2010 Isn't 1994, etc.

People in the political world like to sneer at generals for "fighting the last war." So what is all the talk of 1994, and the worrying about a Republican Congress overreaching in 2011 in a reprise of 1995?

As Ronald Reagan said: to say that Congress spends money like a drunken sailor is an insult to drunken sailors. And the re-fighting the wars of 1994 and 1995 is an insult to generals.

The only thing we know is that 2010 won't be a replay of 1994 and that 2011 won't be a replay of 1995. However, like any general that has studied recent wars, it certainly doesn't hurt for us to recall the lessons of 1994 and 1995.

First of all, 1995 may have been a tactical defeat for Republicans in that President Clinton "won" the government shutdown. But in the medium term Republicans actually did reduce the rate of increase in spending. The problem for Republicans was not 1995, it was 1998. That was the year when the budget went into surplus and President Clinton started saying telling Americans that, yes he could cut taxes and return money to the taxpayers but then maybe the taxpayers would waste it. That was voters started to think that we could relax the purse strings a little.

That sentiment gave us the 2000s and a Republican Congress that gorged itself on earmarks.

Anyway, all the talk about debt and deficits and bailouts rather misses the point. The whole key to the federal spending problem is, #1 Medicare, #2 Medicaid, and #3 Social Security. That's where the money is.

The Medicare problem is simple. Affluent middle-class seniors (like me) will have to pay full freight on health care. It is simply unjust for people with money (i.e., older people with savings) to tax the hides out of 30 somethings much less wealthy than they are. The fact is that most middle-class seniors can afford to pay for our own health care. And we should.

Of course, that might mean that a lot of seniors won't be able to afford to become snowbirds and winter down south.

When we affluent seniors start to pay full-freight on our health care we will start to find ways to economize on health care. We will revolutionize health care and all of a sudden health care costs will stop their exponential rise into the stratosphere.

Once the Medicare problem is solved, then Medicaid will follow. Don't know how, but it will. The American people will demand it.

Social Security? You can fix Social Security with a financial coup de main. For instance, you can capitalize current benefits by awarding Social Security beneficiaries special Treasury bonds that pay off Social Security benefits and then privatize the whole thing. Again, it's a matter of justice. People in their fifites and sixties should save, big time, for their retirement. And guess what: our savings will go to create the jobs for the 30 somethings. As is should be.

When will middle-class seniors be ready to pay full freight on health care? When Medicare is completely broken. And that won't be in 2011.

So Republicans won't be doing a grand reform on entitlements in 2011. But Republicans can start the ball rolling by offering, e.g., a New Medicare that offers a fixed subsidy that you can apply to your own health insurance plan.

One thing is for sure. We are living in interesting times.

Stimulus and Confidence

The big question in economic crises is Confidence. When the stock market is going south and banks are going broke and everyone is worrying about a "double dip" they are looking for the magic bullet that will turn the whole thing around and restore Confidence.

In the liberal world-view, you restore Confidence with a stimulus program that keeps money in consumers' pockets and gives them Confidence in the economy's future.

In the conservative world-view, you restore Confidence with tax cuts that give businessmen Confidence that the future will allow them to make profitable investments and keep a good chunk of what they make.

James Glassman has a useful analysis of the current crisis of Confidence in "The Failure of the Liberal Economic Experiment?" in Commentary.

He argues that the stimulus hasn't worked because people are looking past the stimulus to the higher taxes and spending and heavier regulation that the Obama administration has so diligently been working on for the last 18 months.

If government spending is short-term or one-time-only, which is what the stimulus was supposed to be, then individuals might be expected to take a more benign view. But the 2009 stimulus did not take place in a vacuum. It was soon accompanied by other economic policies and proposals of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress: health-care reform extending public coverage to 30 million new people, cap-and-trade energy proposals featuring vastly higher taxes, and the imminent expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2010.

American business leaders and consumers are not fools. They can see what is coming. They see that the Confidence-building stimulus was a bridge to nowhere.

Americans judged that the party in power intends the radical expansion of the size of government in perpetuity. That expansion will have to be paid for. There is no reason to expect very much good from the future if you are the sort of person who generates income and creates jobs. Your “permanent income” is going to decline, and your gut response will be to husband your resources.

Democrats have had this coming to them for a long time. They were lucky in the 1937-38 downturn resulting from increased taxes and higher union wages rates that World War II came along before they got pitched out on their ears. They were lucky in 1965-68 when their inflationary economic policies were drowned out by the Vietnam War. They were lucky in 1994 when Republicans gained control of Congress and reduced spending. They were lucky that the crazed credit subsidies at Fannie and Freddie crashed on Bush's watch.

But it is starting to look as if the American people are going to blame the Democrats for the current lack of progress on the economy. It is starting to look as if their luck is running out.

My guess is that the only thing President Obama needs to do to save his presidency is to extend the Bush tax cuts and lower corporate income tax in stages to 20 percent. Because that will restore Confidence in the future.

My guess is that he won't do it.

Glenn Beck's Girl Conservatism

Suppose you are a liberal, and here you are on Monday morning after the Beck Restoring Honor rally. What are you to think? What does it all mean?

You go read Ross Douthat in The New York Times and he isn't really that helpful. OK, he says, he underestimated Glenn Beck. But it's not really such a big deal:

Beck’s packed, three-hour jamboree was floated entirely on patriotism and piety, with no “get thee to a voting booth” message. It blessed a particular way of life without burdening that blessing with the compromises of a campaign, or the disillusioning work of governance.

For a weekend, at least, Beck proved that he can conjure the thrill of a culture war without the costs of combat, and the solidarity of identity politics without any actual politics. If his influence outlasts the current election cycle, this will be the secret of his success.

OK. Here's a quickie analysis for liberals, so you chaps can figure it out.

Glenn Beck is selling girl conservatism.

Rush Limbaugh is selling boy conservatism.

That's it. That's all you need to know. Now go back to NPR. The rest of you, Stay tuned.

I once read a critic of Rush Limbaugh who lightly sneered at his "jaunty optimism." That's it, I thought! That's exactly the secret of Rush Limbaugh: his day in, day out, irrepressible jaunty optimism. It's a profoundly male thing, of course. When men are under stress, whether they are an army platoon in a tough spot or working in a business that is teetering on the edge of failure, the response is to maintain a front of jaunty optimism, to say to your brothers that things are looking up, we'll get through to the end of this, and then we'll lift our arms with a brewski.

Glenn Beck is different. He is all emotion, all twelve step recovery, all history lessons, all revival. This morning, I caught a couple of minutes of the Glenn Beck Radio Program, and it featured women calling in about Good Samaritan episodes that they experienced at the Restoring Honor Rally. Guess what: that's girl stuff.

So we have Rush Limbaugh servicing the boy side of conservatism, about "being the best you can be," about laughing in the face of adversity. We have Glenn Beck servicing the girl side of conservatism, dishing up morally uplifting stories, rolling his eyes and rolling out the blackboard for a lesson on conservatism. Women love that stuff.

So if I were a liberal, trotting off to my non-profit sinecure this morning with a vague feeling of unease, I'd realize that things were really a lot worse than I thought. Because conservatives now have a one-two punch communicating daily to the 40 percent of Americans that call themselves conservatives. Men and women.

P.S. How about that black woman at the rally that said: "I am not an African. I'm an American!... These people are my family."

I Just Got a Tingle!

For the last couple of years I've sneered at liberal Chris Matthews and his famous tingle. But now I take it all back.

Needless to say, my tingle--and yes, it was in my leg--had nothing to do with President Obama. It came at the end of an American Spectator blog by Ben Stein. It had to do with the comments of his Hispanic gas station attendant.

"We have to wake up," he said. "Those people want to hurt us. Then they want to build a mosque. Why? To hurt us more? And how come Obama always takes the side of the people who hate us? Isn't this his country, too? What's wrong with him? Doesn't he know he's an American? Or what is he? This country has to wake up and get rid of Obama."

I nodded. "I agree," I said.

The man shook his head. "This country has to wake up," he said again. "We elected Obama. We made a big mistake. Now we have to fix it. Stop him, then get someone else in there. Someone who is an American. Someone who works for us, not our enemies."

Tingly stuff, I'd say. Because it tells a very big truth about America and American history.

At some point every immigrant stops thinking of himself as a helpless victim oppressed by a big bad America. He stops hugging the side of the swimming pool in the shallow end with all the liberal swimming instructors and strikes out into the deep end. He finds out the amazing, almost unbelievable truth about America. He belongs. He finds himself thinking of himself as a non-hyphenated American. He starts talking about "we." He finds, out there in the deep end, that when he gets into trouble and asks for help, Americans will come and help.

Perhaps he plucks up his courage and goes to a Tea Party--where all those racist whites hang out. And he finds out that he's welcome, that the sharp-faced middle-aged white women are pathetically grateful to see him there.

He finds out that everything the liberals told him is a lie, that all those awful racists and bigots of which he's heard tell are just folks.

Maybe he even gets a tingle running up his leg.

Ben Quayle's Way With Words

Back in the day--oh what halcyon days they were--Vice President Dan Quayle (R) had a little problem with his spelling.

Yes, he spelled "potato" with an "e." Oh what a jolly time our media friends had with that. Because, you see, it confirmed their worst prejudice, that Republicans were uncultured and anti-intellectual.

What a shock it is, then, to discover that Dan Quayle's son Ben has a remarkable way with words. Even the liberal Politico has taken notice covering his victory speech when he won the Republican primary for the 3rd congressional district in Arizona on Tuesday.

His victory speech's first line mirrored a startling attack ad he released in the campaign's final weeks: "I mainly have eight words for you: Barack Obama is the worst president in history," he told supporters.

Well. On the other hand, maybe he's not so good with words. His line seems a bit wordy to me. For one thing, it adds up to 15 words, including the vocal pause "mainly".

Dan Quayle can't spell, and now we find out that Ben Quayle can't add.

The thing is that in these latter days, you've got to cut things down, dumb them down so the "like" and the "totally" and the "whatever" crowd can get it. How about this:

Worst. President. Ever.

Still too long? Hmm. Maybe we have to reduce it to texting-speak, where everything is reduced to an abbreviation, as in LOL. How about:

WPE

I wonder if WPE is already taken? Let's just Google it and see.

Ah, no problem. WPE is already recognized as "worst president ever."

So that's all right. Mind you, WPE also stands for "writing proficiency exam" and "winsock packet editor." But somehow I think that people will get the point.

When they go into the voting booth in November.

Palin the Kingmaker

Several of the GOP candidates that won yesterday are, as our MSM friends like to say in their objective reports, outside the mainstream. In the next paragraph, they typically quote some Democratic honcho; he'll say that Democrats look forward to running against him.

Sharron Angle in Nevada is one such candidate. And it looks like Rick Scott (R), the self-financed businessman running for governor in Florida is another. Maybe Joe Miller, who seems to have defeated Lisa Murokowski, is another.

The MSM is right, of course. In the past conservative candidates that didn't mouth the correct pieties to liberal Articles of Faith got clobbered.

One day, of course, that's going to change. Because that's the way the world works. One day some chap will come along and desecrate a holy shrine. People will hold up their hands in horror. They will look up to the heavens expecting the wrath of the gods--and nothing will happen.

Is 2010 that year? Nobody knows. Not yet.

But we do know that Sarah Palin is a political force. All the people that wrote her off as a light-weight and as a bumbling fool are wrong. Sarah Palin is a remarkable political talent, and she has been a professional politician since the mid-1990s. She seems to have a political "golden gut," an instinct for the right word, the right gesture, that President Obama would probably love to borrow, if only he could.

Sarah Palin is making herself into a political kingmaker. She travels around the country sprinkling selected candidates with her pixie dust--and they keep coming out of nowhere to win elections.

Are you chaps ready to take her seriously yet?

Government's Kiss of Death

I picked up Tom Wolfe's two latest novels, I am Charlotte Simmons and A Man in Full a while back, and now I have started Charlotte.

But I almost stopped right there. Because I thought to myself: I don't want to read about this squalor, this tale of youth utterly degraded and demoralized. It's too painful.

Then just yesterday I had been reading Hugh Hewitt's interview with Peter Hitchens on his new book The Rage Against God. There's this nugget of life in Britland.

We are a country in very severe decline of all kinds, and there is, at the moment, no sign whatever of any serious attempt to recover from that decline... [T]he tourist visitor inevitably sees the nicer parts, and isn’t going to go to the sort of place where you discover that the feral youths loping through the streets, where they will kick your head in at the drop of a hat. But we see them, and we see the un-policed cities, and we see vast areas from which the economy has withdrawn, and where people live entirely on welfare... And we see the effects of an education system in which people can spend eleven years in full-time education and come out unable to read, write or count... And unless something is done about it very soon, then as a society, we will cease to function. We are becoming an uncivilized anarchy, and a very, very uneducated and immoral one as well.

He goes on to say that marriage as an institution has just about ceased to exist in Britland.

Then, of course, we come back to the Obama administration and its $4.4 trillion increase in government spending and its utter failure to spark the economy from the banking crisis of 2008.

If you want to come up with the common denominator in all this, it is government and the government's kiss of death.

This is not all that hard. Government is the social agent of force. Politics is about power. The people that succeed in politics are people that are good at power.

When you put government in charge of anything then the culture of force takes over. Compulsion becomes the order of the day. And then the social arts, the kindly virtues, start to wither. Since everything becomes a matter of political power, then everything in society becomes reduced to power.

When everything is reduced to power, you no longer have a society.

We've put government in charge of education. So now everything to do with education is a matter of power. All the mediating institutions that make the world safe get tossed away, and solitary individuals like Charlotte Simmons get chewed up in the government meat grinder. The government kiss of death to young people.

We've put government in charge of welfare. So now everything in welfare is a matter of political influence. Welfare recipients understand how this works. They vote for the chaps that promise more money. If you want money, you must act pathological. Now we find that a century of government money for the poor has destroyed the low-income family. The government kiss of death to the poor.

We've put the government in charge of the economy. So now we have the massive swings and tidal bores of the current economy. Government spends a ton of money on housing subsidies, and creates a housing bubble and the inevitable housing bust. Now government is trying to fix the broken credit system while it plans vast new interventions in the economy. And, of course, in the century of the Federal Reserve, the value of the dollar has gone from $20.75 per ounce of gold to $1,200 per ounce of gold. The government kiss of death to the economy.

I wonder what will happen if we put the government in charge of health care? Oh dear. We already did.