"Questions Linger" about Scott Walker

Just like everyone else, I couldn't resist the headline at Drudge and the cute picture and clicked over to the Washington Post's breathless article by David A. Farenthold on the unanswered questions about GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker's college career: "As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit."

Oh no! What could it be? What shameful and hidden scandal could have caused Scott Walker to leave Marquette University without getting a degree?

You do know that Scott Walker doesn't have a university degree?

Yeah. It seems that Scott Walker didn't really study too hard at college. In fact he was really only interested in college politics, at which he was a failure. Then he quit and went to work for the Red Cross. And never went back.

It was amazing to watch the comments section at the WaPo, labeled "5000+", as new comments, mostly from conservatives, came in every other second. And just about every other comment wondered about President Obama's college career, about which we still know next to nothing.

Now, for me, the point of this article is obvious. As is well known, there are only two kinds of Republican candidates for president. There are the "stupid" candidates, like Ronald Reagan and Ike and George W. Bush. And then there are the "evil" candidates, like Richard Nixon.

Wait! By 2004, George W. Bush had become an "evil" candidate! So it's possible for a Republican to be both "stupid" and "evil."

You can see that the "Walker didn't finish college" meme is all about defining Scott Walker to be as dumb as a post. Liberals apparently have a need to be able to marginalize the "other" in politics, and so articles by folks like David A. Farenthold cater to that basic human need.

And just to help out, the Brits just asked Scott Walker about "evolution."

Do you wonder who will be the "evil" candidate in 2016? Wonder no more; the answer is obvious. It is Ted Cruz. The "stupid" meme doesn't work for Ted, because Ted Cruz is brilliant. Just read the "Education" section in his Wiki article. Princeton, debate star, Harvard Law: Alan Dershowitz called him "off-the-charts brilliant." So it stands to reason that Cruz is "evil."

But if you ask me, "questions linger" about why liberal journalists at the mainstream media always find it necessary to do this kind of article about GOP rising stars. And why liberals, the tolerant ones, always need to instruct their charges in the "stupidity" or the "evil" of GOP political frontrunners.

The Conservative Reform Agenda

Yesterday I was feeling a bit sorry for myself, so I wrote about the dreadful record of liberals, starting with 50 years since Moynihan's "Negro Problem" and things have just gotten worse for the Negro family. I was talking about the fact that nothing happens when liberals screw up. They keep on keeping on, wrecking and sabotaging, and nobody holds them to account. Where's the conservative Hope and Change?

But now comes Peter Ferrara at The American Thinker to tell us about the secret conservative reform agenda being cooking up by Paul Ryan and others, what we may all hope will be "The Post-Obama Triumph of Conservatism."

First of all there's a plan to balance the budget, starting with the House and Senate budget resolutions for FY 2016.

But the prospect now is that new House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-GA) and new Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (R-WY) will propose identical budget resolutions that will balance the federal budget within 10 years.

Oh yeah? But Ferrara says that the budget will include "careful, politically sensitive entitlement reform" of Medicare and welfare. That means moving Medicare more towards Medicare Advantage and the remaining 79 welfare programs towards block grants, like with TANF in 1996.

But not Social Security Reform. Not yet.

Then there's tax reform.  Paul Ryan has a plan over at House Ways and Means.

[It] would apply a 10% federal income tax rate to family incomes up to $100,000, and 25% after that.  Under that plan, close to 90% of working families would be subject to only the 10% rate.  The federal corporate income tax rate would be reduced to 25% as well.

Yay!

Then there's Obamacare. Here, Peter Ferrara is talking about "shoulds" so I suppose that the "repeal and replace" he proposes is just his idea. Anyway, Ferrara has a two point plan:

(1) targeting public assistance to help the poor buy essential health insurance, and (2) providing means for those uninsured who have developed highly expensive pre-existing conditions, such as cancer or heart disease, to obtain essential health insurance.

The poor would get subsidized insurance plus subsidized HSAs. The pre-existing conditions guys would pay on a means-tested basis.

It all sounds great. But now we need to sell the ordinary middle class on these ideas: people that don't want to change their Medicare and don't want to change their Social Security and don't want to pay for pre-existing condition health insurance, and don't want to give up their mortgage deduction.

The thing is that conservatives don't get to bully the American people into accepting their agenda like liberals do. Liberals can call everyone that disagrees with them racists, sexists, and homophobes, and it works.

But conservatives have to persuade, and I wonder just how persuadable people are, even after eight years of Obama's fundamental transformation.

Liberals Screw Up and Nothing Happens

Guess what: it's the 50th anniversary of Pat Moynihan's report on "The Negro Family" and its firestorm.

Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was not due to a lack of jobs but rather to a destructive vein in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. 

Of course this went against mainstream settled social science that "economic conditions determine social conditions," so it had to be squelched.

And Jason L.Riley at the Wall Street Journal wants to remind you about what Moynihan said.

When the report was released, about 25% of black children and 5% of white children lived in a household headed by a single mother. During the next 20 years the black percentage would double and the racial gap would widen. Today more than 70% of all black births are to unmarried women, twice the white percentage.

Since then there has been a ton of social science research that demonstrates that children of married parents are seldom poor, but children of single parents often are. Also, children of married parents seldom exhibit social pathologies; children of single parents often do. But we still have the Great Society programs that pathologized the poor.

You'd think that liberals would be hanging from lampposts for continuing the unjust subsidization of non-work and single parenthood and the ruin of millions of lives, but they haven't.

Here's Kevin Williamson reviewing Peter J. Wallison's history of the mortgage meltdown, Hidden in Plain Sight. No it wasn't deregulation; it was regulators allowing "financial firms to park certain holdings off balance sheet." No it wasn't Fed easy money; the bubble started in the 1990s. The culprit was the easing of lending standards.

The real problem was the collapse in lending standards, with each of the big three — borrower credit rating, size of down payment, and borrower debt-to-income ratio — eroding practically overnight.

And why did that happen? Because liberals insisted, the federal government mandated, and Fannie and Freddie implemented it and then lied about it.

You'd think that liberals would be hanging from lampposts for tempting millions of low-income minorities into this wilderness of debt and ruin, but they've managed to persuade us all the "greedy bankers" did it.

Here's RedState's Moe Lane commiserating with a self-employed Obama supporter profiled in The New York Times. Her post-Obamacare health plan isn't working out. She couldn't keep her doctor; she faced higher premiums; her deductibles went up; her co-pays went up. But what really frosted her was having to drive to Connecticut for a follow-up doctor visit -- 14 miles away.

You'd think that liberals would be hanging from lampposts for screwing up the health plans of good Democratic supporters, but it seems that it's Republicans that are to blame for not supporting the president.

I suppose that we should all be encouraged. There is no way we could tell if anything were changing because in Obama's America you are not allowed to criticize Democrats on anything. Because racism, sexism, homophobia.

All you can do is vote for the most Republican Congress since the Great Depression.

It's just that I'd really like to live in an America where a politician could actually call for reform -- of entitlements, of welfare, of housing finance, of health care, of education -- without being shouted down as a bigot who wants to push grandma off a cliff or hurt little children.

And I'd like liberals to get the blame, for once, so that I could then step forward and forgive them.

You are Missing the Point, Mr. Krugman

The New York Times columnist and Keynesian apologist Paul Krugman has been on a tear this week with not one but three pieces explaining debt to us. There are a couple of blog posts: "Debt is Money We Owe Ourselves" and "Debt: A Thought Experiment," followed by a full-dress oped: "Nobody Understands Debt."

Naturally, everyone wants to get in on the act, including Steve Keen at Forbes with "Nobody Understands Debt -- Including Paul Krugman," so why shouldn't I join in the fun?

In "Debt is Money We Owe Ourselves" Krugman cranks up a chart of UK National Debt -- also available here at ukpublicspending.uk -- and says that, hey, after the Napoleonic Wars the Brits had a National Debt of 250 percent GDP and what harm did it do them?

Britain did not emerge impoverished from the Napoleonic Wars; the government ended up with a lot of debt, but the counterpart of this debt was that the British propertied classes owned a lot of consols.

True. But suppose the Brits had lost the Napoleonic War and defaulted on the debt? Then all the British propertied classes would have been a "foul way out." And suppose they didn't have the industrial revolution helping out?

Then Krugman returns with a hypothetical:

Here’s a thought experiment that may clarify matters (or alternatively make the usual suspects even more enraged.) Suppose that for some reason the government were to decree, arbitrarily, that every American whose last name begins with the letters A through K now owes $100,000 to a special government agency; meanwhile, every American L through Z is given a $100,000 bond to be paid by that agency.

The net balance is zero, he explains:

Clearly, the overall level of debt in the U.S. economy has suddenly increased (actually by about $1.6 trillion). But has the nation become any poorer?

The answer is: not unless the government defaults on the debt.

So later on, Krugman writes his usual oped about debt and austerity. In "Nobody Understands Debt" he keys off a McKinsey Global Institute report that not much deleveraging had taken place since 2008 to complain that, in fact, savage retrenchment had taken place, and it hadn't helped.

 But we have, in fact, had unprecedented austerity. As the International Monetary Fund has pointed out, real government spending excluding interest has fallen across wealthy nations — there have been deep cuts by the troubled debtors of Southern Europe, but there have also been cuts in countries, like Germany and the United States, that can borrow at some of the lowest interest rates in history.

All this austerity has, however, only made things worse — and predictably so, because demands that everyone tighten their belts were based on a misunderstanding of the role debt plays in the economy.

 Foolish people say that all this debt is robbing our grandchildren. No it isn't, writes Krugman. "Families who run up debts make themselves poorer... the world economy as a whole owes money to itself." So, if the peripheral countries needed to tighten their belts, the Germans needed to loosen theirs.

Forbes' Steven Keen faults Krugman for not seeing the difference between "peer-to-peer" lending and bank lending. But I have a different beef.

My point is that Krugman is wrong about debt. When families "run up debts" they don't necessarily make themselves poorer; they are just making a bet on the future. They are betting that they will have the income to service those debts. The same with the Brits in the Napoleonic War; they were betting that they would win, and to the victor the spoils. There is no problem if the bets pay out. But if the bet fails, then we have a different story.

And so we return to a piece of wisdom told to me by a communications engineer. The interesting case is not the successful transmission of data, he said. The interesting case is what you do when things go wrong.

When a debtor fails to service a loan, it is because he is poorer than he expected; his bet on the future has not panned out. But then the question is: who is going to pay for his mistake? The answer is: everyone. The debtor must surrender his collateral, such as it is, and the creditor most likely must take a haircut. Everyone is poorer.

That's what might have happened at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. If the Brits hadn't won, or if the industrial revolution hadn't come along and flooding the nation with wealth and the government with revenues, well then the British propertied classes wouldn't have been sitting on their £1,000 a year, they would have been sitting on a lot less and would have had to get out and get a job, like Charles Dickens, son of a bankrupt.

Nobody understands debt. Least of all Paul Krugman. Every investment is a bet on the future. With debt, I say that if I can invest money in a project right now I can make enough money to service the debt and pay it off, and if there are any profits then I get them all. With equity, I say that if I can invest money in a project right now I will share the profits, if any, with my partners.

If the bet pays off, then we are all winners. If the bet goes bad, then we are all losers.

The problem with the world right now is that we are arguing about who is going to take the losses from the bubble of the 2000s. Should it be the Greeks? The Germans? Krugman's "usual suspects?" The minority homeowners who got loans on a "dream house" that went south? (Yeah. Did you know that minority homeowners were hardest hit in the mortgage meltdown?)

The problem for the Paul Krugmans of the world is that the liberal ruling class made all kinds of promises to all kinds of people: vote for us and we'll give you loot -- pensions, subsidies, jobs, health care, you name it -- and they paid for the loot with debt. Now they can't pay out on the promises. What to do? Blame greedy bankers, blame "austerity," blame the rich, blame the Germans.

So what do they want to do? They want the rest of us to pay for their blunders.

The whole point of Keynesian economics is to avoid the truth, that government screwed up and pumped up the economy with easy money, and now we will all have to pay the piper.

That's one thing that government can never admit: it's time to pay the piper.

The Judis Enlightenment

Way back when, in 2002, Democrats thought that they were going to own the future, and so John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book about it: The Emerging Democratic Majority.

It was simple, they said. A new coalition of minorities, women, the educated, and the young was forming and they were going to be Democrats.

But now, with the Republicans in the best position they've held in Congress since the 1920s, John B Judis has changed his mind in "The Emerging Republican Advantage."

What has happened to change Judis' mind, other than the facts on the ground: a Republican Senate joining the Republican House to make up the most Republican Congress in 80 years.  It's the thesis of the emerging middle:

[There are] two trends that have emerged in the past few elections—one surprising, the other less so. The less surprising trend is that Democrats have continued to hemorrhage support among white working-class voters—a group that generally works in blue-collar and lower-income service jobs and that is roughly identifiable in exit polls as those whites who have not graduated from a four-year college...

The more surprising trend is that Republicans are gaining dramatically among... middle-class Americans. These are voters who generally work in what economist Stephen Rose has called "the office economy." In exit polling, they can roughly be identified as those who have college—but not postgraduate—degrees and those whose household incomes are between $50,000 and $100,000.

Golly!  You think that maybe the Republican Party is not the party of the rich, as the Democrats keep telling us, but really the party of the middling sort of person, neither rich nor poor, neither uneducated or super-educated, not exactly brainy, but certainly not stupid? Who could have figured that out?

Of course, that's what conservative brainiacs have been saying for years. The Democratic Party is an over-under coalition, of the rich and the credentialed in an unholy alliance with the poor. The Republican Party is the party of the responsible middle class.

OK. So John B. Judis has seen the light on party alignment. But he is still as dumb as bricks when it comes to the economy.

After the 2008 election, I thought Obama could create an enduring Democratic majority by responding aggressively to the Great Recession in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt had responded in 1933 to the Great Depression. Obama, I believed, would finally bury the Reagan Republican majority of 1980 and inaugurate a new period of Democratic domination.

See how he got it completely wrong? That's because he doesn't care about science and hasn't cracked a book to get beyond the straight liberal narrative on the Great Depression. First of all, President Bush was already "responding aggressively" to the Great Recession. He let Nancy Pelosi have whatever stupid Keynesian stimulus she wanted, and then he had Hank Paulson in at Treasury to make sure that "this sucker" didn't go down in the Fall of 2008. All the heavy lifting had been done before Obama was inaugurated, and if John B. Judis knew a thing beyond the usual liberal shibboleths about the Crusades he'd know that.

In retrospect, that analogy was clearly flawed. Roosevelt took power after four years of the Great Depression, with Republicans and business thoroughly discredited, and with the public (who lacked any safety net) ready to try virtually anything to revive the economy. Obama's situation was very different. Business was still powerful enough to threaten him if he went too far in trying to tame it. Much of the middle class and working class were still employed, and they saw Obama's stimulus program—which was utterly necessary to stem the Great Recession—as an expansion of government at their expense.

Oh really. Business powerful enough to threaten him? Obama's stimulus "utterly necessary?" You mean the one that kept teachers' salaries going? For God's sake, John B. Judis, get out of your liberal hidey-hole and get out more.  Obama's economic policy has been a failure because it tried to emulate the glory days of FDR, which some commentators think deepened and extended the Great Depression.

The Obama problem is that the natural reaction of all politicians at all times is to throw money at their supporters, and he's too cloistered to know that there is another way. The way the economy works is that when you lose your job you must get on your bike and go find a job. The more people are sitting around on a government check (I am talking about both workers and crony capitalists) the slower the economy will rebound. The real job of a government in a financial crisis is to supply endless liquidity until the panic is over, and then clear the decks of regulations and onerous taxes to grease a swift recovery.

As a coda to John B. Judis' partial emergence from the ignorance and superstition of the liberal Dark Ages, there is Henry Olsen's "Submerging Democratic Majority." He points out that, if the Democratic majority idea is flawed, so is the counter idea of a "natural Republican majority," because "simplistic proponents of the “natural Republican majority” counter-thesis also overlook the elements of white-working-class and middle-class psychology that makes them quintessential swing voters." For Olsen, you can explain every election since 2008 on the idea that the "white-working-class and middle-class" voters are up for grabs. Writes Olsen:

Judis basically gets them right when he notes that they are suspicious of, but not hostile to, government. They no longer trust government to automatically act in their interest, but neither do they think that all government is evil — especially those aspects of government they can feel most directly in their lives: police, public schools, and mass entitlement programs.

Too true. The problem for right-wingnuts like me is to persuade the white working class and the non-credentialed middle class that reform of public schools and entitlement is really just what the doctor ordered for them. And the problem starts with the fact that even though public education and the entitlements stink they still make the white working class and the middle middle class feel safe.

Good News on Unemployment

Here's the headline I've been waiting for -- for years. From Drudge: "Boom: Jobs Surprise" followed by "But Unemployment Rate Ticks Up" from 5.6 percent to 5.7 percent.

Anyone who knows how the employment market really works knows that the sign of a really good jobs market is when people start returning to the labor force faster than they are actually getting jobs. When that happens the unemployment rate ticks up even though people are getting jobs like gangbusters. And that's what's finally happening.

In the latest BLS Household Survey the Labor Force is up from 156.129 million to 157.180 million, an increase of 1,051,000! But the Employment Level number is up from 147.442 million to 148.201 million an increase of a mere 759,000. When that happens, the Unemployment Rate ticks up.

That is what you call good news. And if you look at the charts you see a steady increase in the Labor Force, starting a year ago when the Republicans in Congress cut back extended unemployment benefits. Employment Level seems to have gone into overdrive a little over a year ago.

It's sad, of course, that the mind-numbed Obama economic policy has been so hard for the folks pitched out of work by the Great Recession. No doubt a Republican president would have done better, because he'd have done less Keynesian foolishness.

But those of us that like to blame Obama for the lackluster economy better understand one thing. If a Republican president had presided over the worst recovery since World War II the media would have persuaded the American people never to let Republicans govern again. Just like they did in the 1930s when incompetent government created the stock bubble and then failed to rescue the financial system thereafter and then slowed recovery with stupid lefty stimulus programs. Talk about a ThreePeat.

So really, if and when the Republicans get into the White House in 2017 with the economy in good shape it means that they can do sensible reforms of the welfare state without being in the "stimulus" phase of the political cycle. Hey, how about those entitlements!

But the next question is the Fed. Will the Fed now, finally, start returning interest rates to normal and let mom and pop savers actually get a return on their savings? And how fast? Remember last time? The Fed started increasing interest rates in 2003 and took about three years to get back to normal, by which time the real-estate market was in a monster bubble.

Anyway, it looks like the economy is at first and ten on the 40 yard line. That's good news for the American people, who have been remarkably patient about the economy for the last six years.

Then and Now: "And Mary Pondered These Things in her Heart"

The wonders of the rape culture are something to behold. First there was "Jackie," freshman at the University of Virginia, who conceived a story about rape on shards of glass in a fraternity house. Then there's the Columbia mattress story, where we have now heard the side of the German student accused of rape (for which the police declined to prosecute).

I've said it before in 2008, so I'll say it again. This is all about sociologist Georg Simmel's century-old prediction that eventually women would transform the public square to "suit a more feminine sensibility." And it's about the clash between women's "liberation" and the basic instinct that every woman needs to be right with the other women in her community.

In Honor: A History, James Bowman says that honor for a woman is her chastity. But we should understand chastity in a wider sense than not having sex before marriage and not having sex with other men. It is about not being wrong, ever. A woman cannot say: Gee, I screwed up; but let's forget it and start over. Starting over is for men, not for women. A woman must reinterpret events that might throw a bad light on her to show that she was innocent all along. I am not saying this in a pejorative sense. I suspect that this attitude is deep in the Darwin, a necessary part of the female role of bearing and raising children. After all, one mistake and your kid is eaten by a wolf, or nowadays, darts into the street and is run over by a car.

There's another thing too, something I learned from James A. Ault's Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. It's the story of a liberal's sojourn in a fundamentalist church community. You know, patriarchy and barefoot and pregnant and all that. Only it wasn't.

It is true that women did not hold any offices in the fundamentalist church of his study. But Ault found that it was misleading to assume that they had no power. On the contrary, they controlled the church. And they controlled it through their gossip network. The women’s gossip network got to define reality, who had said what to whom, and who had done what to whom. This made the women of the church enormously powerful. But their power often was used destructively, and the church would split every year or two.

We are now reaching the point where the majority of university students are women. And a larger and larger number of university teachers and administrators are women. This means that a moral equivalent of the "women's gossip network" is getting to define reality in the university.

How do you explain "Jackie's" transition from disappointment at failing to win the love of "Randall" by rousting him out in the middle of the night with a story about being forced to perform oral sex at a fraternity to the magnificent story of the Night of the Shattered Glass? (Notice how careful "Randall" was to get a couple other friends to accompany him to rendezvous with "Jackie"?) "Jackie" started talking about it with the campus counselors.

And what about the Mattress Girl at Columbia? Six months after a night of rough sex, after which she and her lover started to drift apart, she accused him of rape. Through the Office of Gender-based Misconduct.

How do you explain this? Mattress Girl got angry. She started talking about it with friends and then with the campus counselors, and one thing led to another.

I will tell you what I think. I think that free sex just doesn't work for most women -- particularly well-born women. When a woman has sex she opens her heart as well as her legs, and she can't shut it off like a man, and go on to other sexual partners. So in the turmoil of the campus sex culture she gets to feel angry, abandoned, and ashamed. You can see the searing ambiguity in the relationship between Mattress Girl and her German lover. They were supposed to be friends, but a couple of times they ended up sleeping over and one thing led to another. I tell you: girls don't like that sort of thing.

There's a double standard here, of course, but it is not the one you think. Let's rewind to the most popular opera of all time, La Boheme. It involves two middle-class artists living in a garret doing the bohemian thing and getting it on with little Mimi, a seamstress, and Musetta, a girl with a sugar daddy. All great fun and all that. But don't start trying this bohemian stuff with Daddy's girl, or helicopter Mommy's girl. Oh no.

You see, in the lower orders, a girl accepts what the world hands out to her; she has to. And hey, suppose she managed to snag a college boy? But in the professional middle class things are different. Middle-class girls get protection, and the middle class doesn't take kindly to adventurers mucking around with their little darlings. If you want confirmation, just read Trollope's The Prime Minister, where a rich county girl, Emily Wharton, gets swept off her feet by an adventurer, Ferdinand Lopez, about whom nobody knows anything. Well, it all ends well because Lopez eventually gets run over by a train, and Emily marries the man she was always supposed to marry. But she takes a year getting to Yes because she is so ashamed of herself for getting into a mess with Lopez, the man from nowhere.

Ever since the Virgin Mary in Luke 2:19, and doubtless long before, women have been pondering things in their hearts. Mary had a lot to think over, what with her cousin Elisabeth getting pregnant and all and Mary wanting her baby to be special rather than a follow-on after Elisabeth's baby. I'm not saying that Mary got envious when Elisabeth suddenly got pregnant after years of trying and concocted the whole story about the angel to cover the fact that she ran out and got pregnant before she actually married her espoused Joseph. Oh no. After all this time, who can tell?

But as a conservative I have to believe that people don't change, least of all women.

I believe that we are seeing women today revolting against the sexual revolution, and they are revolting against it using the woman's cultural technique of the women's gossip network all gussied up into glorified bureaucratic categories.

The problem is that I wonder if the informal women's gossip network doesn't make a complete mess of the public square and the fact that the public square can't operate on feelings but must be based on facts, facts that can be adjudicated in court.

The lesson for men is simple. Get away. Don't go to college, don't work for big anything, because the women's gossip network is taking over, and you are in the target hairs.

The whole point of being a man is to make life into an adventure. That's what rape and pillage were all about; that's what ISIS is all about. For us civilized chaps rape and pillage are out, but there is still the start-up. Read Peter Thiel's Zero to One: Notes on Startups and How to Build the Future to get with the program.