A Modest Marriage Proposal

In Britain the Law Commission is worried about the rights of cohabiting couples, writes Libby Purves.  It thinks they should have all the rights of married couples.

Why bother, wonders Purves?  Anyone that wants the rights of married people can get married.  Even gays can obtain similar rights now that civil partnerships are recognized under the law in Britain.  It isn’t exactly a secret that marriage tightens the obligations of sexual partners.

Women — who traditionally get the short end of the stick — should be aware that marriage is a safer basis for scaling down work to raise a family, and that if they eschew it or are denied it, then they had better make arrangements.

But the idea of automatically formalizing cohabitation rights gives Purves an idea.  Why not declare that any couple that has a child together is automatically married?

If the Law Commission really wanted to put a spoke in the wheel of feckless and exploitative lovers, it could simply decree that the birth of a child creates, ipso facto, a marriage — with all the property and pension rights which that implies. Imagine the terror, imagine the caterwauling of complaint — not least when chaps found themselves “married” to multiple women, and instead of the weedy Child Support Agency were faced with complex crypto-divorce proceedings and settlements.

That would really change the terms of trade, wouldn’t it?

Democrat Budget & New Taxes and Spending

Does nobody care what the Democrats are proposing in their budget resolution?  Thank goodness Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, does:

This five-year budget blueprint, a partisan plan designed and passed by congressional Democrats with no input from Republicans, will weigh down the economy with the largest tax increase in U.S. history, hundreds of billions in new spending, and billions of dollars in new debt.

Had enough?  There’s more.

The budget also is unrestrained in its embrace of new spending on Washington programs. Wasting no time, this budget in fiscal 2008 will spend $82 billion, or 9 percent more than fiscal 2007 levels. In total, discretionary spending jumps $205 billion over the president’s request during the next five years, while entitlement spending grows unchecked by $402 billion during the same period.

Here’s what I think.  I think the Democrats are heading into a wood-chipper.  They are so eager to get their hands on the lovely lolly, the spending dollars, and hand them out to their special interests that they haven’t stopped to think about what will happen if they actually get what they want.

That’s because, at the critical turning points in economic policy in the past generation, Democrats were AWOL.

The job of Republicans and conservatives is to make sure that when the economy heads south the voters get to understand who did it.  Good and hard.

It Couldn't Happen Here. Could It?

You’d think that when you have a centralized Nataional Curriculum, like the British do, that you’d at least guarantee that the flaky and the positive-self-esteem fluff would be kept to a low roar.  But that is not the case.  British think tank Civitas reports that the National Curriculum is a cess-pool of left-wing fashion.

The traditional subject areas have been hi-jacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government’s social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students.

And that includes physics.  Here’s a cri-de-coeur from a physics teacher, Wellington Grey.  He writes about how he got out of the private sector because he wanted to teach.  Physics.  For a few years he was happy.  But then something changed.

My subject is still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in physics, but that exam doesn’t cover anything I recognize as physics. Over the past year the UK Department for Education and the AQA board changed the subject. They took the physics out of physics and replaced it with! something else

Whereas students used to learn about theory and equations now “pupils debate topics like global warming and nuclear power.”  In fact, global warming has just about taken over the curriculum.

On top of everything, the questions asked in the government’s GSCE test weren’t covered in the government’s syllabus specification.

My pupils complained that the exam did not test the material they were given to study, and they are largely correct. The information tested was not in the specification given to the teachers, nor in the approved resources suggested by the AQA board.

But really, when the whole point of high-school physics is to learn the correct line on global warming, who needs a syllabus?  Who needs to sit in class?

Just pump out the politically-correct answer, kid, and you’ll do OK.

And don’t think it couldn’t happen here.

Sarkozy allies head for landslide

Count me among the amazed as the French voted overwhelmingly for reform in their parliamentary elections Sunday.

According to Jon Boyle:

Mr. Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party won 39.6 percent of the vote, while the opposition Socialists had 24.7 percent, the Interior Ministry said.

And Sarkozy’s party campaigned frankly on a platform of economic reform, as in:

1.  Make overtime exempt from taxes
2. Make mortgage interest tax deductible
3. Eliminate 95 percent of the death tax
4. Put 50 percent cap on individual taxation
5. “No performance, no bonus” limit on executive golden parachutes
6. Give universities more freedom to recruit staff, link with private sector
7. Minimum jail sentences for repeat offenders

And the French government is also proposing to modify the standard lifetime work contract to “loosen firing rules.”

It’s true.  Change can happen.  Now all the French need to do is actually implement the reforms 

Bush Defines G-8 on Climate Change?

The advance word on the G-8 meeting in Germany was that hostess Angela Merkel and poodle-in-chief Tony Blair would bring President Bush around to the advanced, sophisticated European way of thinking on climate change.

But that’s not what happened at all, according to Kimberley A. Strassel.  See any mandatory targets?  Any anti-growth sentiments?  Let’s read her take.

Yesterday’s declaration, far from mandatory targets, instead sets a "global goal" of halving emissions by 2050. It invites the "major emerging economies" to join in this endeavor. It acknowledges that different approaches across the world can "coordinate rather than compete." It reports that "technology is a key to mastering climate change" and lauds government "incentives." It admits that "over the next 25 years, fossil fuels will remain the world’s dominant source of energy," and talks up the "peaceful use of nuclear energy." It even explains that any program "must be undertaken in a way that supports growth in developing, emerging and industrialized economies."

Democrats want to rush in and swing huge government powers around to save the planet from global warming. That’s OK.  It’s what Democrats do. But when they really get a chance, in 2009, it may be that the train will already have left the station.  On George W. Bush’s schedule.

What Were They Thinking?

It’s easy to say that after the fact.  You wonder: What planet are they on?  President Bush and leading Republicans should never try to run a controversial bill past the Republican base in the dead of night.   A proper immigration compromise requires leadership.  It requires that the bill sponsors go out and move the country. 

That’s what President Bush told the New York Times back in 2000 when its editorial board told him that the American people didn’t support tax cuts.  Then I’ll have to move the country, he responded.

In retrospect it is clear that the negotiators on the Senate immigration bill knew this.  They knew they didn’t have the country, and they knew that they didn’t have time to build support and move it.  So they tried the bum’s rush.

Conservative commentators are talking this morning about the fact that people don’t trust the federal government.  They don’t trust it to be serious about border security and they don’t trust it to be serious about employment enforcement.  And we know that at the local level the liberal counties and cities turn a blind eye to illegal immigrants in their faces. 

The truth is that ordinary Americans don’t like that.  They don’t like it because they think that the law is the law, and the government ought to enforce the law.

It is probably true that the welfare state today is finding itself ministering to hordes of illegal immigrants and that one of the main drivers of the immigration bill is the desire of the welfare state administrators and line workers to have recognized in law what they are already doing in fact.

But that is the government’s problem, not the people’s problem.

Could the Immigration Issue Hurt the Democrats?

The usual procedure after a big showdown like the immigration bill that was just withdrawn in the US Senate is that it means bad news for the Republican Party.  Remember how the gender gap has always been a Republican problem, not a Democratic problem.

Of course, the withdrawal of the bill by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, writes Julie Hirschfeld Davis provoked the usual response. 

The defeat set off a bitter round of partisan recriminations, with Democrats and Republicans each accusing the other of killing it.

Oh well, I guess we will all survive it.

But it is clear that US politics is entering the post-Bush era, and it is also evident that the tectonic plates are shifting.

The interesting thing about immigration is that it is Republicans who are most opposed.  Yet you would think that rank-and-file Democrats would have the most at stake and be the most damaged by competition from low-wage immigrants. 

What gives?  Why don’t we hear from the Democratic rank-and-file?  My feeling is that lunch-bucket Democrats don’t have a direct voice in politics.  They are only represented by elite-led interest groups like organized labor and AARP.  The netroots operate at the individual level, but they are clearly college-educated liberals, not ordinary workers. 

Theda Skocpol, defenestrator of Larry Summers, wrote about this in Diminished Democracy.  She realizes that modern democratic politics is conducted by memberless cadre lobbying groups.  In the old days politics was driven by the leaders of big membership organizations.

You could argue, of course, that the reason the Republican Party picked up a majority in the past quarter century was because unhappy Democrats could never get their leaders to listen to them.  As elite anti-war liberals and feminists talked to each other about liberal issues Reagan Democrats left them on national security and patriotism and religious Democrats left them on abortion and school prayer.

Suppose that in the next few years secure-border Democrats leave the party on the issue of immigration.  Is it possible?  Who knows?  Nobody ever asked the rank-and-file Democrats for their opinion.