Obama's Cunning Plan

Now that President Obama has turned sharp left with his tax-the-rich rhetoric, the question is this.



Is he crazy, or crazy like a fox?



If he's crazy like a fox it's because he and his campaign operatives see the danger of a candidate coming out of the left to challenge him.  He needs to keep the left-wing base on side until it is too late to challenge him in next winter's primaries.  On that view he would pivot to the center in mid-February and everyone would live happily ever after.



But is there a danger of a serious candidate from the left?  A candidate that will challenge America's first black president? I can't see a candidate from the left doing any more than embarrass the president. Might he not be more vulnerable on the right in his party?  Such as a Clinton candidacy?



The other possibility is that this is "Baldrick's Cunning Plan," a stupid panicky effort of the kind often proposed by Blackadder's rather slow-witted TV sidekick.



The panic notion is supported by the recent tittle-tattle book about life inside the Obama White House, Confidence Men by Ron Suskind.  It's the first solid indication of just what kind of a leader we have in the White House.  The New York Times reviewer puts it this way.

Mr. Obama emerges in this volume as an oddly passive chief executive whose modus operandi was to sketch out overarching principles, “wait until others had painted in those outlines with hard proposals” and then “step down from his above-the-fray perch to close the deal.”

If this is true then it tells us that Obama is not a "commander" personality type.  It means that he is likely to get confused and overwhelmed when the going gets rough.



When people get in a tight spot they find it difficult to think clearly and decisively.  Some people are just good at keeping their head cool in a crisis.  Most of us need training so we can overcome our fear when the bullets are whistling by our ears.  That's why the military trains its people to act on instinct.  That's why people who have studied airplane emergencies tell us that the crew always reverts to their training when the going gets tough.  Small wonder that when airlines put their pilots in the simulator they throw emergencies at them.



Now let us think about what President Obama would do in a tough spot.  He doesn't seem to be the decisive type.  And he doesn't have a lot of executive experience in dealing with tough situations.  He would revert to what he knew, his basic belief system, the tried and true.  But for President Obama the "tried and true" is the belief system of his left-wing youth and young adulthood.



We have seen peeks at his basic belief system when the president has been caught short by an unexpected question.  When Joe the Plumber asked him about taxing the rich, he talked about "spreading the wealth."  When Charles Gibson asked about higher taxes on capital gains, he talked about "fairness."



My guess is that the president is getting really overwhelmed, now that things are going seriously wrong with his presidency.  So he is instinctively going back to his training and his many years of experience on the left and in the lefty foundation world.



That stirs hopes in me of a blowout election in 2012.  We've had pretty close elections in recent years because the parties have been pretty careful not to scare the moderate horses in the middle.  But it looks like a panicked Obama might stampede those nervous moderates.



Could we have a 60-40 election in 2012?  Don't count it out.

Our "Circumlocution" President

Back in the dawn of the modern era, in the middle of the 19th century, Charles Dickens nailed modern government in Little Dorrit.  Dickens invented the Circumlocution Office, staffed by the Barnacles and the Stiltstockings, and the motto of the office was "How Not To Do It."



Decades from now, I predict, professors will be using the Obama administration as an awful example of "How Not To Do It."



Of course, for liberals, the example will be how the Obama administration managed not to do it to the greedy bankers.  There's a lovely piece today from New York magazine, a dialog between Frank Rich and Adam Moss about the new White House tell-all book Confidence Men by Ron Suskind.  Their big problem with Obama is that in the chaos of conflict between Tim Geithner and Larry Summers the Obama administration failed to reform the financial system and nail the greedy bankers.  That's the liberal narrative of course, that the financial meltdown was all due to greedy bankers, and Rich and Moss are sticking to it.



For conservatives, of course, the "How Not To Do It" of the Obama administration lies in its liberal folly. It failed to realize that the financial mess required a leaning of government and an all out effort to get the economy restarted.  Instead the Obamis went with a wasteful stimulus that mainly went into the pockets of Democratic supporters, and terrified all job creators with higher costs and taxes in ObamaCare and swingeing environmental regulations.



In back of all this is the bigger question, the monstrous betrayal of the American people, the cynical pandering for votes that has left the US bankrupt and will require the reckless promises on health care and pensions to be rolled back.



Then there is the devastating indictment from Reuven Brenner on education.

In fact the much discussed increasing inequality in the U.S. and other Western countries may be, in part, explained exactly by the fact that governments subsidize so extensively high-schools and universities.  After all, the best and brightest benefit disproportionately from these subsidies.

If someone is not thrilled about math and the sciences, but is excited to repair cars, and would like to open a garage, the government doesn’t offer him a $50,000 to $100,000 subsidy.  Yet the bright kid gets just such subsidy – and more – when studying math, engineering, biology, or medicine.

The problem is not just that the liberal elite has skewed the education system by sluicing money in favor of the kind of education they want for their kids, but that the whole economy is riddled with this privilege and subsidy regime, in which the $500 million load guarantee to bankrupt solar panel manufacturer Solyndra is just the poster boy.



One fine day, the educated class has got to wake up and admit to themselves that they know nothing about the economy or education or anything else, and that their high-handed efforts to make it more fair just ends up encouraging rent seekers to lobby for favors.



I keep saying: it probably had to be like this.  The only way for everyone to realize that government is lousy at everything except simple force--keeping the peace--is to have the government try all the cool stuff, from education to pensions to health care to welfare, and then fail miserably at it.



And that is where we are at with this failed "Circumlocution" president.  We are in the middle of a great demonstration that government is always and everywhere a great Circumlocution Office, filled with place-holders like the Barnacle family, hanging on like grim death to their sinecures, and pathetically devoted to the practice of "How Not To Do It."

Yes, Conservatives are Radical, Dr. Krugman

Yes, Dr. Krugman.  We conservatives are radicals.  I'm glad you noticed.  We want change at the root.  As you write in your column:

[M]odern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

I couldn't have said it better myself.  You see, we conservatives believe that when society "acting through the government" works to mitigate the common hazards of life, it diminishes people and damages society.  We believe passionately that society should act to mitigate the common hazards of life.  We just believe these things should be done through people, not through government.



Conservatives think that the mitigation of the common hazards of life is one of the basic functions of society, but that society, that is, people working together collectively, must cooperate together to do this.



Conservatives believe that when government is deputized to do this, when these mitigations of the common hazards of life are organized by government force in government taxes and government spending then the whole of society is put at hazard.  Humans are social animals, not social slaves.



Social Security: It is common knowledge that Social Security discourages people from saving for their old age.  That's a double harm, because it makes people more dependent and it reduces the opportunities for young people created by older peoples' savings.  Now it's going broke, and betraying the people it was meant to help.



Unemployment insurance: People that receive unemployment payments don't look for work very hard.  After all, it's not their money they are spending.  And unemployment insurance costs many employers a bundle.  For instance in Washington State in construction it can go up to 6 percent.  Imagine if that money went into a personal account for the worker.  Unemployment insurance is not insurance; it is an encouragement for free-riders.



Medicare, Medicaid:  These programs are going to bust the budget, because the programs give away a lot of free services.  The only way to reform them is to get the government out of them and start to make everyone pay for routine care up front.  Anyone who, e.g., smoke cigarettes, can afford to pay a little more on their health care.



Viewed from the conservative perspective the great social programs that liberals are so proud of represent a monstrous betrayal.  After promising the moon to the workers we are now facing the fact that the promises cannot be redeemed.  Modest, ordinary people that put their faith in politicians are going to be screwed.



Imagine:  Suppose that Social Security had been a proper savings program from the start.  That means that many people of modest means would have saved a significant capital sum that they could pass on to their children.  But not with Social Security.  Suppose Medicare/Medicaid were true insurance programs with realistic deductibles and co-pays.  Why then the grannies would be ferociously shopping for the best prices and the best service.  That's a big difference from right now where they care only about the service and not about the price.  The two programs are going to eat the budget, so there will have to be cuts, and sooner rather than later.  And without the government programs that let prosperous people off the hook, then we could all work together to make sure that people that have come upon hard times "through no fault of their own" could be properly helped.



Worst of all, after the liberal politics of the last three generations we now have an entitlement society where people expect to get a ton of services for free--because it's their right.  That is not society.  That is looting.  The health of any society depends on the amount that people are prepared to put into it, not by compulsion from taxes or from forced labor, but from their own cooperative spirit.  Liberals have managed, "in the last three generations" to destroy that cooperative spirit and turn the society of voluntary association into a selfish grab-it-and-go society.



The impression we conservatives get, Dr. Krugman, is that liberals believe that big government programs equal a compassionate society.  The facts argue otherwise.  In Makers and Takers, Peter Schweizer reports that liberals, people that believe in the welfare state, are less generous at a personal level than conservatives.  And less honest.  And more angry.  In other words, liberals are less social that conservatives.  I wonder why.



If you liberals really believe that government spending equals societal compassion, Dr. Krugman, I've got a bridge to sell you.

The Liberal Bigotry Problem

The lyrics from South Pacific tell it all when it comes to bigotry and hate.  Of course that was in the good old days when liberals were noble folk trying to break up the encrusted superstition and bigotry of the ages.

You've got to be taught

To hate and to fear



You've got to be carefully taught.

Yeah.  Well that was then.  This is now.  And now it is liberals that have been carefully taught to hate and to fear.  Who do they hate?  Why Christians, of course.  Not to mention Mormons.



And the fact is that the person nominated in 2012 for President of the United States by the Republican Party is likely to be either an enthusiastic Christian or a faithful Mormon.



Right now I am just finishing up a Teaching Company lecture series by a Smith College professor, Jay L. Garfield, called The Meaning of Life.  This 36 lecture series starts with the Baghavad Gita, continues with Job, Aristotle, the Stoics, Buddhism, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama.



Notice anything missing?  Yeah.  Christianity.  Not to mention Augustine and Aquinas.  How in the world could you do a lecture series on the Meaning of life without including these great Christian thinkers?  And how can you look at the modern age by just palming off capitalism with the Marxian put-down of "commodity fetishim?"



I'll tell you how.  Liberal anti-Christian bigotry.  And we are also talking about liberal anti-womanism.  Because Christianity is pre-eminently a girl religion, focusing on the perfect relationship between you and God.



Liberal anti-religious bigotry is going to lead them into the abyss in the next few years.  Liberals have systematically demolished the normal human modes of social cooperation: family, religion, God.  And they have demolished the substitutes for kin relationship like the Moose and the Elks.  People are desperate to find effective ways of social cooperation and belonging.



And  now that the liberal system has crashed with Social Security and Medicare on the block, and the Great Recession hammering blacks and the working class, the American people are looking for something better than the cold machanical system of the authoritarian welfare state and its permanent class and race war.



But what will they do when a full-on Christian is a nominee for president of the United States?

Another Look into the Abyss for Dems

It's been obvious for months that Democrats are looking an an annus horribilis next year.  Their politics of privilege, their society of subsidy, their legalized looting has elected generations of Democrats to power.  But now it looks like it is collapsing, all at once.



Because the government has run out of other peoples' money.



Democrats have pressed every policy button they know, but it doesn't look like anything will change the economy for November 2012.  And why should it?  Why should business expand and hire when a gigantic tax cliff is coming in 2013, as the Wall Street Journal reminds us.



Democrats are in the same position as the Republicans in 1931.  For decades the Republicans had seduced the working man with the protective tariff, telling him that the tariff protected his wages from low-wage Europe.  But, of course, when the Progressive era Federal Reserve finance system screwed up in 1929-32 the working man got hammered.  And he returned the compliment by hammering the GOP and handing over the keys of the kingdom to the Democrats.



Now the Democrats are facing a similar fate.  For years they have promised the average working man that their Social Security, their Medicare, their unemployment and workers compensation benefits would be a solid safety net under the vicissitudes of life.  Now those promises are proving to be empty. It's not just that Social Security and Medicare are broke.  The problem is that all these benefits hit the economy as taxes on jobs, the payroll taxes that mostly get paid by employers and that make them hesitate before hiring.



Yeah!  We'll make sure those stingy employers pay for your benefits!  That's what Democrats have told the workers.  And it's all a lie.  The workers would have done better by saving their own money and buying their own insurance.  Because you know what?  If they had, then all that money their employer  paid in taxes would be their own money, saved in bank accounts and mutual funds and life and disability insurance.



Well, after the special elections on Tuesday, all Democrats now know they are in trouble.  Unfortunately for them the US is out of smoke and mirrors.  We'll have to get out of trouble the hard way, with work and saving, and cuts to wasteful government programs.  There is no other way.

Taxing "Millionaires and Billionaires"

Now that President Obama has actually come out with a proposal for taxing "millionaires and billionaires" we can get a handle of his proposal.  Just how much does he propose to tax those folks who are already at the point where average citizens may ask how much more do they need.



According Carol E. Lee and Janet Hook in the The Wall Street Journal the president's proposal to phase out deductions for those earning more than a taxable income of $250,000 a year expects to collect $400 billion over ten years.



According to the SOI Table 5 (xls) IRS analysis of individual income tax returns, the floor of the top one percent of taxpayers is around $200,000.  It's been going down recently, of course, due to the Great Recession.  In 2007 to 2009 the Feds collected about $400 billion each year from the top one percent.  So the Obama tax increase on millionaires and billionaires, $400 billion over ten years, is going to increase the federal income tax bill on the millionaires and billionaires by about ten percent.  The increase is not nothing, and it's not outrageously punitive.



Problem is, of course, that the millionaires and billionaires in question are exactly the people we are counting on to start hiring at some point in the future when they have got off their capital strike.  So ramping up their taxes can't really help in the jobs department.



Here's what I think.  I think that the Republican House should pass the president's tax increase on millionaires and billionaires.  I think they should say: here Mr. President.  Here is what you want.  Tax the rich.  See how many jobs it creates.



Tax-the-rich is pure left-wing politics.  It's required for lefties because the left has to believe that it is a lack of tax payments from the rich that is keeping the poor poor.  If you don't believe that, and you don't believe that corporations are screwing the workers and the consumers then you don't have a reason to pass swingeing legislation to tax and regulate and crush those evil capitalists and their partners in crime, millionaires and billionaires.



You'd just think that, wow, in the last two hundred years under the reign of the corporations daily income has gone from about $3 to $100 in constant dollars.  Somebody was doing something right.



The truth is that left-wing politics is "living by looting" in exactly the same way as the "barons of the crags" once lived by looting the travelers on the alpine passes.  The problem is, of course, that when you live by looting instead of working to make products and services for other people, it turns you into a monster.  Thus it turns out, according to Peter Schweizer's Makers and Takers,  that liberals are meaner and less honest than conservatives.  Looting for a living does that to you.

9/12 Plus 10

I've found myself unwilling to do a 9/11 retrospective.  I suppose that's because, for me, conflict is conflict, war is war.  9/11 was not so much an outrage as a marker.

There is--there has always been--violent disagreement about what the world is and what the world should be.  And this disagreement is usually conducted by young hot-heads.  In our day these hot-heads are the sons of the educated elite.  Thus it was that the 9/11 terrorists were mostly the sons of well-to-do Saudis.

Today the world is divided.  It is divided mostly between those that are trying to understand the meaning of the industrial revolution and those trying to oppose the industrial revolution.  Some people say: there has been a profound revolution in the way that the human race lives its life, due to the scientific and energy revolutions.  We need to discover how to live our lives in recognition of that fact.  There are others, and many of them live in the West, who say that industrialism, capitalism, and prosperity have combined to divorce humans from their humanness and from God, and that only a violent turn away from democratic capitalism can save us.

In my view, the present democratic capitalism based upon Judeo-Christian culture is the best thing going.  Every effort in the last two hundred years to attack it or to substantially restructure it has been a bloody failure.  The great religious movements of socialism, communism, and fascism failed after monstrous religious wars and outrages.  Now we are in the middle of another religious movement, the Islamic reaction against Judeo-Christian democratic capitalism.

The immediate reaction of the United States government after 9/11 was to ramp up its security apparatus, both foreign and domestic, and we can see now that the results were mixed.  At home the government has erected a huge bumbling inspection regime that has humiliated the American people in dozens of ways. Abroad the government has found that wars against Islamist-harboring thug dictators is a lot more complicated than anyone would want.

Domestically, the government seems to think that the only way to protect the American people is to herd them around like cattle.  Abroad it has found that military force leaves a horrible political vacuum in its wake.  These failures of post 9/11 US policy are not scandalous.  All government action is drenched in failure.  But there seems to be an important lesson that the US government is slow to learn.

Humans are not cattle.  Americans showed, from the first moments after the first plane exploded on the World Trade Center, that they are capable and resourceful in responding to the terror threat.  The passengers on Flight 93 understood, from communications with the ground, that they had to stop the flight and they did, sacrificing their lives in the process.  They ended the "airplane hijack" era in which hijackers were the actors and passengers were the non-actors.  It was passengers that subdued the underpants bomber.  Government policy must pivot to encourage and respect the abilities of the resourceful American people.

In military operations it is clear that military questions cannot be divorced from political questions.  And beyond both is the battle of ideas.  We westerners must politely but firmly assert our ideas and values against the ideas and values of the Islamic extremists.  And that means everyone, from the pope on down.

The result of the great battle between democratic capitalism and socialism has now been won.  The two great cultures of India and China were initially seduced by the socialists, the revolutionary communists in China and the democratic socialists in India.  In the years since each country abandoned socialism their peoples have vaulted into the democratic capitalist world with an energy that leaves the rest of the world breathless.

The same will doubtless be true when the peoples of Islam abandon their fight against democratic capitalism.  We may hope that in doing so they will bring a critique to democratic capitalism that will improve it.

But meanwhile the West must oppose the forces that wish to demolish our democratic capitalism.