Pelosi's Politics

I often like to say that the Democrats have learned nothing from the last 30 years of Reagan/Bush economic policies. But I have to admit that, privately, I don’t believe it. Surely they must have learned a thing or two about the economy, and twigged onto the 140 year old notion of marginal value that was invented in the single year of 1870 by about three different economists in three different countries.

But when you read Nancy Pelosi in the Washington Post saying, according to Paul Kane:

"Put me down as clearly as you possibly can as one who wants to have those tax cuts for the wealthiest in America repealed[.]"

Well you have to wonder. Doesn’t she get that income tax collections on the wealthy have soared over the Reagan Bush years as marginal tax rates were decreased? Doesn’t she get that when the government increases marginal tax rates as she wants to do then economic growth will be reduced and less jobs will be created?

I know why she doesn’t get it. It’s the politician’s version of reality. Nothing really exists except reelection. That means that nothing exists except having more money with which to buy votes. So why would anyone give up revenue with tax cuts?

Well, the absolutist monarchs of the Enlightenment loved revenue as much as anyone, but they came to realize that you got more revenue with a healthy economy. In their day, they wanted the lovely lolly for their armies. Today, of course, politicians want the money to pay their armies of entitlement beneficiaries. But the principle is the same. Bigger economy equals more revenue equals more money to slosh around among your supporters.

According to Larry Kudlow the Obama people seem to get this. Sort of. His “stimulus” package is still full of pork, of course.

However, it’s interesting just how much the Obama plan has changed since the election. The size has been roughly constant. But the mix of tax cuts and spending increases is now totally different.



Instead of $100 billion worth of tax credits, there are now $300 billion worth of tax cuts. This includes a big new piece for business, more cash-expensing for small-business investment, and a restoration of the five-year tax-loss carry-back, which will especially help banks and homebuilders. It might even result in tax refunds for businesses, and might also allow banks to rid themselves of toxic assets, since the losses will now be spread over many years.

And the Obama people are talking about keeping the Bush tax rate cuts until 2011. Unfortunately the Obama guys are still living in the pre-1870 world. “The problem is that they’re not reducing marginal tax rates on large and small businesses or individuals.”

I say, chaps. How about getting with the consensus on marginal tax rates? The science is in on this, you know. And anyone who is holding out on Marxian labor theories of value, or the prior notions of “exchange” value and “intrinsic” value is really dealing in superstition.

You might even call them “deniers.”

RU Sophisticated?

Time was, Paul Johnson writes, when “sophisticated” was a pejorative—as in “sophist” and “sophistry.” But now it means that you are the cat’s pajamas.

Given that we all now want to be “sophisticated” how do we know if we are?

Not to worry. Doctor Johnson is in, and he will advise you. Here is his ten-point test. Passing grade is 7 out of 10.

1. “Can you remain truly indifferent to what people say or think about you?” If you can (be honest now) you are sophisticated.
   
2. “A sophisticated person knows all, or a very great deal, but rarely chooses to display knowledge.” This is too hard. Who amongst us can resist the temptation to display knowledge and scatter pearls before swine?
   
3. “[I]t is vital to be able to command behind-the-scenes knowledge.” Johnson uses an example: “Did Benjamin Britten first lose interest in choirboys when their voice broke or when pubic hair sprouted?” Hmmm. Maybe I don’t want to be sophisticated after all.
   
4. Then there’s the amusing anecdote. “A sophisticated person ought to be able to make you laugh.” But they would never go on and on and make you bored. Oh no! That would be the worst!
   
5. Then there is behavior. “[A] sophisticated man never inflicts pain except in an attempt to extract information in a good social cause.” The sophisticate is, of course, a gentleman, but more.
   
6. You must never ask to go to the bathroom. Particularly important for women. That means, of course, that you must limit your input of adult beverages.
   
7. “Granted only one moderate-sized suitcase, what do you pack for a weekend at Highgrove or Sandringham?” Oh dear. Don’t have a clue.
   
8. “After such an event, which servants do you tip, and what, and how exactly do you do it?” Worse and worse.
   
9. Finally, if you call on the President, how do you avoid politics? “And how do you decide when it is time to leave?” OK, I know the answer to that one. Keep an eye on the president’s aide.
   

When you think about it, who needs to be sophisticated? It sounds like too much work.

If Ann Coulter Didn't Exist...

Exactly. We’d have to invent her. And if liberals didn’t have such pompous thin skins, Ann Coulter wouldn’t have a job.

The flap over Ann Coulter and her new book, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America is par for the course. Liberals cannot help getting all riled up when Coulter comes into the room.

Did NBC “ban” Coulter from its airwaves? Or did they put her off for a day because of the important Gaza conflict? Who knows; who cares?

But we do know that liberals hate everything about Ann Coulter and everything she writes.

Oh yes, of course. Her humor is “sophomoric.” No doubt that’s why she is so popular with college conservatives. Someone has to do the sophomoric humor. There’s a market for that sort of stuff, you know. With liberals it involves a lot of f-words and s-words. For conservatives it makes much more sense to make fun of liberals.

You have to say that Harry Smith’s pompous interview of Coulter on CBS was iconic, as media critic Brent Bosell demonstrates.

Harry Smith hosted Maher on CBS just months ago on his faith-mocking movie "Religulous" and didn’t say one discouraging word to him about his caustic remarks about Cheney or his hateful anti-Christian bigotry. Not one word.

But with Coulter, it’s another tone completely.

[Smith] called her "goofy," "simplistic," "sophomoric" and a "whiner." "You should have a cross," he said dismissively. "You should put yourself up on a cross."

And on Hannity and Colmes when Coulter indicted liberals for attacking the nuclear family and encouraging single-parent families, Alan Colmes asked her why she wasn’t married.

Warning to conservatives: Don’t you try that. Conservatives aren’t allowed to make sexist comments like that: “Why aren’t you married?” It could be career ending for you. And not just in the liberal media.

While we are at it, let’s put up Ellwood and Jencks 2004. It tells you what liberals have done to America.

Never forget. Liberals did that. Liberals deprived millions of children of the right to have a mother and a father. At home. With them where they live.

Why the Culture War Matters

Why is it that performers at cultural events seem to think it is ok to make politicized comments, as Jay Nordlinger notes?

The indefatigable Mark Steyn takes a stab at it.

Liberalism is the default mode of the culture — to the point where the left-of-center position is so pervasive it’s no longer a position at all, but rather something uncontentious, received wisdom, part of the air we breathe.

Yes, he says, people from Hollywood sidle up to him and say “how much they agree with my book but please don’t mention it to anyone.” But so what?
The trouble is that there is no payoff from people sidling up to you. Crypto-conservatives are just that: hidden. When the culture is default center-left then you can expect most people to be default center-left.

If the non-political sphere is permanently left-of-center — the movies, the pop songs, the plays, the sitcoms, the newspapers plus the churches, schools and much else — it’s simply unreasonable to expect people to walk into a polling booth every other November and vote conservative. The culture is where the issues get framed and the boundaries set.

There’s a good argument to make that there is a pretty substantial rejectionist front out there, people who are disgusted with the cultural liberalism and determined to do something about it. Then there are those who are naturally conservative in their habits and who just do not like the rude, crude culture of Hollywood and liberal politics but just sit there and do nothing.

Right now the conservative orientation is a subculture and doesn’t look to be making much progress any time soon. If you are a kid in college, the default youth culture is the licentious liberal culture of the hookup and girls gone wild. If you are a women working in government the default culture is feminist multiculturalism that celebrates Halloween but mumbles about “holidays” during the Christmas season.

It won’t change until we do something about it.

A Good Year for Climate "Deniers"

The whole point about being a conservative is to stand against liberal group-think. Who knows? Liberals may end up being right on everything. But why do they all have to act like the Japanese under their emperor Hirohito: A hundred million hearts beating as one?

The science is in. The earth is dangerously overheating. We must act now. All that liberal group-think on climate just sticks in a conservative’s craw.

And now it is beginning to look as though something is changing in the earth’s climate. Temperatures are down.

It looks like we are getting two La Ninas in a row. It looks like the oceans are flipping from a warm cycle to a cool cycle. And Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick, the graph that shows stable temperatures over the last millennium suddenly shooting into the stratosphere in the last century, is slowly disappearing into Stephen McIntyre’s wood chipper.

Here are a couple of end-of-year pieces from another denier website, Watts Up With That:

First, there’s All Quiet on the Solar Front, an analysis of the much-extended Solar Minimum. There’s a strong suggestion that when sunspots are absent from the sun then the earth’s climate gets cooler. With the current Solar Minimum betwen Cycle 23 and Cycle 24 going on and on, we are going to get a lot of solar data from all the satellites that have been launched in the last generation to record the doings on the Sun.

Then there’s the curious case of the Decline in the Solar Geomagnetic Ap Index. It suddenly dropped in 2005 and has continued to decline since then. What does that mean?

For us climate deniers, there are troubling questions about the science of global warming. Our modern climate scientists are not amateur scientists like Charles Darwin laboring away in his country estate. They are closely connected with politicians who are pushing a large-scale political project to “do something” about global warming. They have obligingly developed a lot of science to provide “corroborative detail designed to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” to quote the Lord High Executioner from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado.

But when statistical experts like Stephen McIntyre start to analyze the work of climate scientists, it all starts to look pretty rocky. The corroborative detail turns out to be not that good.

In the coming years, the deniers are predictive a triple threat of a possible extended sunspot minimum combined with cool phases in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. That’s denier-speak for Little Ice Age.

Are the deniers on to something? Or are we just as dumb and blinkered as the bribed apologists of Al Gore?

Voters Think Dems are "Center Right"

You gotta give President-elect Obama credit. He managed to get the voters to think that the Democrats are a center-right party. That’s some achievement. And voters think that the Republican Party is a hard-right party. That’s according to a poll by Target Point Consulting discussed Wednesday by Stephen Moore.

[S]ays [pollster Alex] Lundry. "Democrats are seen as a center-right party, while Republicans are seen as dominated by the right."

I know what you are thinking. If only. Heck, if the Democrats truly were center-right we could give up on the limping, wounded GOP and join the parade. Liberals could desert the Democrats and create a Huffington-Kos Party, and the rest of us could live happily ever after.

Still, the key base of the Republican Party shrank in 2008. White males were for Bush by 24 points in 2004 and that gap closed to 16 points in 2008. You can see why. White males are instinctively center-right, and when Obama came through as the candidate most likely to give Americans a tax cut, well...

What about white women? McCain won them 53 to 46 percent, according to David Paul Kuhn in Politico, probably because of Sarah Palin.

Here are the spreads, updated from a variety of polls, using Jay Cost’s data from 1996-2004.

Republican Margin of Victory/Defeat: Selected Demographic Groups 1996-2008
	1996	2000	2004	2008
White Men	+9	+24	+25	+16
White Women	-5	+1	+11	+7
African Americans	-72	-81	-77	-95
Hispanics	-51	-27	-9	-36
Overall	-8.5	-0.5	+2.4	-7

So what does it all mean? It means that, just as Karl Rove knew in 2000 and 2004, the future lies with the Hispanics.

And the future also lies with defining the Republican Party as center right, which is what it really is, and defining the Democratic Party as center left. Which is what it really is.

And one more thing. The Republican Party is the party of tax cuts. Really.

UPDATE: Pollster Alex Lundry emails to say he was misquoted. Voters think that
the Dems are a center-LEFT party, after all. What a pity! I thought there was
strategic opening here. So the only opportunity is to move the voters
towards thinking that the GOP is really a mushy center-right party instead of
the Democrats’ favorite image of a party dominated by racist, sexist rich-bitch homophobes.

The Conservative View from 2008

Because so much happened in 2008 on such an epic scale, it is hard to know what it means.

Take the election of Barack Obama to be President of the United States. Is this primarily the election of the first African American president? Or just the election of yet another Harvard Law School grad, the liberal elite taking care of business?

What about the epic collapse in the credit markets? Will this result in a ratchet upwards in political control of the economy? Or will it cause the politicians to lower the risks in the credit market by reducing the amount of subsidy for highly-leveraged borrowing?

What about the eruption of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber? Conservatives loved them and liberals hated them. What is that all about? Does it mean that the Republican Party has become a party of the yahoo white working class? Or does it mark the decisive turn of the party towards aspirational America?

What we all do in exciting times is project our hopes and fears upon the climactic events. Conservatives hope for a conservative renaissance; liberals hope for the birth of another FDR era of Democratic dominance. And both sides propose their standard solutions. Conservatives say we need tax cuts; liberals say we need stimulus spending. Nothing has changed since the Reagan revolution of 1981.

While we worry about our jobs and our 401ks, the real story will probably be told in India and China. Let’s assume that the US will struggle through the meltdown and emerge in a year into a decent economic rebound. But China and India may experience much more turmoil that we do in the US. If all goes well, they will emerge as economic, cultural, and political powerhouses. If things go wrong, and they might easily do so, then there will be untold misery for hundreds of millions, and doubtless wars of frightful ferocity.

But what about the threat of Islamic extremism? It’s a problem, but I regard it as a similar problem to the ruthless revolutionaries in the west in the tradition of Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Che. The Muslim extremists will be a problem, but they will fail just as the other ruthless revolutionaries failed. In the modern world, power is not enough. Power doesn’t issue from the barrel of a gun but from the wealth of the modern economy.

What about conservatives here in the United States? Shouldn’t we get to work and repair the damage of the Bush years? Exactly. The important thing to do is to reformulate conservatism into a sadder, wiser creed, and one that directs its appeal to the most important democraphic group in America: white women. Despite all we’ve heard over the past half-century, women care mainly about their marriages, their children, their health care, and their safety. Get right with women on that and you have got their support and deserve it.

That can’t be so hard, can it?