Dems' Luck Running Out?

How lucky are the Democrats? They came into power in 1933 after a Republican president had been screwing up the economy for 3.5 years. They came into power in 1961 after President Eisenhower had paid down the WWII debt, so they could open the spigots for a decade of fun and frolic.

They came into power in 1976 just after the end of a nasty recession. They came into power in 1993 just after a mild recession.

But this time the Dems are coming into power at the beginning of a nasty recession.

Maybe their luck is running out. Because today government leaders need to make some difficult decisions to revive the economy. It’s not First and Ten. It’s Third and Long.

The political parties are, realistically, one-trick ponies. The Republicans always want to cut spending and taxes, and are looking over their shoulder wondering how much in the way of spending cuts the American people will tolerate.

The Democrats always believe in more spending. Whether it’s 1933 or 1993, it’s time for a stimulus.

But maybe not now. You see, the governments in the US have been cranking up spending on “nice-to-have” pretty well uninterrupted since the Reagan Cuts of 1981. There really isn’t anyone around that was there when cutting was the order of the day. And Democrats have never had to do the serious work of political triage: which lovely spending programs do I cut and which do I save?

It seems to me that the markets are telling us that the Spend Yesterday, Spend Now, Spend Tomorrow philosophy of the Democrats as manifested in the bloated budget of President Obama is wrong. The time has come for retrenchment, and the sooner the better.

Democrats don’t want to hear that. The present Obama generation has never had to hear it. For Democrats, the answer to every problem is to increase spending.

I suspect that things are going to have to get a lot worse before our Democratic friends will realize that they must change course and abandon their present policy of increased spending and bailouts.

Because sooner or later, we are going to have to get the business owners of America more money so they can earn enough profit to expand their businesses and start hiring.

Sooner or later, our Democratic friends are going to have to learn that tossing money away on political pet projects from new government buildings to more health care to more education to alternative-energy subsidies just doesn’t cut it.

The fact is that government is a cost. RIght now, the government is an enormous cost. The time has come to reduce that enormous burden on the backs of the American people. Then the economy can catch its breath and get moving again.

I just hope that the American people don’t have to suffer too much while our Democratic friends learn this vital lesson.

Let's Get Serious Mr. President

Now that the president’s budget has been out for about a week, it is time to reach a judgment upon it. What can we say now about the course that President Obama has set for the federal government and, by extension, all the governments of the United States?

I think it is becoming clear. The Obama administration’s budget is an error of strategic proportions.

The Democrats ran in 2008 on a platform that proposed to give government a bigger slice of the Bush prosperity. We had the money for extra health care programs. We had the money for pre-K schooling. We needed to spend big money to revolutionize the energy economy to meet the challenge of global warming. Nobody was thinking about a big financial crisis.

(President Bush probably was. Else why would he nominate Ben Bernanke, an expert on the Great Depression, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and Hank Paulson, Mr. Big from Wall Street, as Treasury Secretary?)

Anyone with half a brain understands that the status quo of 2007-08 has been smashed to smithereens. We are not going to be thinking about nice-to-have social programs in the next few years. We are not going to be whacking away on the oil companies and the coal companies as we bring in beautiful solar farms and wind farms.

No. Anyone with half a brain understands that we are going to be putting the economy back together in the aftermath of the biggest financial hurricane in living memory.

But the president’s budget doesn’t really adjust its spending plans to this reality. His budget shows that it was developed by campaign staffers back in the middle of 2008 before the crash in September when Lehman Brothers went under.

Right now what is needed is to go through all government budgets with a meat axe. What is needed is to release resources being wasted on low-value government programs and to redirect them to more valuable uses in the private economy.

But the Obama administration with its willing accomplices in Congress have just enacted a vast increase in government spending on stupid stuff that doesn’t deliver value to the bottom line.

Right now what is needed is to give substantial marginal tax-rate relief to America’s business leaders—and I mean to the people earning between $250,000 and $1,000,000 per year, the people who run America’s small-to-medium-sized businesses—so that they can improve their cash flow enough to start hiring again.

But the Obama administration is planning big tax increases on America’s business leaders.

How do you spell R-E-A-L-L-Y D-U-M-B?

There is still time for the Obama administration to get it right. But time is running out.

But then there’s this:

• Today I read an article saying that Treasury SecretaryTim Geithner looks like a student pilot trying to fly an F-18.
• And they say that none of the under-secretaries at Treasury have even been nominated yet.

Yes, Mr. President. What exactly is the status of your grand plan to fix the banks and end the financial crisis?

The Culture of Compulsion

According to President Obama, he doesn’t believe in Big Government. When he asked Congress to send him a recovery plan, he told the nation in his almost State of the Union speech, all he wanted to do was put people back to work and put money in their pockets.

Not because I believe in bigger government – I don’t.

On the strength of that, writes Tony Blankley, we can say, in the spirit of bipartisanship that reigned from 2003-2008:

Obama lied; the economy died.

According to Obama’s own Budget Overview, federal spending will increase from the 20 percent range in the Bush years to over 22 percent in the mid 2010s.

So on the basis of numbers, he is going for Bigger Government.

But then there is the program side. In his budget proposal, President Obama proposes the following:

• Increase federal government control over health care
• Increase spending on education
• Create a fast-track renewable energy program and create a carbon cap-and-trade tax

Come on, Mr. President. In the immortal words of fictional silent-screen movie star Lina Lamont: What do you think I am? Dumb or something?

What you want to do is increase the span of compulsion. You want to increase the government’s control over the American people. You want to introduce more compulsion into health care. You want to increase the amount of compulsion in education. You want to increase the amount of compulsion in energy production and consumption.

Let’s face it. President Obama and the Democratic Party are hopelessly lost in a pernicious Culture of Compulsion. Everything they want to do, they want to do it by force and compulsion.

Tell the truth, Mr. President. And shame the devil. Your program is a program of Big Government.

(Ain’t opposition fun!)

Why Presidents Fail

Our liberal friends are predictably annoyed by Rush Limbaugh’s hope that President Obama “fails.”

It was ok to wish the most frightful things on President Bush. But this is different.

On Saturday, Rush Limbaugh “doubled down” on the Obama failure meme. So let’s look at what he said at CPAC.

This notion that I want the President to fail, folks, this shows you a sign of the problem we’ve got. That’s nothing more than common sense and to not be able to say it, why in the world do I want what we just described, rampant government growth indebtedness, wealth that’s not even being created yet that is being spent, what is in this? What possibly is in this that anybody of us wants to succeed?

Rush Limbaugh looks at the program of President Obama, and says: I don’t want this to succeed.

The greatest power of all is not the power to run the government to to lead a great army. It is to define what can and cannot be said. It is to have the power to say: This is beyond the pale, and I cannot believe that you would say it.

The great contribution to American culture made by Rush Limbaugh is that he has pushed back against the liberal efforts to draw the line on what is acceptable speech. Back in the 1990s when Limbaugh was first building a national audience for the Rush Limbaugh Program, listeners would call in, agog, and say: But Rush, you’re not allowed to say that!

Of course, if Rush Limbaugh were running for political office, or the head of a foundation, or lobbying for government grants, he could not say the things he says.

This is something that Limbaugh’s liberal critics do not understand. Rush Limbaugh does not live or die by his political reputation. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer who lives and dies by the ratings of his radio show. He is like any celebrity: all publicity is good publicity.

So if Rush Limbaugh has failed for several months to raise the outrage of the liberals, an alarm bell goes off in his head. It is telling him to serve up something outrageous, get into the news—and drive a few new listeners to his radio program.

The folk in the conservative rank-and-file appreciate the courage that Rush Limbaugh exhibits. They appreciate that someone at least has the guts to show their head above the parapet and say the things that liberals say you are not allowed to say in America.

Rush Limbaugh is only saying what every conservative is saying in his heart: Golly. I sure hope this guy fails to get all the new taxing and spending that he’s planning. If Obama succeeds we will look back and see that he really did change America—for the worse.

Understanding Obamas Budget

President Obama’s first budget, now available as a pdf “overview” online, is properly horrifying conservatives. And not a few moderates.

But really there is nothing remarkable in the budget. President Obama is doing what he said he would do.

• Moving towards universal health care.
• Increasing government education both at the college level and early-childhood period.
• Following through on the notion of a global warming crisis caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

All these actions are perfectly consistent with the liberal world view. In the first place, liberals believe that people should be freed from the burdens and responsibilities of ordinary life in order to enjoy a richer, nuanced experience. The ideal is a creative life as an artist, a writer, or an activist.

Cult author Joseph Campbell rather neatly encapsulated this philosophy with his injunction: “Follow Your Bliss.”

There’s one problem with this notion. It doesn’t work. Most people—nearly everyone—must work. Because underneath the vision of creativity is the reality of creation. We humans are animals that must eat every day and regenerate ourselves in our children.

So if you are going to live a life of creativity, someone else is going to have to do the dirty work of getting and making so that you can do the creating and the spending.

It may seem very harmless, but in practice it comes down to the freeloader problem. Or as Charles Hurt puts it:

Obama’s budget schemes to drain staggering amounts of money from people who worked for it and steer it to people who didn’t.

This isn’t the free market. It’s the freeloader market.

Up in the higher reaches of the educated elilte, people can afford to spend their lives as creative artists following their bliss. Maybe they have a trust fund. Maybe their parents can kick in some Economic Outpatient Care to keep them going. Maybe they have the talent or connections to find a cosy academic sinecure or a berth in a liberal foundation.

But unless you have a strong work ethic, the follow-your-bliss ethic descends quickly into pathology. It ends up as the “freeloader problem.”

There are a lot of people in any society who will game the system so that they can coast along without contributing to society. Mankind has come up with a way of dealing with them. It is called Shame and Guilt, and is usually institutionalized in religion.

But our liberal friends have carefully dismantled the social controls of shame and guilt and have declared war on organized religion. That is because they want to do things that are shameful. They want to have various sexual liaisons. They want to have their health care prepaid. They want to be able to go to school indefinitely. They want to end up, if possible, in some cosy academic sinecure “doing research.” In other words, they don’t want to have to put their shoulders to the wheel and contribute. They want other people to put their shoulders to the wheel.

The huge social consequence of this is only beginning to show up. The consequence is not hard to predict. People have a choice. They can put their life energy into the world or they can take energy out. People that takers will find themselves withering away, condemning themselves to irrelevance.

When President Obama presents a budget that encourages the freeloaders, he is setting on a course that can only end in tears.

Obama Back to the Future

We conservatives thought that in 1981 with the election of Ronald Reagan that the United States had taken a path of no return. There could be no return to the disastrous policies of the Carter administration, with its synthetic-fuels energy policy, its inflation, its gas lines, and its retreat in the cold war.

Yes. Remember “synfuels?”

We conservatives believe that government doesn’t do anything well, and does a lot of things really badly.

We thought we had elected Ronald Reagan to put Big Government behind us, gas lines behind us, inflation behind us. We thought that, by the end of the 1980s we had demonstrated beyond a doubt that the future belonged to a low tax state that kept out of the way and didn’t try to administer the economy from Washington DC.

We knew all along that our liberal friends hated all this. But they didn’t dare to poke their liberal ideas above the parapet, at least not without camoflage.

But all along, we can now see, in the morning after President Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress, they longed to get back to their liberal agenda. They wanted to direct the economy. They wanted to administer health care and education and increase the government’s power in health and education. And in the thirty years since the end of the 1970s energy crisis they found a new way to politicize the energy business, through the notion of saving the planet from global warming.

We conservatives believe that the administrative society is a recipe for disaster. That’s the Hayek Principle. The man in Washington cannot know enough to direct the economy. Government policies picking winners and losers usually ends up backing the loser. Government administration of health care and education and welfare has been a waste. And increasing the government role is likely to make things worse.

We conservatives think that the global warming notion is mistaken. The earth’s climate fluctuates in all time scales and though the production of greenhouses gases may have affected the climate, the change not likely to be catastrophic. In any case, it will probably be better to adapt to changes in climate rather than try to steer it by carbon taxes and subsidies for renewable energy.

Then there is the question of marginal tax rates. We believe that tax rates should be low and uniform, with a bias towards lower taxes on the lower paid.

President Obama is setting the course of the United States firmly in the direction of the liberal administrative state. We believe that this will end in tears. We also believe that the American people will react pretty strongly against it.

The American people will reject the Obama agenda for one good reason. Call it the Santelli Principle: Government must not make chumps out of ordinary hard-working people by subsidizing idleness and recklessness. Reformers in the late 19th century emphasized this strongly. Welfare, they insisted, must not be bigger than the wage of an unskilled manual worker. Otherwise you make the struggles of the respectable working class worthless. You make them into chumps.

Here’s an example of what I mean, from Politico’s Andy Coller. He’s writing about people upset by President Obama’s $75 billion homeowner bailout plan.

According to the Rasmussen poll, even 49 percent of Democrats oppose mortgage subsidies like the ones Obama has proposed.

Among them: Lynn Powers, 39, a Bethesda, Md., resident who describes herself as a “liberal Democrat” who has been hardworking, prudent and responsible — and now feels “like a fool.”

Maybe President Obama has created a new group of refugees from the Democratic Party: The Santelli Democrats.

Anyway, the battle is joined. The liberals have rejected the Reagan recipe of smaller government and low tax rates. They have started down a path that will either win them the support of the American people for a generation, or they have accelerated the nation towards a disastrous smashup.

One way or another, at the end of it, we shall have decided the direction of the nation. Let’s just hope that not too many people get hurt in the process.

Flailing Around in Washington

If things weren’t bad enough, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) isn’t making things any better. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds is careful to post an item about the author of the banking crisis, Friend-of-Angelo Chris Dodd, every day.

On Friday, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., mouthed off that the government might have to nationalize some big banks. Such a move would clean out investors, and investors reacted accordingly.

If you read the late great Michael Kelly’s essay “Ted Kennedy on the Rocks” in Things Worth Fighting For you learn that back in the 1980s Senator Chris Dodd was not reading up learned tomes on credit and banking, diligently preparing for the chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee. No, he was getting roaring drunk at La Brasserie with Ted Kennedy.

It is after midnight and Kennedy and Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk, too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.)

I could go on, but I won’t.

What this country needs is a lot less of the political elite grabbing on the wheel of state, and a lot more power and responsibility devolved to ordinary businessmen and ordinary consumers. For over a century, the Progressives and their heirs the liberals have been “calling the big shots” on everything from banking to health care to education to welfare and the results are in. They screwed up.

America needs a system that doesn’t depend on wise men in Congress or the bureaucracy or the Treasury or the Federal Reserve. There’s a reason for that. The wise men don’t have a clue.

• We need an economy that’s a lot less about debt and a lot more about equity.
• We need a politics that’s a lot less about patronage and federal dollars and a lot more about setting rules for everyone to honor.
• We need a culture that’s a lot less about personal creativity and a lot more about creative thinking about what we can do for other people.

The world isn’t a global village. It can’t be run by the village Big Man ordering around his deferential villagers.

The world is an organism. It runs according to ideas and notions that we hardly grasp. That’s why we need to be conservative about the powers we loose into the world, and we need to be especially careful about the powers we give to politicians.

Hey, there’s a concept. How about a greater separation of powers between the economic sector, the poliltical sector, and the moral/cultural sector! Then we could keep politicians in their place, bankers in their place, and moralists in their place.

That would at least be better than the Amateur Hour running right now in Washington DC.