Bush Attacks Excess Dem Spending

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says it’s “only” $22 billion.  But President Bush had a different attitude, threatening to veto nine of the 12 appropriation bills, as Joseph Curl reports.

The president said yesterday he already has proposed increasing discretionary spending by 6.9 percent, but that Democrats want to add $205 billion in additional spending over the next five years.

Well, it’s about time.  Couldn’t the president have started vetoing six years ago? Perhaps the Republican Congresses weren’t as egregious in their spending plans.  But we know where Democrats stand on spending.

Although the House has passed most appropriation bills, each has added additional spending not proposed by the president. While Mr. Bush proposed numerous reductions in his $433 billion request for non-defense programs, Democrats have restored money for those proposed cuts, while also adding additional spending.

But Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) justifies the increases, saying that Bush has damaged the federal budget:

the Bush administration’s "reckless" fiscal policy has turned a $236 billion surplus into a $248 billion deficit, leaving key domestic programs unfunded or underfunded.

Say that again?  “Leaving key domestic programs unfunded or underfunded?”  Is that French for failing to throw enough money at key Democratic constituencies, or does it refer to something else?

Either way, what’s not to like?

What Voters Know That Isn't So

You can call it economic illiteracy, as John Stossel does.  Or you can talk about the The Myth of the Rational Voter as Bryan Caplan does, arguing that “most voters cast their ballot on the basis of irrational biases about economic matters.”  As Stossel writes:

People tend to acquire their wrong opinions about economic policy packaged in worldviews they inherited while growing up. They never test their views against the evidence because that would be unsettling. No one likes having his worldview challenged. So people vote for candidates who make them feel good. They vote irrationally.

Actually, I think that is unfair.  Most people do not really experience the market.  They live in market-sheltered enclaves, as employees or as government dependents.  They really do not experience the operation of capitalist economics.

But sheltered away from the market as they are, they suffer from four common-sense biases that confirm the old adage that it’s not what you don’t know, it’s what you know that isn’t so.

• Antimarket bias: people think that the market is a zero-sum game
• Antiforeign bias: people mistrust foreigners and try to protect themselves against cheap foreign goods
• Make-work bias: people think that jobs make us rich, not the products of jobs
• Pessimistic bias: “any economic problem is proof of economic decline”

Really these biases are not irrational.  They are only irrational in politicians, academicians, and businessmen who ought to know better. 

In people who do know better, but who demagogue to get votes or subsidies anyway, we are not talking about irrationalism either.  We are talking about evil.

Murdoch Gets the Prize

Yesterday Rupert Murdoch finally overcame the finicky objections of the legacy Dow Jones owners and bought Dow Jones for about $5 billion, report Richard Perez-Pena and Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. 

The decision signals the end of an era for Dow Jones and the Bancroft family, an intensely private clan that for generations had allowed The Journal to operate independently and become one of the nation’s most prominent and trusted newspapers, even as its finances deteriorated.

Now who knows what will happen.  Murdoch!

The truth, so resolutely ignored by our liberal friends, is that Rupert Murdoch is a businessman, first and last.  He wants to make money.  He has taken advantage of the fact that the introspective liberalism of the mainstream media has left gigantic market niches available for media titles occupying a center-right perspective.

But Rupert Murdoch is not the right-wing ideologue that our more fevered friends imagine.  The proof of that is that in the mid 1990s he swung his British titles behind New Labour and Tony Blair. 

Now he is reported to have established ties with Hillary Clinton and made contributions to her campaign.  Of course he has.  News media is not called the Fourth Estate for nothing.  It is entangled with politics and always will be.

What Murdoch can do with his new Dow Jones properties is make the center-right media into a world-wide force that can seriously counter the center-left media that dominates the culture today.

For conservatives that is a cheery prospect, not least because it makes business sense.

The Surge is Working, But...

It’s pretty clear that the “surge” in Iraq is making progress.  And as Dean Barnett observes, the left is taking it badly.

SO HOW HAS THE LEFT reacted to this positive development? Poorly, angrily, and childishly. In other words, characteristically.

Actually, it is not surprising that the surge is working.  The surge is a military operation in which the US Armed Forces are doing military things, like searching out and destroying Al Qaeda forces in places where they are concentrated enough to make it worth while to attack. 

Before the surge the strategy of the United States was to “stand up” the security forces of Iraq and keep US combat forces in the background as much as possible.  It was the failure of this strategy that provoked the appointment of Gen. Petraeus and the adoption of the surge strategy.

But what comes next?  What in fact do the various factions in Iraq want and what will they do to get it?

Right now Iraq exists under the umbrella of US power and the native Iraqi political and military forces are restrained by that power. 

In my view the clearing out of Al Qaeda that seems to be the goal of the surge merely sets up a cleaner civil war between Shia and Sunni than might occur if Al Qaeda were in the full bloom of its power in Iraq.

We have not heard much about the Shia militias since they withdrew from Baghdad at the beginning of the surge.  Doubtless we will hear from them when the surge is over and the US combat forces start to leave Iraq.

Then we will find out what kind of powers are contesting for Iraq and what they are prepared to do in order to win.

Debating YouTube

Should Republican presidential candidates descend to the level of YouTube?  Actually, more to the point, should they subject themselves to the Children-of-the-Welfare-State worldview of the YouTube generation?  Hugh Hewitt says: No.  But Patrick Ruffini thinks that a Republican YouTube debate is on, whether we like it or not.

Governor Romney says that he’d be open to participating in a rescheduled debate. Mayor Giuliani expressed support for a date change[.]

The question for Republicans is whether we can turn the depressing lefty helpless-victim mentality of the YouTube questioners into a plus.

Can a presidential candidate say to a YouTuber: “I’m sorry, but I disagree with your underlying assumptions.  We’ve tried that government-centered approach and it doesn’t work.”  Are you allowed to respectfully disagree with a voter?

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred politicians don’t even try.  Because there is nothing to be gained by insulting anyone.

The thing is: Republicans need to be able to confront the comprehensive and mandatory national government program approach to politics and persuade the American people that they have something better to offer.

Otherwise the American people will sensibly vote for the party that really believes that government can make a difference in peoples’ lives.

Alarm bells on China

Classical liberals thought that they had won the argument over free trade back in the nineteenth century.  But the apologists for directed trade or mercantilism keep popping up again.  Like William Hawkins from the US Business and Industrial Council. 

The "global economy" is not based on the "harmony of interests" once envisioned by 19th century classical liberals, but on cut-throat competition. Winners and losers in these commercial contests impact the national societies in which they operate... There is no world community in any meaningful sense. Energetic nations rise, complacent ones decline.

So the Chinese deliberately keep their currency low in order to build an industrial base.  The gush of cheap Chinese goods puts industrial corporations elsewhere in the world out of business.  If the Chinese are not willing to increase the value of the yen:

it will be necessary to adopt other measures, such as the countervailing duties used to offset other subsidies.

Of course, the assumption that Hawkins makes is that the low yuan policy of the Chinese is in fact the best policy for the Chinese to achieve national power and greatness.  But is it?  There is a cost for the low yuan, the huge overhang of foreign exchange reserves and US sovereign debt.  Hawkins assumes that this strengthens China and weakens the rest of the world.

But Hawkins is supposing that the crude power calculations of politicians is correct, that emphasizing exports is the way to international power. 

More likely it is true that a more balanced growth policy is the better course.  What good did Germany’s national greatness policy after 1871 do for it?  It ended in the ruin of 1918 and 1945.

It could be that China is growing as an energetic nation in spite of its mercantilist policies.

Or it could be that China is emphasizing industrial growth purely as a strategy to mop up the internal migration (said to be as high as 25 million a year) from the country to the city.

"Can I Help You?"

It’s a Gilded Age, writes Peggy Noonan, an age of fabulous wealth, but the manners aren’t so good.  Noonan reports daydreaming into a store on Madison Avenue recently

"Hi! Let me help you find what you’re looking for!" She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark.

Hmm. And another store:

"How are you today? How can I help you?" Those dread words.

The angle, of course is that the shop assistant is trying to engage, to have a relationship.  And that makes it easier to sell.

No doubt.  But I rather look on the bright side of this.

It is, I believe, hard work to be cheerful and outgoing to every customer that comes into the store.  This is particularly so when you enter the produce department at Safeway and you are greeted by a worker restocking the food displays. 

“Hello, can I help you find anything?”

I find this affecting.  There is nothing in the world that I would find more difficult than to stop what I am doing to take a customer half way across the store to find a product and be cheerful about it.  Yet the folks working at Safeway greet me like this every time I go in.

I try to respond by being cheerful in return.

I found out recently why they are so careful to greet me.  They never know when a mystery shopper might come by.  If they don’t greet the mystery shopper then they get into trouble.

They work hard in retail, and they do it right out in the open, not hidden, like many of us, in a cubicle.  I think they deserve our respect and consideration.

It’s a question of manners.