The Wages of Liberalism

Graffiti on Trees, High-Speed Rail to Nowhere — the Wages of Liberalism
August 27, 2012 - 12:01 am - by Victor Davis Hanson



Last week, while reading about an insolvent California’s insistence on going ahead with the first leg of a proposed high-speed rail line (total cost of the system: an estimated $100-$300 billion), I heard the following story on a local ABC news affiliate about a nearby low-Sierra lake:
Vandalism forces closure of Pine Flat campground

Monday, August 20, 2012
Amanda Perez
FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — Acts of vandalism have forced officials to shut down a popular campsite in Fresno County. The Pine Flat Campground located below the Pine Flat Dam on Trimmer Springs Road is closed indefinitely. Nearby Winton Park remains open but things aren’t looking much better there. Vandals tagged rocks, barbeques, and even trees with graffiti. “It was horrible. It didn’t look like nature. It looked like a nightmare,” said visitor Jose Zarate of Fresno.
Unfair to the Vandals
You can read the rest of story at KFSN’s Website; additional news items detailed similar stories at other local lakes — a veritable Vandal assault on the vestiges of civilization (actually, that allusion is unfair to the Vandals): copper wire stripped out of power conduits, toilets and sinks ripped out of bathrooms, and, yes, more gang graffiti painted on trees.
I think the latter horror is what earned the local media attention. Destroying public property, assaulting other campers, closing down recreation sites are one thing — but graffiti on trees? That’s an insult that no liberal can stomach. In the grand struggle of environmental correctness versus multiculturalism, green wins every time. (Why do a few liberals oppose illegal immigration? Because of worries about environmental damage along the border.)
The Tipping Point
I have a hard time timing car trips to Los Angeles because a large section of the 99 state “freeway,” north of Kingsburg, is still (after a half-century) two lanes, potholed, and crammed with traffic. But the rub is that the traffic is of a strange sort, one characterized by an inordinate number of drivers with loose brush, tools, appliances — almost anything — not secured in flat-bed pickups or piled too high in pickups and trailers. The debris commonly flies out on the road, causes an accident, and shuts down California’s main interior north-south lateral for several hours.
What is the common theme here?
When the liberal mind cannot cope with the concrete ramifications of its own ideology, it seeks a sort of tokenism. Unable to ensure that trees are not defaced? An ancient highway is not upgraded? Presto, zoom ahead to space-age high-speed rail, as if the conditions that created sprayed trees and mattresses lying among the pot-holes will not easily migrate to high-speed rail. That is, within 10 years I have no doubt that the Fresno-Corcoran (“rail to nowhere”) link will be periodically closed due to stripped copper wire conduit, mattresses thrown over the fence onto the tracks, and the general inability of the state to service the system due to the sort of daily vandalism seen at our local campgrounds.
If one third of the nation’s welfare population resides in California, and if seven million of the last ten million Californians added to the state population are now on Medicaid, and if Californians, as it is estimated, send approximately $10 billion a year in remittances to Mexico and Latin America, then something has to give. And the remedy for that something that gives is either teaching youth not to spray paint pine trees, or hiring unemployed ex-gang-bangers to pressure wash the graffiti off pine trees — or moving to a kinder, gentler Santa Cruz or Newport, feeling good on the beach, watching the sunset each evening, and cursing those evil conservatives who want to poison the 3-inch delta smelt and keep foie gras legal in California.
The Role of the Scapegoat
When society cannot fathom that 16 youths were shot and another six killed last weekend in Chicago, it seeks symbolic relief. As I followed stories of the mayhem in the inner city of Chicago, I noted periodic news about the case of Trayvon Martin and the national outrage at George Zimmerman, who in a world of liberal jurisprudence has nonetheless mostly been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. But because the Congressional Black Caucus cannot fathom what to do about the epidemic of black-on-black murder and even Rahm Emanuel was not successful after calling in Louis Farrakhan to keep the peace  (and neither wishes to make even a rough connection between the violence and Great Society paternalism, the destruction of the black family, and a generation of youths raised without fathers on state assistance), they must seek a token — or rather, in anthropological terms, a scapegoat, some symbolic target to beat when crops fail and pestilence arrives. What is the alternative — lectures about flash-mobbing and sermons about the waste of buying $300 Lebron James signature sneakers?
The angrier we can become about Trayvon Martin, and the more our furor at George Zimmerman, the more we can square the circle of dealing with the Chicago killings (one murder occurred this week just three blocks from the Obama Chicago mansion. [I doubt Barack Obama will be returning to his home after his tenure ends in Washington]). If California has no clue what to do about its schools being reduced to near last in math and English test scores, its epidemic of uninsured drivers, its nearly 40% drop-out rates of Hispanic males in Central Valley high schools, and its 50%-plus rates of remediation of incoming freshmen in the state college system, then its needs a token solution. So it deals with the very real long-term consequences of illegal immigration by pushing for the Dream Act.
But tokenism is not the only reaction when postmodern liberal dreaming ends up in concrete premodern catastrophe. Escapism is a related response. I don’t think Dream Act supporters in Santa Monica or Atherton wish to live in, or visit much, Parlier or Orange Cove. When CSU presidents retire from Central Valley campuses, they usually frown and head to Palm Springs or Monterey. Doctrinaire liberalism is predicated on the notion of escapism, that one has the means and know-how to ensure that children do not go to the schools whose curriculum and policies follow your own utopian thinking. Or that you make sure your “wind and solar and millions of green jobs” windmills are obstructing someone else’s view. Or that the first high-speed rail link connects Fresno with Charles Manson’s prison in Corcoran rather than cutting a wide swath through Bay Area suburbs.
Medieval exemption is yet another response to liberalism. As I wrote in 2008, I watched with curiosity as tony Palo Alto neighborhoods sprouted bigger Obama campaign signs on their lawns, even though the owners were by definition one-percenter segregationists (East Palo Alto and Redwood City are a mile — and a solar system — away). The mansions of an Al Gore, John Kerry, and John Edwards are expiated by their owners’ always louder liberal outrage. No one really wishes to live in a world governed by the laws of contemporary liberalism. So the architects escape it and justify their flight by finding a suitable token, a convenient scapegoat, a secular priest like Obama to offer them penance for their sins of enjoying elite privilege.
When we talk of tokenism, escapism, or penance, we are still in world of symptoms, not the etiology of the malady. All can understand the very human desire to support a liberal crusader like Barack Obama among those who pay no income tax, belong to the near 50% who receive some sort of government aid, or are part of the one-sixth of the population on food stamps. Self-interest is an understandable motivation. It explains why the public employee and teacher naturally worry more about pay increases than the tax wherewithal to pay for them.
But for the more elite and influential progressive, affluence has allowed liberal orthodoxy to evolve to its theoretical limitations. There is a reason why 90% of professors — life-long tenure, summers off, guaranteed pay raises — are liberal and 70% of small-business people are conservative. The more removed one becomes from the elemental struggle to eat one more day — and never in the history of civilization have so many been so exempt from such existential worries — the more one enjoys the luxury of pondering more cosmic issues such as extending Social Security disability payments to youths suffering from attention deficit disorder or mandating gay history in state public schools or saving the smelt.
The problem, however, with modern redistributive liberalism is that it is predicated on a number of people not predicating their existences on just such modern liberal principles. When the natural gas fracker, the dairy owner, the cement contractor, and the software engineer either quit or move, then the Pine Flat campgrounds become, as they are now, the norm rather than the aberration.
A rich inheritance, a big law settlement, tenure, a movie deal, a state sinecure — these enablers of elite liberal thought are all predicated on the less-liberal productive classes creating wealth to shear. Behind every liberal philanthropist fortune is a huge capitalist score. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett can afford now to be liberal — an expensive indulgence — because in their early incarnations they were no-holds-barred capitalists who made lots of enemies conducting business without mercy and in search of pure profit. (In the 1980s and early 1990s Bill Gates’ Microsoft was cast as a Darth Vader enemy that had crushed the underdog, hip, and nearly insolvent Apple through piratical means.)
Put Sean Penn or George Clooney in a socialist Hollywood (one in fact, not in mere name), where the state ran the industry and the profits were divided evenly among actors, crews, and janitors (who is to say that Clooney “built” a film any more than the guy who swept the set after he got in his Mercedes and headed home?), and soon you would have a suddenly conservative Penn or Clooney, netting about $70,000 a year before taxes and without the wherewithal to jet to Caracas or hold a fund-raiser in Geneva — and furious that they were making the same as the guy who swept the set (as in most can sweep sets, but not all can be Sean Penns).
Affluence and poverty are the twins of liberalism. The former allows one to both dream and to escape that dream. The latter provides the fodder for liberal artillery.

Income Losses for Those Near Retirement

 

 

Big Income Losses for Those Near Retirement

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

7:24 p.m. | Updated with additional details.

 Americans nearing retirement age have suffered disproportionately after the financial crisis: along with the declining value of their homes, which were intended to cushion their final years, their incomes have fallen sharply.

The typical household income for people age 55 to 64 years old is almost 10 percent less in today's dollars than it was when the recovery officially began three years ago, according to a new report from Sentier Research, a data analysis company that specializes in demographic and income data.

Across the country, in almost every demographic, Americans earn less today than they did in June 2009, when the recovery technically started. As of June, the median household income for all Americans was $50,964, or 4.8 percent lower than its level three years earlier, when the inflation-adjusted median income was $53,508.

The decline looks even worse when comparing today's incomes to those when the recession began in December 2007. Then, the median household income was $54,916, meaning that incomes have fallen 7.2 percent since the economy last peaked.

Income drops vary significantly by age, though. Households led by people between the ages of 55 and 64 have taken the biggest hit; their household incomes have fallen to $55,748 from $61,716 over the last three years, a decline of 9.7 percent.

Sustained unemployment among older workers may be at least partly to blame for this decline. Unemployment rates for that age group are relatively low, but once older workers lose their jobs, they have an unusually hard time finding re-employment. And even when they do find new work, they usually take a pay cut.

"I was laid off in '08, and I never really managed to get back into the job market," said Jan Thomas, 62, who lives in Sarasota, Fla. She decided to apply for Social Security early, even though that means her benefits are lower than they would be if she had waited until 66. "I've pretty much gone through my savings at this point. You know, taking money out of one account, then the other. Then it all just kind of went poof."

Younger Americans have also felt income declines in the three years since the recovery began. The inflation-adjusted median household income for those 25 to 34 fell 8.9 percent, while that for people under age 25 fell 6.1 percent.

Incomes for the oldest Americans, on the other hand, have risen steadily since the recovery began. Among those 65 to 74, the inflation-adjusted median household income rose 6.5 percent (to $42,113 from $39,548), and among those age 75 and older, the increase was 2.8 percent (to $26,991 from $26,244).

It's not clear why incomes rose for older people when as they fell for everyone else.

This may be because older Americans are working longer, taking in more income at more advanced ages. Perhaps they are working longer partly to compensate for the decline in the value of their homes. Rising employment rates among older people predate the housing bust, however.

The share of people over 65 who have jobs has been rising since the early 1990s; in 2011, 16.7 of people over 65 worked, compared with 11.1 percent two decades earlier.

The chart below -- which is based on a different Census Bureau survey that goes through 2010 only, unfortunately -- shows that almost all age groups have actually seen their income rise over most of the last 50 years, although incomes for non-seniors have been much more volatile. (Remember, though, that during recessions older people have at least some steady income from Social Security.)
Income losses since the recovery began also varied depending on educational attainment, Sentier Research found.

People with the least education and people with the most education had smaller income losses, supporting the idea that the job market in the United States is "hollowing out," as the M.I.T. economist David Autor has proposed, meaning that high-skilled and low-skilled jobs are growing while midskilled jobs are thinning out.

The median household income of high school dropouts has fallen 5.3 percent (to $24,495 from $25,860), while that for college graduates has fallen 5.9 percent (to $83,378 from $88,570).

Meanwhile, incomes for those with a midlevel education -- a high school diploma, some college but no degree, or an associate's degree -- slid much further.

As you can see in the chart above, the biggest percentage decline was for people who took some college courses but never got a degree.

Their median income has fallen 9.3 percent over the course of the recovery so far, to $46,200 from $50,948. That must especially sting, given that these income losses are probably accompanied by student loan debt.

Black Americans appear to have suffered the most, according to the Sentier report.

The real median annual household income for blacks fell 11.1 percent from June 2009 to June 2012, landing at $32,498 from $36,567.

That compares with 5.2 percent for whites, 3.6 percent for other race combinations (including Asians) and 4.1 percent for Hispanics -- all of whom started with higher incomes than blacks.




















 

GM Headed for Bankruptcy ???

GM goes from bad to worse despite Obama bailout 

 

Is this really what Obama wants to do for all manufacturing across America? Let's hope not.

 

  

Readers with long memories may recall that Charles E. Wilson, president of General Motors and nominee for secretary of defense, got into trouble when he told a Senate committee, "What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what's good for General Motors is good for the country."

That was in 1953, and Wilson was trying to make the point that General Motors was such a big company -- it sold about half the cars in the United States back then -- that its interests were inevitably aligned with those of the country as a whole.

Things are different now. General Motors' market share in the U.S. is below 20 percent. It has gone through bankruptcy and exists now thanks to a federal bailout. But Barack Obama seems to think that it's as closely aligned with the national interest as Charles E. Wilson did.

"When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse," Obama told a campaign event audience in Colorado earlier this month, "I said, let's bet on America's workers. And we got management and workers to come together, making cars better than ever, and now GM is number one again and the American auto industry has come roaring back."

His conclusion: "So now I want to say that what we did with the auto industry, we can do in manufacturing across America. Let's make sure advanced, high-tech manufacturing jobs take root here, not in China. Let's have them here in Colorado. And that means supporting investment here."

"Obama talks about the auto bailout frequently, since it's one of the few things in his record that gets positive responses in the polls." -Michael BaroneWas he calling for a federal bailout of other American manufacturing companies? And what does he mean by "supporting investment"? White House reporters have not asked these obvious questions, for the good reason that the president, who has been attending fundraisers on an average of one every 60 hours, has not held a press conference in something like two months.

Obama talks about the auto bailout frequently, since it's one of the few things in his record that gets positive responses in the polls. But he's probably wise to avoid probing questions, since the GM bailout is not at all the success he claims.
GM has been selling cars in the U.S. at deep discount and, while it's making money in China -- and is outsourcing operations there and elsewhere -- it's bleeding losses in Europe. It's spending billions to ditch its Opel brand there in favor of Chevrolet, including $559 million to put the Chevy logo on Manchester United soccer team uniforms -- and just fired the marketing exec who cut that deal.

It botched the launch of its new Chevrolet Malibu by starting with the green-friendly Eco version, which pleased its government shareholders but which got lousy reviews. And it's selling only about 10,000 electric-powered Chevy Volts a year, a puny contribution toward Obama's goal of 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.
"GM is going from bad to worse," reads the headline on Automotive News Editor-in-Chief Keith Crain's analysis. That's certainly true of its stock price.

The government still owns 500 million shares of GM, 26 percent of the total. It needs to sell them for $53 a share to recover its $49.5 billion bailout. But the stock price is about $20 a share, and the Treasury now estimates that the government will lose more than $25 billion if and when it sells.
That's in addition to the revenue lost when the Obama administration permitted GM to continue to deduct previous losses from current profits, even though such deductions are ordinarily wiped out in bankruptcy proceedings.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that GM is bleeding money because of decisions made by a management eager to please its political masters -- and by the terms of the bankruptcy arranged by Obama car czars Ron Bloom and Steven Rattner.

Rattner himself admitted late last year, in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, that "We should have asked the [United Auto Workers] to do a bit more. We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay." Nonunion employees of GM spin-off Delphi lost their pensions. UAW members didn't.

The UAW got its political payoff. And GM, according to Forbes writer Louis Woodhill, is headed to bankruptcy again.

Is this really what Obama wants to do for all manufacturing across America? Let's hope not.

Michael Barone,The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on washingtonexaminer.com.

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PBGC Guaranteeing the Guarntor Pt II

Who Will Guarantee This Guarantor? Part Two

By Alex J. Pollock Friday, July 20, 2012

Filed under: Economic Policy

The director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation responds to an article on American.com.

Late last month I published a piece on the serious financial problems at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the government corporation that guarantees private pension plans (see “The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation: Who Will Guarantee This Guarantor?”).
The article prompted a thoughtful response from Josh Gotbaum, the director of the PBGC. His response follows, along with my additional comments:

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which guarantees the pensions of more than 40 million Americans, has had a financial deficit for over a decade.

PBGC pays pensions when bankrupt companies can’t afford them. Recently, some analysts decided that PBGC itself will become bankrupt and that taxpayers will end up footing the bill. Alex Pollock, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, notes accurately that PBGC was intended to be self-financing yet has a $26 billion deficit, and despairs that both the death of traditional pensions and the bankruptcy of PBGC are inevitable. Mr. Pollock writes, “A financial way out for the PBGC is not apparent and none is being proposed.”

As one who’s spent the last two years running PBGC, working both to put its finances in order and to preserve pensions, let me respectfully disagree.

For starters, let’s be clear: A taxpayer bailout is not our agenda. PBGC has never taken a dime from taxpayers and we want to keep it that way.

PBGC funds come from premiums paid by the pension plans we insure (and from recoveries from the plans we take over). However, Congress sets those premiums, not PBGC—and it has set them too low. From time to time, Congress raises the premiums—it did so again last month—but always bows to pressure to keep them low. If Congress keeps this up, Mr. Pollock will be right: PBGC eventually will either get a taxpayer bailout or, if not, go bankrupt.

But that’s a path we can avoid. There is a way out, and the administration proposed it over a year ago: Let PBGC, not Congress, set premiums. Let PBGC do it on a businesslike basis—based on each company’s actual risk. That's the way it’s done by the FDIC, by other government insurance programs, and by virtually every private insurance company on the planet.

Of course, it’s no surprise that businesses pressure Congress to keep premiums artificially low. They’d rather leave the taxpayers holding the bag. And, thus far, the Congress has played along.

Businesses claim that if they had to pay fair premiums, they would drop their plans and couldn’t afford to stay in business. A little arithmetic shows how silly this is: Last year PBGC premiums represented about 3% of all pension costs. (Does anyone think auto insurance is only 3% of the cost of owning a car?) Pension costs themselves are about 3% of average labor costs. Put those together and PBGC premiums represent about one-tenth of one percent of labor costs. Even if they were tripled, the effect on American industry’s costs and competitiveness would be negligible.

So, rather than ignoring our efforts to reform PBGC’s finances, I hope Mr. Pollock will join them. Millions of retirees will thank him. Millions of taxpayers, too. Including me.

Sincerely,

Josh Gotbaum, Director
Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation

I appreciate Mr. Gotbaum’s letter and salute his efforts to increase the revenues of the PBGC. He and I agree on the sharp irony that “self-financing” has created a $26 billion deficit. He is right that PBGC has not so far taken any cash from the taxpayers, but it is still financially dependent on them. No entity would be allowed to continue operating with such a huge deficit net worth if it were not guaranteed by somebody else—in this case, the taxpayers. Of course, this guaranty is “implicit,” just as it was for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We all know that when financial push comes to shove, “implicit” government guarantees turn into explicit taxpayer costs. Mr. Gotbaum and I agree on this risk.
Also, I fully agree with Mr. Gotbaum that PBGC’s premiums should be raised to economically and actuarially sensible levels. As he suggests, this would be politically unpopular, and, in my opinion, it would speed up the inevitable continuing decline of defined-benefit pension plans—but it is a good idea nonetheless.
Deposit insurance may not be a good model for the PBGC to cite. One big federal deposit insurance fund—the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (“FSLIC”)—went broke in 1989, as many state deposit insurance programs did historically. FSLIC was meant to be self-financed by insurance premiums, but it cost the taxpayers $150 billion. As a result of that experience, the FDIC is now formally guaranteed by the government, as you can see by checking the FDIC sticker at any bank teller window. It says: “Backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.” I don’t believe the PBGC wants to ask Congress for that.
Alex J. Pollock is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

FURTHER READING: Pollock also writes “The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation: Who Will Guarantee This Guarantor?,” “Who Knew When about the LIBOR Problems?,” and “Would You Settle Your Claims on Social Security for 80 Cents on the Dollar? (I Would).” Andrew G. Biggs contributes “Understanding the True Cost of State and Local Pensions” and “Public Sector Pensions: How Well Funded Are They, Really?”

Image by Dianna Ingram / Bergman Group

EPA #6

EPA Smack-Down Number Six

A federal court cashiers another illegal Obama regulation.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been waging a regulatory war on Texas—and losing in the federal courts. On Tuesday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down another misguided EPA rule.
Enacted in August 2011, the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule was supposed to reduce air pollution emitted in one state and carried downwind to another. Under the Clean Air Act, if pollution from the upwind state is causing the downwind neighbor to fail federal air quality tests, then the EPA can order the upwind state to reduce the emissions causing the problem.
But even such expansive authority from Congress is never enough for the Obama EPA. So the agency decided to use the rule-making as a pretext to force down emissions even further—illegally, as it turns out.

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Assistant editorial page editor James Freeman on an appellate court ruling vacating the EPA's cross-state pollution rule. Photos: Getty Images

In Tuesday's decision, two of the three judges on the appellate panel found that under the rule "upwind States may be required to reduce emissions by more than their own significant contributions to a downwind State's nonattainment. EPA has used the good neighbor provision to impose massive emissions reduction requirements on upwind States without regard to the limits imposed by the statutory text."
The court found that the feds also broke the law by dictating the measures to be used to reduce emissions instead of allowing states to design their own plans, as the statute demands. "Congress did not authorize EPA to simply adopt limits on emissions as EPA deemed reasonable," wrote Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
The flawed rule would have hit coal-fired electric plants in particular, and especially those based in Texas. EPA's illegal micro-managing of state air-quality plans was so specific that immediately after the rule-making it was clear that coal-powered energy production at Texas-based plants operated by Luminant, a big utility, would have to be cut. Tuesday's ruling means Luminant will be able to keep 1,300 megawatts of power online in Texas, which needs more electricity because unlike other parts of the U.S. in the Obama era it is growing.
Luminant had announced it would need to lay off roughly 500 workers in mining and electricity production. Now the utility says those jobs have been spared, thanks to the court's intervention.
According to a scoreboard by the American Action Forum, Tuesday's rebuke from the D.C. Circuit marks the 15th time that a federal court has struck down an Obama regulation, and the sixth smack-down for the Obama EPA. This tally counts legally flawed rules as well as misguided EPA disapprovals of actions by particular states.
As for this latter category, last week the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals saved Texas from an arbitrary and capricious EPA rejection of its permitting process for utilities and industrial plants. In that case the court found that "the EPA based its disapproval on demands for language and program features of the EPA's choosing, without basis in the Clean Air Act or its implementing regulations."

Associated Press

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson

See a pattern here? Mitt Romney and House Republicans are making the case that Obama regulators have been punishing U.S. business in violation of the law and beyond what Congress intended. Tuesday's ruling proves their point and underscores how much more damaging the EPA could be without re-election restraint in a second Obama term.
The court's decision states it plainly: "Absent a claim of constitutional authority (and there is none here), executive agencies may exercise only the authority conferred by statute, and agencies may not transgress statutory limits on that authority."
The message is that regulators must follow the laws of the United States. Why do federal judges constantly have to remind EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson of this basic principle?

O's Twin Failures Iraq/Iran Bite

Obama's Twin Iran-Iraq Failures Metastasize

Posted 08/20/2012 07:02 PM ET

Mideast: Sanctions against Iran are even more ineffective than believed. Foolishly relying on them to stop Tehran's nuclear program, the president gave Baghdad license to help Iran evade the sanctions by leaving Iraq.
'To Obama's internationalist sensibility," former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton once wrote in Commentary magazine, "laws 'made in the U.S.A.' by freely elected representatives of our own citizenry are too 'exceptional' and too 'parochial' to hold weight in this interconnected world."
Paradoxically, it turns out that President Obama fails to understand the interconnected nature even of neighboring countries in the Middle East.
He never realized, for instance, that extracting the U.S. presence and influence in one volatile Muslim country — Iraq — would go gravely against the objectives of our policies next door, in the country with the most threatening regime in the world today — Iran.
The New York Times over the weekend reported that "for months, Iraq has been helping Iran skirt economic sanctions imposed on Tehran because of its nuclear program."
It turns out that Iraqi bankers have been neutralizing the already limited effects of U.S. and United Nations sanctions against the Islamofascist regime in Tehran. Iraq's government is apparently pretending not to notice "large financial flows, smuggling and other trade with Iran," with high-level Iraqis even "directly profiting from the activities."
Meanwhile, trade between Iran and Iraq is uncontrollable, reaching as much as $11 billion a year.
Obama last month announced that one Baghdad bank's connections with U.S. banks would be cut off, but U.S. and Iraqi government and banking officials told the Times that as many as four Iraqi banks might be under Iranian control.

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And in obvious disregard for Obama, the Iraqi government continues allowing the institution the president targeted, Elaf Islamic Bank, to purchase U.S. dollars on a daily basis, thus allowing the Iranians to move large amounts of cash into the international banking system.
What's more, much of the money misused by Iran is actually under the U.S. government's nose, with approximately $60 billion of Iraqi central bank reserves at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
One Iraqi parliamentarian feared Iran's exploitation of Iraqi banks threatened Iraq's economy, because it was depleting Baghdad's foreign reserves, much of which come from huge oil revenues made possible by its U.S. liberation.
The Obama administration has apparently exacerbated this crisis. The U.S. privately told the Iraqi government that it "would not be found to be in violation of the new Iran sanctions," a former U.S. official told the Times.
As a result, "the Iraqi government has done little to stop a highly organized effort" — including the smuggling of Iraqi fuel oil into Iran "at extremely low prices with the help of government subsidies."
On top of that, "at least some Iranian oil is finding its way to Iraqi ports for export."
Why shouldn't the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki help its neighbor Iran at the expense of the U.S.? Uncle Sam hightailed it on the last train. America has left the Iraqi people to the wolves, so they might as well save themselves by making deals.
Consider all the implications here. Iran is insulating itself from the sanctions meant to stop its nuclear weapons program. Iraq's economy might be destabilized because of illicit exploitation of its banking system, draining it of cash.
Ultimately, an Iran that America allowed to become armed with nuclear weapons will dominate an Iraq we allowed to become economically and politically weakened.
Funny how the modern world's interconnections don't operate the way they're supposed to when a non-exceptionalist America shirks on its responsibilities.

US Blood in Afganistan on O

Blood Of Afghan Betrayal On Obama's Hands

Posted 08/20/2012 07:02 PM ET

War On Terror: It's now clear why so many U.S. troops have fallen prey to Afghan insider attacks: The administration disarmed them while arming their Afghan trainees, making them sitting ducks.
With U.S. and NATO troop deaths from so-called green-on-blue attacks climbing past 100, military brass last week reversed a standing order requiring troops to remove their magazines from their weapons while quartered inside bases with their "trusted Afghan partners."
Rogue Afghan soldiers or police have easily gotten the jump on their trainers, shooting them in cold blood with the rifles and ammunition issued by the U.S. Ten of our troops have died this way in just the past two weeks.
The number of insider attacks this year already exceeds the total for last year. Since the start of 2012, there have been 32 attacks resulting in 40 deaths, many more than last year's 21 total attacks.
Earlier this month, an Afghan security commander ambushed U.S. troops. The officer, who was helping U.S. special forces train the local police force, lured elite U.S. soldiers to a Ramadan meal at his outpost to talk security. He then opened fire on them at close range, killing three and wounding one.
The Taliban took credit for the attack. The terror group released a video indicating it has heavily infiltrated the Afghan national army and police force.
"I opened fire on three Americans who were sitting together," a rogue Afghan soldier, identified as Ghazi Mahmood, says while smiling for the camera. "The reason I killed them is because they have occupied our country. They are enemies of our religion."
He said that there are many other uniformed Afghans "looking for the opportunity to kill infidels."

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Now, after years of denying the attacks were anything but an "isolated" problem, U.S.-led command has finally let American soldiers carry loaded weapons at all times to protect them not just from terrorists but from the Afghan security forces they're training.
The policy reversal exposes the suicidal nature of the prior order. Even as our disarmed soldiers were being systematically ambushed and gunned down by their Afghan counterparts, high command continued to co-locate entire Afghan military units inside U.S. bases.
As a gesture of trust toward these Muslim partners, commanders ordered U.S. soldiers to remove their magazines from their weapons while training and working alongside them.
The Afghans, however, were allowed to remain armed.
Further exposing them to "friendly fire," American troops generally removed their heavy Kevlar body armor once they got inside the base.
Disarming the Afghans would have been the obvious solution. But of course that would expose this whole "training partnership" as the farce it really is.
Training and standing up a national security force in Afghanistan is the linchpin of President Obama's withdrawal strategy. He has set a 2014 deadline for troop pullout.
But the Pentagon is already reducing troop presence by 30,000 by the end of the summer. Many of the remaining soldiers will switch from fighting to training and advising Afghan forces. This means even more of them will be exposed to insider attacks.
But we're not just training Afghans to replace soldiers. We're hiring them to protect our soldiers right now, and many of them have also turned on our soldiers.
Obama has insisted on using Afghan security guards for base security as a way to limit the size of the U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan.
Hiring local Afghans to protect troops obviates the need to deploy some 20,000 additional troops as MPs, or to move existing troops out of combat roles.
Obama's rush to withdraw has needlessly cost at least 100 soldiers' lives and wounded countless others.

RULING by Executive Command: King O

Barack Obama And Ruling By Presidential Decree

By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 08/20/2012 06:09 PM ET

There are some very serious issues at stake in this year's election — so many that some people may not be able to see the forest for the trees. Individual issues are the trees, but the forest is the future of America as we have known it.
The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration, during the process of dealing with particular issues.
For example, the merits or demerits of President Obama's recent executive order, suspending legal liability for young people who are here illegally, presumably as a result of being brought here as children by their parents, can be debated pro and con. But such a debate overlooks the much more fundamental undermining of the whole American system of constitutional government.
The separation of powers into legislative, executive and judicial branches of government is at the heart of the Constitution of the United States — and the Constitution is at the heart of freedom for Americans.
No president of the United States is authorized to repeal parts of legislation passed by Congress. He may veto the whole legislation, but then Congress can override his veto if they have enough votes. Nevertheless, every president takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws that have been passed and sustained — not just the ones he happens to agree with.
If laws passed by the elected representatives of the people can be simply over-ruled unilaterally by whoever is in the White House, then we are no longer a free people, choosing what laws we want to live under.
When a president can ignore the plain language of duly passed laws, and substitute his own executive orders, then we no longer have "a government of laws, and not of men" but a president ruling by decree, like the dictator in some banana republic.
When we confine our debates to the merits or demerits of particular executive orders, we are tacitly accepting arbitrary rule. The Constitution of the United States cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution. But, if we allow ourselves to get bogged down in the details of particular policies imposed by executive orders, and vote solely on that basis, then we have failed to protect the Constitution — and ourselves.
Whatever the merits or demerits of the No Child Left Behind Act, it is the law until Congress either repeals it or amends it. But for Barack Obama to unilaterally waive whatever provisions he doesn't like in that law undermines the fundamental nature of American government.
Obama has likewise unilaterally repealed the legal requirement that welfare recipients must work, by simply redefining "work" to include other things like going to classes on weight control. If we think the bipartisan welfare reform legislation from the Clinton administration should be repealed or amended, that is something for the legislative branch of government to consider.
There have been many wise warnings that freedom is seldom lost all at once. It is usually eroded away, bit by bit, until it is all gone. You may not notice a gradual erosion while it is going on, but you may eventually be shocked to discover one day that it is all gone, that we have been reduced from citizens to subjects, and the Constitution has become just a meaningless bunch of paper.
ObamaCare imposes huge costs on some institutions, while the president's arbitrary waivers exempt other institutions from having to pay those same costs. That is hardly the "equal protection of the laws," promised by the 14th Amendment.
John Stuart Mill explained the dangers in that kind of government long ago: "A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement."
If Obama gets re-elected, he knows that he need no longer worry about what the voters think about anything he does. Never having to face them again, he can take his arbitrary rule by decree as far as he wants. He may be challenged in the courts but, if he gets just one more Supreme Court appointment, he can pick someone who will rubber stamp anything he does and give him a 5-to-4 majority.

Niall's Piece in Newsweek: O's Gotta Go

Niall Ferguson: Obama’s Gotta Go

Why does Paul Ryan scare the president so much? Because Obama has broken his promises, and it’s clear that the GOP ticket’s path to prosperity is our only hope.

by Niall Ferguson  | August 19, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

I was a good loser four years ago. “In the grand scheme of history,” I wrote the day after Barack Obama’s election as president, “four decades is not an especially long time. Yet in that brief period America has gone from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the apotheosis of Barack Obama. You would not be human if you failed to acknowledge this as a cause for great rejoicing.”

Despite having been—full disclosure—an adviser to John McCain, I acknowledged his opponent’s remarkable qualities: his soaring oratory, his cool, hard-to-ruffle temperament, and his near faultless campaign organization.

Yet the question confronting the country nearly four years later is not who was the better candidate four years ago. It is whether the winner has delivered on his promises. And the sad truth is that he has not.

In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.

 

COVER STORY: Obama has broken his promises, and it's clear that the GOP ticket's path to prosperity is our only

In an unguarded moment earlier this year, the president commented that the private sector of the economy was “doing fine.” Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.

In his fiscal year 2010 budget—the first he presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year.

Unemployment was supposed to be 6 percent by now. It has averaged 8.2 percent this year so far. Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.

Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.

Niall Ferguson discusses Obama's broken promises on ‘Face the Nation.’

And all this despite a far bigger hike in the federal debt than we were promised. According to the 2010 budget, the debt in public hands was supposed to fall in relation to GDP from 67 percent in 2010 to less than 66 percent this year. If only. By the end of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it will reach 70 percent of GDP. These figures significantly understate the debt problem, however. The ratio that matters is debt to revenue. That number has leapt upward from 165 percent in 2008 to 262 percent this year, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund. Among developed economies, only Ireland and Spain have seen a bigger deterioration.

Not only did the initial fiscal stimulus fade after the sugar rush of 2009, but the president has done absolutely nothing to close the long-term gap between spending and revenue.

His much-vaunted health-care reform will not prevent spending on health programs growing from more than 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent in 2037. Add the projected increase in the costs of Social Security and you are looking at a total bill of 16 percent of GDP 25 years from now. That is only slightly less than the average cost of all federal programs and activities, apart from net interest payments, over the past 40 years. Under this president’s policies, the debt is on course to approach 200 percent of GDP in 2037—a mountain of debt that is bound to reduce growth even further.

Newsweek’s executive editor, Justine Rosenthal, tells the story behind Ferguson’s cover story.

And even that figure understates the real debt burden. The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues—what economist Larry Kotlikoff calls the true “fiscal gap”—is $222 trillion.

The president’s supporters will, of course, say that the poor performance of the economy can’t be blamed on him. They would rather finger his predecessor, or the economists he picked to advise him, or Wall Street, or Europe—anyone but the man in the White House.

There’s some truth in this. It was pretty hard to foresee what was going to happen to the economy in the years after 2008. Yet surely we can legitimately blame the president for the political mistakes of the past four years. After all, it’s the president’s job to run the executive branch effectively—to lead the nation. And here is where his failure has been greatest.

On paper it looked like an economics dream team: Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and Austan Goolsbee, not to mention Peter Orszag, Tim Geithner, and Paul Volcker. The inside story, however, is that the president was wholly unable to manage the mighty brains—and egos—he had assembled to advise him.

According to Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men, Summers told Orszag over dinner in May 2009: “You know, Peter, we’re really home alone ... I mean it. We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes [of indecisiveness on key economic issues].” On issue after issue, according to Suskind, Summers overruled the president. “You can’t just march in and make that argument and then have him make a decision,” Summers told Orszag, “because he doesn’t know what he’s deciding.” (I have heard similar things said off the record by key participants in the president’s interminable “seminar” on Afghanistan policy.)

This problem extended beyond the White House. After the imperial presidency of the Bush era, there was something more like parliamentary government in the first two years of Obama’s administration. The president proposed; Congress disposed. It was Nancy Pelosi and her cohorts who wrote the stimulus bill and made sure it was stuffed full of political pork. And it was the Democrats in Congress—led by Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank—who devised the 2,319-page Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank, for short), a near-perfect example of excessive complexity in regulation. The act requires that regulators create 243 rules, conduct 67 studies, and issue 22 periodic reports. It eliminates one regulator and creates two new ones.

It is five years since the financial crisis began, but the central problems—excessive financial concentration and excessive financial leverage—have not been addressed.

Today a mere 10 too-big-to-fail financial institutions are responsible for three quarters of total financial assets under management in the United States. Yet the country’s largest banks are at least $50 billion short of meeting new capital requirements under the new “Basel III” accords governing bank capital adequacy.
 And then there was health care. No one seriously doubts that the U.S. system needed to be reformed. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 did nothing to address the core defects of the system: the long-run explosion of Medicare costs as the baby boomers retire, the “fee for service” model that drives health-care inflation, the link from employment to insurance that explains why so many Americans lack coverage, and the excessive costs of the liability insurance that our doctors need to protect them from our lawyers.

Ironically, the core Obamacare concept of the “individual mandate” (requiring all Americans to buy insurance or face a fine) was something the president himself had opposed when vying with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. A much more accurate term would be “Pelosicare,” since it was she who really forced the bill through Congress.

Pelosicare was not only a political disaster. Polls consistently showed that only a minority of the public liked the ACA, and it was the main reason why Republicans regained control of the House in 2010. It was also another fiscal snafu. The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.

Related

• Paul Krugman's Rebuttal—and Ferguson's Response

The president just kept ducking the fiscal issue. Having set up a bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, headed by retired Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles, Obama effectively sidelined its recommendations of approximately $3 trillion in cuts and $1 trillion in added revenues over the coming decade. As a result there was no “grand bargain” with the House Republicans—which means that, barring some miracle, the country will hit a fiscal cliff on Jan. 1 as the Bush tax cuts expire and the first of $1.2 trillion of automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are imposed. The CBO estimates the net effect could be a 4 percent reduction in output.

The failures of leadership on economic and fiscal policy over the past four years have had geopolitical consequences. The World Bank expects the U.S. to grow by just 2 percent in 2012. China will grow four times faster than that; India three times faster. By 2017, the International Monetary Fund predicts, the GDP of China will overtake that of the United States.

Meanwhile, the fiscal train wreck has already initiated a process of steep cuts in the defense budget, at a time when it is very far from clear that the world has become a safer place—least of all in the Middle East.

For me the president’s greatest failure has been not to think through the implications of these challenges to American power. Far from developing a coherent strategy, he believed—perhaps encouraged by the premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize—that all he needed to do was to make touchy-feely speeches around the world explaining to foreigners that he was not George W. Bush.

In Tokyo in November 2009, the president gave his boilerplate hug-a-foreigner speech: “In an interconnected world, power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another ... The United States does not seek to contain China ... On the contrary, the rise of a strong, prosperous China can be a source of strength for the community of nations.” Yet by fall 2011, this approach had been jettisoned in favor of a “pivot” back to the Pacific, including risible deployments of troops to Australia and Singapore. From the vantage point of Beijing, neither approach had credibility.

His Cairo speech of June 4, 2009, was an especially clumsy bid to ingratiate himself on what proved to be the eve of a regional revolution. “I’m also proud to carry with me,” he told Egyptians, “a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: Assalamu alaikum ... I’ve come here ... to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based ... upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.”

Fact Check: Has Obama Kept His Promises? 

Believing it was his role to repudiate neoconservatism, Obama completely missed the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy—precisely the wave the neocons had hoped to trigger with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. When revolution broke out—first in Iran, then in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria—the president faced stark alternatives. He could try to catch the wave by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail.

In the case of Iran he did nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations. Ditto Syria. In Libya he was cajoled into intervening. In Egypt he tried to have it both ways, exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, then drawing back and recommending an “orderly transition.” The result was a foreign-policy debacle. Not only were Egypt’s elites appalled by what seemed to them a betrayal, but the victors—the Muslim Brotherhood—had nothing to be grateful for. America’s closest Middle Eastern allies—Israel and the Saudis—looked on in amazement.

“This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,” an anonymous American official told The New York Times in February 2011. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.”

Remarkably the president polls relatively strongly on national security. Yet the public mistakes his administration’s astonishingly uninhibited use of political assassination for a coherent strategy. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, the civilian proportion of drone casualties was 16 percent last year. Ask yourself how the liberal media would have behaved if George W. Bush had used drones this way. Yet somehow it is only ever Republican secretaries of state who are accused of committing “war crimes.”

The real crime is that the assassination program destroys potentially crucial intelligence (as well as antagonizing locals) every time a drone strikes. It symbolizes the administration’s decision to abandon counterinsurgency in favor of a narrow counterterrorism. What that means in practice is the abandonment not only of Iraq but soon of Afghanistan too. Understandably, the men and women who have served there wonder what exactly their sacrifice was for, if any notion that we are nation building has been quietly dumped. Only when both countries sink back into civil war will we realize the real price of Obama’s foreign policy.

Story of Two California's

California Doesn't Exist—It's Now Two States

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Posted 08/17/2012 06:29 PM ET

Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts without crossing a state line. Consider the disconnects:

• California's combined income and sales taxes are among the nation's highest, but the state's deficit is still about $16 billion.

• It's estimated that more than 2,000 upper-income Californians are leaving per week to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet California wants to raise taxes even higher.

• Its business climate already ranks near the bottom of most surveys. Its teachers are among the highest paid on average in the nation, but its public school students consistently test near the bottom in math and science.

• Public employees enjoy some of the nation's most generous compensation, but state retirement systems are underfunded by about $300 billion.
• The state's gas taxes — at over 49 cents per gallon — are among the highest in the nation, but its once-unmatched freeways, like the 101 and 99, for long stretches have degenerated into potholed, clogged nightmares.
• The state wishes to borrow billions of dollars to develop high-speed rail, beginning with a little-traveled link between Fresno and Corcoran — a corridor already served by money-losing Amtrak. Apparently, coastal residents like the idea of European high-speed rail — as long as construction doesn't begin in their backyards.

• As gas prices soar, California chooses not to tap millions of barrels of oil and even more natural gas offshore and below ground.

•Home to bankrupt green companies like Solyndra, California has mandated a third of all energy provided by state utilities soon must come from renewable energy sources — largely wind and solar, which now provide about 11% of its electricity and almost none of its transportation fuel.

How to explain the seemingly inexplicable? There is no California. It is a misnomer. There is no such state. Instead there are two radically different cultures and landscapes with little in common, each equally dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly, together a disaster.

A postmodern coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley, where the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values are green and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to a vast impoverished interior, from the southern desert to the northern Central Valley, where life's becoming pre-modern.

Near the coast, blue-chip universities like Cal Tech, Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA in pastoral landscapes train the world's doctors, lawyers, engineers and businesspeople. In the hot interior of blue-collar Sacramento, Turlock, Fresno and Bakersfield, over half the incoming freshman in the California State University system must take remedial math and science.
I
n postmodern Palo Alto or Santa Monica, a small cottage costs more than $1 million. Two hours from the Bay Area, in pre-modern and now-bankrupt Stockton, a bungalow the same size goes for less than $100,000.

 In the interior, joblessness in many areas peaks at over 15%. The theft of copper wire is reaching epidemic proportions. Thousands of the
shrinking middle class flee the interior for the coast or nearby no-income-tax states.

To fathom the state's nearly unbelievable statistics, visit the state's hinterlands. As the state population grew by 10 million from the mid-1980s to 2005, its number of Medicaid recipients increased by 7 million. One-third of the nation's welfare recipients now reside in California.

But in the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood and the wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise.
Coastal Californians can afford to worry about the state's trivia — as their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects to save the 3-inch delta smelt and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents.

But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by coastal utopians who have little idea where the gas for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil and pasta.

On the coast, it's politically incorrect to talk of illegal immigration.

In the interior, residents see first-hand the bankrupting effects on schools, courts and health care when millions arrive illegally without English-language fluency or a high school diploma — and send back billions of dollars to Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The drive from Fresno to Palo Alto takes three hours, but you might as well be rocketing from Earth to the moon.

O IS NOT for the Middle Class

Obama's Biggest Lie: 'I'm Fighting For The Middle Class'

 Posted 08/17/2012 07:03 PM ET

Politics: The president has positioned himself as a "warrior for the middle class," fighting against a ruling class of one-percenters. But a new book says Obama is really at war with middle America.
In fact, Obama hates the American middle class and all it represents, according to "Spreading the Wealth" by Stanley Kurtz. The president is secretly scheming to destroy it where it lives: the suburbs.

Of course, we don't hear that from the campaign.

As part of his "Middle Class and the Economy" bus tour, Obama last week traveled to Iowa and visited with a middle-class family in Cedar Rapids. He sat down with the McLaughlins at their kitchen table in a one-story suburban home and exalted their "hard work" and "all the things that make up a middle-class life."

At the same time, his campaign released a TV ad championing middle-class values and casting himself as a "warrior" for the middle class.

"I believe that the way you grow the economy is from the middle out," Obama said, adding he will tax "millionaires and billionaires" to help out the struggling middle class. "I believe in fighting for the middle class."
Baloney, says Kurtz.

"Re-elect him and you'll see that he is after the pocketbooks of a whole lot more than just 1% of us," he warned in the book. "His real target is America's middle class, suburbanites in particular."

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Added Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center: "Many suburban voters now planning to support him will find their incomes and their children's schools the targets of his redistributive schemes in a second term. The 1% slogan is a sham. If your income is in the top 50%, Obama is after you."

Citing recent White House policy meetings with radical community organizers, Kurtz warns that Obama is saving his most jarring initiatives for a second term, when he no longer has to court the middle class.
They'll see "concerted moves to force regional tax-base sharing on the states," he said, "and federal pressure to equalize urban and suburban school funding."

Kurtz, an expert on Obama's community-organizing days, says the president is following the playbook of his philosophical mentor, Saul Alinsky.

The socialist Alinsky wrote in "Rules for Radicals" that the best way to revolutionize society is to convince the middle class you are on its side. That requires talking and dressing like that group of Americans while issuing bland slogans about "hope" and "change."

Mitt's Mea Culpa & O's Waterloo

Mitt’s Mea Culpa & Obama’s Waterloo

August 16, 2012 - 5:07 am - by Roger Kimball

Mitt Romney has promised that one of his first acts as president would be to dismantle ObamaCare. (“Repeal and Replace ObamaCare” is the operative slogan.) I like to think that his imperative attention to ObamaCare is something more than a deliberate policy program. In part, I suspect, it is an act of expiation, for ObamaCare is to a large extent RomneyCare — the health care reform act that Romney oversaw as governor of Massachusetts — writ large (writ very, very large).

And since RomneyCare has been around a few years longer than ObamaCare (it came online in 2006), it provides an excellent laboratory for seeing what happens to health care when the government takes over. What is happening in the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts today is what will be happening in the U.S. of A. the day after tomorrow unless something is done about this legislative monstrosity eftsoons and right speedily.

This morning, a cardiologist friend of mine sent me a note that contained a link to an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal about RomneyCare as a guide to ObamaCare. By “cardiologist” I mean “former cardiologist,” for like many doctors I know, he has left the practice of medicine in disgust — disgust over the government’s steady encroachment on his income in part, but also disgust over the way government was intruding on the doctor/patient relationship and bureaucratizing the practice of medicine, transforming doctors into wards of the state and patients into abstract consumers of scarce medical “resources” that the government was set to ration. (Why do you think that new government guidelines suggest that regular prostate tests and other screenings are unnecessary? It’s not because those tests don’t pick up pathologies: it’s because they cost money and the government wants to limit its expenditures.)
 
As I say, he is only one of many doctors I know who have left or are considering leaving the practice of medicine because of ObamaCare. Indeed, a recent study by the Doctor Patient Medical Association reports that 83 percent of doctors have considered quitting because of ObamaCare. But you don’t need me to tell you this: you probably know plenty of doctors who have left or shortly will leave their practices. And the flight of doctors is only one problem: “Even if doctors do not quit their jobs over the ruling,” a precis of the DPMA report notes, “America will face a shortage of at least 90,000 doctors by 2020. The new health care law increases demand for physicians by expanding insurance coverage. This change will exacerbate the current shortage as more Americans live past 65.”

While you’re pondering what that is going to mean for your dotage and the health care provided for your children, have a seat and prepare to get outside some of the facts purveyed by that Wall Street Journal story on “RomneyCare 2.0” from a couple weeks ago. (The full story may be available only to subscribers. What follows are highlights.)

The bottom line? “Surging costs, price controls, physican shortages” — all that and “so much else.”
The idea of RomneyCare, as with the “Affordable Care Act” (a.k.a. ObamaCare), is that it if insurance coverage were forced on everyone, costs would go down. More people, bigger pool, lower costs, right? Nope. Only lower quality of care, longer waits, more bureaucracy, and more abuse of the system.
Some stats:

– In Massachusetts, 79% of the newly insured are on public programs.
– Health costs — Medicaid, RomneyCare’s subsidies, public-employee compensation — will consume some 54% of the state budget in 2012, up from about 24% in 2001.

Let’s pause over that terrifying statistic: more than half of the state’s budget will be consumed by health care costs.
There’s more:

– Over the same period state health spending in real terms has jumped by 59%, while education has fallen 15%, police and firemen by 11% and roads and bridges by 23%.

There’s only so much dough to go around. As government-controlled medicine gobbles up more of the available resources, there is less to go around for other important services.
Yet more bad news:

– Massachusetts spends more per capita on health care than any other state and therefore more than anywhere else in the industrialized world.

Why? Because of the horrendous inefficiencies built into socialized medicine.
All this is bad for patients, i.e., you and me. But it is also bad, very bad, for doctors. Consider:

– Under the plan, all Massachusetts doctors, hospitals and other providers must register with a new state bureaucracy as a condition of licensure — that is, permission to practice. They’ll be required to track and report their financial performance, price and cost trends, state-sanctioned quality measures, market share and other metrics.

Were you thinking of setting out a shingle in Massachusetts as a GP, cardiologist, obstetrician, gastroenterologist, etc.? Bet you’ll think twice about that.
The Journal appropriately invokes Jeremy Bentham’s totalitarian idea of the all-seeing panopticon here:

– Massachusetts takes 360-degree surveillance and converts it into a panopticon prison. An 11-member board known as the Health Policy Commission will use the data to set and enforce rules to ensure that total Massachusetts health spending, public and private, grows no more than projected gross state product through 2017, and 0.5 percentage points lower thereafter.

Got that? Your doctor is actively discouraged from spending too much on you lest that extra test that might save your life adds too much red ink to the bottom line.

RomneyCare is a disaster unfolding before our eyes. I’ll leave it to others to apportion the appropriate quantum of blame to its eponymous architect or sponsor or whatever role Mitt Romney played in the creation of the misbegotten piece of legislation. We all make mistakes. The important thing is that Mitt Romney has recognized his mistake and has credibly outlined a plan to make amends by repealing and replacing ObamaCare. Meanwhile, team Obama continues to tout the most unpopular piece of legislation since Prohibition.

And people wonder why I predict Romney/Ryan will win by a landslide.