Arab 'Road to serfdom"

The Wisdom of Fouad Ajami and F.A. Hayek

Posted By Claudia Rosett On July 9, 2011 @ 9:33 pm In Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Writing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Hoover fellow Fouad Ajami has just brought us one of the wisest articles yet on the tumult in the Middle East: “The Road to Serfdom and the Arab Revolt ^[1].” As the headline suggests, Ajami starts by citing one of the great economists of the 20th century, F.A. Hayek, author of “The Road to Serfdom.” Hayek’s mighty contribution was to explain in brilliant and persuasive detail how economic and political liberty are inextricably intertwined. When the state controls economic choices, when government diktats, programs and subsidies curtail individual options and warp the information and latitude entailed in free pricing in free markets, the most profound cost — and it is vast — is a loss of the freedom necessary both to satisfy the soul and allow economies to thrive.
Ajami does an exquisite job of applying Hayek’s insights to explain the autocratic devil’s deals, wrecked economies and massive discontent in the Middle East. He writes: “The sad truth of Arab social and economic development is that the free-market reforms and economic liberalization that remade East Asia and Latin America bypassed the Arab world… True wisdom, and an end to their road to serfdom will only come when the Arab people make the connection between economic and political liberty.”

How right he is.

And reading his article, I was struck – not for the first time– by how far from that wisdom the politics of America has strayed.

In Washington, as the haggling goes on over debts and deficits of titanic dimensions, the focus is over and over on the financial cost. That cost is horrific, to be sure. But the real cost here involves the individual freedom that has been eaten away, traded away, politicked away, in exchange for government programs promising endless relief from the risks, costs, effort and responsibilities of adult life. What ails the American economy right now is no great mystery. The past decade brought an accelerating process of smothering the markets; of government proposing to fix government-generated problems, such as the housing market debacle, or the medical cost mess, with yet more government fixes — further curtailing the freedom of Americans to adapt, create and come up with their own wealth-generating decisions about trade-offs in the use of resources.

There are plenty of Americans who know this, or who sense where the real problem lies.

Thus the Tea Party, the 2010 congressional turnover, the anger at government which I saw a few weeks ago when I dropped by a small-town Town Hall meeting. There are universal principles at work here. Fouad Ajami applies these principles beautifully in his diagnosis of the Arab Revolt. But his wisdom serves also as a reminder that Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” was a warning to the West.

It bears remembering and re-reading and reapplying, now more than ever.

BMB Loses in 2012

Why Obama Is Likely to Lose in 2012

Even a small drop in the share of black voters would wipe out his winning margin in North Carolina.

By KARL ROVE

President Barack Obama is likely to be defeated in 2012. The reason is that he faces four serious threats. The economy is very weak and unlikely to experience a robust recovery by Election Day. Key voter groups have soured on him. He's defending unpopular policies. And he's made bad strategic decisions.

Let's start with the economy. Unemployment is at 9.1%, with almost 14 million Americans out of work. Nearly half the jobless have been without work for more than six months. Mr. Obama promised much better, declaring that his February 2009 stimulus would cause unemployment to peak at 8% by the end of summer 2009 and drop to roughly 6.8% today.

After boasting in June 2010 that "Our economy . . . is now growing at a good clip," he laughingly admitted last week, "Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected." The humor will be lost on most. In Wednesday's Bloomberg poll, Americans believe they are worse off than when Mr. Obama took office by a 44% to 34% margin.

The last president re-elected with unemployment over 7.2% was FDR in 1936. Ronald Reagan overcame 7.2% unemployment because the rate was dropping dramatically (it had been over 10%) as the economy grew very rapidly in 1983 and 1984. Today, in contrast, the Federal Reserve says growth will be less than 3% this year and less than 3.8% next year, with unemployment between 7.8% and 8.2% by Election Day.

Mr. Obama also has problems with his base. For example, Jewish voters are upset with his policy toward Israel, and left-wing bloggers at last week's NetRoots conference were angry over Mr. Obama's failure to deliver a leftist utopia. Weak Jewish support could significantly narrow Mr. Obama's margin in states like Florida, while a disappointed left could deprive him of the volunteers so critical to his success in 2008.

bamaCare, while its survey average when the bill was passed in March 2010 showed that 41% approved.

Finally, Mr. Obama has made a strategic blunder. While he needs to raise money and organize, he decided to be a candidate this year rather than president. He has thus unnecessarily abandoned one of incumbency's great strengths, which is the opportunity to govern and distance himself from partisan politics until next spring. Instead, Team Obama has attacked potential GOP opponents and slandered Republican proposals with abandon. This is not what the public is looking for from the former apostle of hope and change.
In politics, 17 months can constitute several geological ages. Political fortunes can wax and wane. And weak incumbents can defeat even weaker challengers.

At the same time, objective circumstances like an anemic economy and bad decisions not only matter; they become very nearly dispositive. Mr. Obama is now at the mercy of policies and events he has set in motion. He can't escape accountability, especially on the economy.

He's not done yet, but it will be tough to recover. More in a future column.

VDH Illegal Immigration

Is A Flood Tide Of Illegals Cracking The Melting Pot?

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Posted 07/08/2011 06:35 PM ET
 

Recently, in symbolic fashion, spectators of Mexican ancestry in Pasadena's Rose Bowl did not merely cheer on the Mexican national soccer team in a game against the U.S. national team — such nostalgia is natural and understandable for recent immigrants — but went much further and also jeered American players and, indeed, references to the United States.
Which was the home team?

Was America to be appreciated for accepting poor aliens, or resented for not granting them amnesty?
Is the idea of the United States to be conveniently booed or opportunistically thanked — depending on whether you are watching a soccer match or, for example, entering an Los Angeles hospital emergency room with a life-threatening injury?

This otherwise insignificant but Orwellian incident reminds us that illegal immigration in the 21st century is becoming an illiberal enterprise.

Consider the prevailing myth of Mexico as America's "partner." Aside from the violence and drug cartels, an alien from Mars who examined the relationship would instead characterize it as abusive. Close to a million Mexican nationals annually try to cross illegally into the United States, aided and abetted by a cash-strapped Mexico — in a fashion that the latter would never permit on its southern border with Guatemala.

Lost Majority
Indeed, if Guatemala had published an illustrated comic book instructing, in picture fashion, its presumed illiterate emigrants how to enter Mexico illegally — as Mexico actually did — the Mexican government would have been outraged. So is the surreal logic of Mexico City summed up by something like, "We value our own people so much that we will help them break laws to go elsewhere"?

In the old immigration narrative of the 1960s and 1970s, affluent, profit-minded white American employers often exploited cheap workers from Mexico. But that matrix now is often superseded. So-called whites are no longer a majority in California, where large Asian and African-American populations often object to illegal arrivals from Mexico who cut in front of the legal immigration line or tax social services and raise costs to the detriment of American citizens.

Even the notions of "white" and "Latino" are becoming problematic in today's intermarried and interracial society. Does one-quarter or one-half an ethnic ancestry make one a member of the "minority" or "majority" community — and, if so, by what logic and under which convenient conditions? For the purposes of hiring or college admission, should we apply one-drop rules from the Old Confederacy to measure our racial purity?

Poverty is no longer so clearly delineated either. In an underground economy where wages are often in cash and tax-free, and entitlements easier than ever to obtain, well over $20 billion a year in remittances are sent southward to Mexico alone, maybe double that sum to Latin America as a whole.

Something here once again has proven illiberal: Does a liberal-sounding but exploitive Mexican government cynically encourage its expatriates to scrimp and save in America only to send huge sums of money back home to help poor relatives, so that Mexico City might not?

In turn, do an increasing number of illegal aliens count on help from the American taxpayer for food, housing, legal and education subsidies in order to free up $20 billion to send home?

Sanctuary Cities
The paradoxes and confusion never end these days. Do today's immigration activists work to grant amnesty on the basis of legal philosophy and principled support for open borders, or just because of shared ethnic identity?

If there were now 11 million East Africans in America illegally, would today's Hispanic immigration lobbyists seek amnesty, bilingual services in Swahili, and yet more illegal immigration from Kenya and Uganda? Would they ever seek racially blind legal immigration into the U.S., based on education and skills rather than point of origin?

The yearly arrival of hundreds of thousands from Latin America, mostly without English-language skills, a high-school diploma and legality, has also challenged old ideas of everything from the assessment of U.S. poverty rates to affirmative action.

Once an impoverished resident of Oaxaca crosses the border, does his lack of education and his modest income immediately help cement the charge that the American Latino population has not achieved economic parity?

Or in the first nanosecond after illegally crossing the border, does a Mexican national or his family in theory become eligible for affirmative action, on the basis of past historical underrepresentation or present-day discrimination or poor treatment in Mexico — in a way not extended to the Arab-American or Punjabi-American citizen?
Why does the present administration oppose new anti-illegal immigration laws in Arizona and Georgia that are designed to enhance existing federal law — but not so-called "sanctuary city" statutes that in some municipalities deliberately contravene federal immigration law?

The old liberal ideal of a racially blind, melting-pot society where the law is applied equally across the board has descended into the new, postmodern practice of enforcing many laws only selectively — and based entirely on politics, matters of race, ethnic chauvinism and national origin.

In sum, yesterday's immigration liberals have become today's illiberals.

Incandesant Bulb vs CFL

Let There Be Lights

Posted 07/08/2011 07:02 PM ET
 

Energy: The ban on incandescent light bulbs sums up everything that's wrong with intrusive, nanny-state government. It's expensive, dangerous and, perhaps worst of all, won't work as promised. Congress should repeal it.
President Bush, perhaps preoccupied by the relentless attacks on him by the so-called "progressive" left, Al Gore-niks and Democrats in Congress, signed the light bulb ban into law in 2007.
As the law stands, the incandescent light, the greatest invention by America's greatest inventor, Thomas Edison, will disappear at the end of this year. It is being replaced with an unproven substitute — the compact fluorescent light, or CFL — that is both politically foolish and bad science.

Proponents claim CFLs would provide lots of healthy light but use as much as 30% less energy. Not true.
Since GE's closure of its last U.S. bulb plant in 2010, the new lights have been made in dirty factories in China and India and are shipped 8,000 miles in large container ships and then on U.S. trains and trucks.

Net energy gain: zero. Maybe even negative.

CFL advocates promised big long-term savings from using energy-efficient CFL bulbs. But because CFL bulbs cost as much as 20 times more than the reliable old incandescent bulbs, consumers will pay through the nose for pretending to be green.
As anyone who's replaced a regular bulb with a CFL can tell you, the quality of the light isn't the same. An incandescent bulb casts over objects a warm, yellow hue that's easy on the eye. CFLs have a sharp, cold, bluish tint that some people find nauseating — literally.

 

As the Edison Tech Center notes: "The color rendering index (CRI) of incandescents and halogens is 100, while most CFLs are around 82." So CFLs make it harder to see both colors and objects than regular bulbs.

As for safety and disposal, the CFLs are downright dangerous. They contain toxins such as mercury, arsenic, lead and cyanide. You can't just throw them out — they have to be recycled in a way that's expensive.

Indeed, you'd need a full page to list all the drawbacks of CFLs. They're a bad product, one foisted on Americans by a government eager to control all our lives in the name of creating a glorious green future utopia.

Congress will vote Monday to repeal the ban on the incandescent bulb. It should be a slam-dunk. Those in Congress who can't muster the brains or courage to end this foolish, costly and dangerous ban don't deserve to be in office.

Russian Pres. Endorses Obama in 2012

Perspectives Of A Russian Immigrant (No. 17)

By SVETLANA KUNIN
Posted 07/08/2011 06:09 PM ET
 

'I can tell you directly," Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in a June 19 interview with the Financial Times, "I would like Barack Obama to be re-elected president of the United States maybe more than someone else. ... If another person becomes U.S. president, then he may have another course."

---

IBD Exclusive Series:
Perspectives of a Russian Immigrant

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A month earlier, Lech Walesa, former leader of Poland's Solidarity union, declined an invitation to meet with America's president. "It is tough to tell journalists what you would want to tell the president of a superpower," Walesa told Poland's public broadcaster, TVP. "But this time I will not tell him, I will not meet him, the meeting does not suit me."

Obama is the product of teachings that both Medvedev and Walesa know well. To anyone who has lived in a socialist country, the class-warfare theory in Obama's rhetoric sounds all too familiar.
Medvedev realizes that with the Obama administration, Russia has a good chance to return to its lost status of powerful and feared nation, while the U.S. will continue to slide in a weak and hopeless direction.
From 1919 to 1991, the Soviets provided monetary support to help leaders of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and other Soviet sympathizers spread socialist ideals and anti-American propaganda.

In 1993, after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., experts from the Library of Congress traveled to Moscow to review previously secret archives of the CPUSA, sent to the Soviet Union for safekeeping by party leaders. The records revealed an irrefutable link between Soviet intelligence and the CPUSA.

On Dec. 2, 1939, Jay Lovestone, a founder of the CPUSA who had broken with the Stalin regime, testified before the House Special Committee about communist activities in the U.S.: "You cannot fight Stalinism in this country, or elsewhere, by repression, by outlawing legislation, by declaring it a crime to be a member of it. When you do that, you supply them the most powerful sentiment — blood of martyrdom.
"Secondly, I think their ideas ought to be subjected to maximum sunlight. They represent a special type of character, and I am convinced, in the light of their own traditions and the light and the character of the labor movement, that if their ideas are subjected to the opening, scorching sunlight and sunshine, that they cannot flourish."

Today in the U.S., Lovestone's advice is forgotten. The investment by the old Soviet commissars, from Lenin and Stalin to Khrushchev and Brezhnev, in the socialist and anti-American propaganda inside the U.S. has paid off.
Proponents of a big and powerful government that regulates the lives of others are reminiscent of the Japanese soldiers who continued to fight years after their country surrendered to end World War II in 1945.

American liberals and progressives are oblivious to the fact that socialized economies either collapse (U.S.S.R.), go bankrupt (Europe) or keep people locked in poverty (Cuba, North Korea, African nations).
The so-called American elite, supporters of the Obama administration, have much in common with the Soviet "nomenclatura" — those within the U.S.S.R. and other Eastern European countries who held key administrative positions and regulated all aspects of people's lives but were themselves excluded from the rules.

Last January, on the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birthday, a statue was unveiled in Budapest by grateful Hungarians who honored his leadership in helping end communism.
And on July 1, Reagan was presented posthumously with the highest Czech state decoration, the Order of the White Lion, for his contribution to communism's demise in Central and Eastern Europe.

America's real elite are people who appreciate the uniqueness of a country where government's power is limited by its founding laws, and achievements are not limited by the destructive consequences of the socialist agenda.

Barack Obama is bringing to America what people in former socialist countries experienced and rejected.

Obama is reversing everything good about the U.S. — opportunities and prosperity inside and alliances with democracies outside.

That is why Lech Walesa, the legendary Polish anti-communist, declined to meet with Obama, and why Russia's Dmitry Medvedev is hoping for his re-election.

• Kunin lived in the Soviet Union until 1980, working as a civil engineer. She is now a retired software developer living in Connecticut. The other 16 articles she has written for IBD are available in the Special Series section of IBDeditorials.com.

© 2011 Investor's Business Daily, Inc. All rights reserved. Investor's Business Daily, IBD and CAN SLIM and their corresponding logos are registered

Eat the Rich - Iowahawk (Tax the Rich)

 

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/eat-the-rich.html

 

 

March 2011

Feed Your Family on $10 Billion a Day

Seems like these days I hear a lot of whiney whiners whining about "out of control government spending" and "insane deficits" and such, trying to make hay out of a bunch of pointy-head boring finance hooey. Sure, $3.7 trillion  of spending sounds like a big number. "Oh, boo-hoo, how are we going to get $3.7 trillion dollars? We're broke, boo-hoo-hoo," whine the whiners.  What these skinflint crybabies fail to realize is that $3.7 trillion is for an entire year - which translates into only a measly $10 billion per day!

Mister, I call that a bargain. Especially since it pays for all of us - you and me, the whole American family. Like all families, we Americas have to pay for things - health, food, safety, uncle Dave America with his drinking problem. And when little Billy America wants that new quad runner they promised, do Mom and Dad America deny him? No, they get a second job at Circle K, because they know little Billy might have one of his episodes and burn down the house.

So let's all sit down together as an American family with a calendar and make a yearly budget. First, let's lock in the $3.7 trillion of critical family spending priorities; now let's get to work on collecting the pay-as-we-go $10 billion daily cash flow we need.

12:01 AM, January 1
Let's start the year out right by going after some evil corporations and their obscene profits. And who is more evil than those twin spawns of Lucifer himself, Exxon Mobil and Walmart? Together these two largest American industrial behemoths raked in, between them, $34 billion in 2010 global profits. Let's teach 'em both a lesson and confiscate it for the public good. This will get us through...

9:52 AM January 4
Okay, maybe I underestimated our take. But we shouldn't let Exxon and Walmart distract us from all those other corporate profiteers out there worth shaking down. In fact, why don't we grab every cent of 2010 profit made by the other 498 members of the Fortune 500? That will net us another, let's see, $357 billion! Enough to get us to...

2:00 AM February 9
So we're running out of corporate cash, but look - it's Super Bowl time! As we all know, the game has become a crass disgusting festival of commercialism. So let's take all the TV ad money spent on stupid Super Bowl ads, and apply that to government needs. That would be $250 million, enough to fund us for, let's see... 36 minutes. The half time show, at least. But why stop there? Let's take every cent of ad money spent on all 45 Super Bowls, a cool $5 billion, which would cover us until...

2:00 PM February 9
Speaking of sports, why should the players be immune to our pressing public needs? Lord knows professional athletes make obscene salaries for playing a dumb game. So let's take the combined salaries of all players in the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NHL. Hey, they've got endorsement deals, they'll hardly miss it. Throw in the total winnings of everybody on the PGA tour and NASCAR, and we get $9.4 billion, enough to get us through until...

1:00 PM February 10
Okay, it's time to stop messing around. Athletes aren't the only ones greedily raking it in. What about America's rich - those fancy pants fat cats living the high life in the above-$250,000 income bracket? According to IRS statistics, these 1.93% of US households are hogging 25% of US income. And why do they need it? For crying out loud, they probably stole it anyway. I say let's take 100% of every penny they make above $250,000. They can use the rest to pay their state and local taxes. Now we're talking big bucks, brother. How much? Let's see...

A: Number of US households: 116,000,000
B: Average US household income: $68,000 (median = $52,000)
C: Total US household income (A * B): $7.89 trillion
D: Percent of households above $250k income: 1.93%
E: Number of households above $250k income (A*D): 2,238,800
F: Percent of national income earned by households making $250k or more = 25%
G: Total income of households making $250k or more (C*F): $1.97 trillion
H: Total income of households in excess of $250k (G - E*$250,000) = $1.412 trillion

Alright! Take that, fat cats! Our $1.412 trillion windfall has us covered for the next 141 days, or until...

6:00 PM July 2
Well, I guess maybe there are a few items we can cut from the budget. Those quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. Why don't we end all funding for those wars, and bring our troops home to march in the  Fourth of July parade? That would save us $105 billion Afghanistan and $159 billion in Iraq, a total of $264 billion - enough savings to cover us until...

4:00 AM July 29
Summer blockbuster season! And of course the biggest blockbuster of all time was Star Wars. To punish George Lucas for those stupid sequels, let's confiscate every penny of revenue generated by the Star Wars franchise since 1977 - movies, TV rights, books, toys, action figures, everything - which nets us $25 billion. Enough to keep the lights on until...

4:00 PM August 1
Well, there's plenty more money in Hollywood to go after. So, for the national good, let's evict everyone in Beverly Hills and sell their homes at current market value. 15,000 homes at $2 million per gets us another $30 billion, paying the bills through...

4:00 PM August 4
The kids will be going back to school soon, so we're gonna have to bring out the big guns and really go after those moneybag plutocrats like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Between 'em, those two bastards have amassed a combined fortune of $100 billion. What kind of jerk needs that kind of money? The worst thing is they're shielding it from the public treasury using the oldest trick in the billionaire playbook - by continuing to live. Once they kick the bucket, and after we close the estate tax loopholes, the American public will get the 50% of their ill-gotten loot we so richly deserve. So let's say we arrange a couple of unfortunate "accidents" for Mssrs. Gates and Buffett. Now we've got another $50 billion for the US coffers, enough to get us to...

4:00 PM August 9
Aw, screw it. There are plenty more American billionaires to go after - 398 more to be precise, according to the latest Forbes 400, with a combined total net worth of $1.29 trillion. 398 more "accidents," 398 more estates taxed at 50%, and we've got another $650 billion to tide us through...

4:00 PM October 13
Crap. Okay, let's just kill all the billionaires and take all their money. Add in another 100 or so of the almost-billionaires, and that buys us an additional 73 days until...

4:00 PM December 25
Merry Christmas! Just one more week to go. In the spirit of the season, let's give the surviving conservative wingnuts a few of the budget cuts they've been bitching for, like getting rid of foreign aid. This saves $50 billion - getting us to...

4:00 PM December 30
Only 32 hours to go! To cover the remaining $12.5 billion vital federal program tab, let's pass the cash bucket and demand every surviving American man, woman and child to kick in another another $40 bucks. I'm pretty sure they will, after all those previous "accidents."

12:00 AM January 1
Happy New Year!

See? Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Time to do it all again, except this time we'll need to come up with $11 billion per day. I'm sure we'll figure it out somehow.
Do you know where we can get some more plutocrats?

C K - Obama Demagouges

The Elmendorf Rule

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: July 8 | Updated: Thursday, July 7, 8:00 PM

Here we go again. An approaching crisis. A looming deadline. Nervous markets. And then, from the miasma of gridlock, rises our president, calling upon those unruly congressional children to quit squabbling, stop kicking the can down the road and get serious about debt.

This from the man who:

• Ignored the debt problem for two years by kicking the can to a commission.
• Promptly ignored the commission’s December 2010 report.
• Delivered a State of the Union address in January that didn’t even mention the word “debt” until 35 minutes in.
• Delivered in February a budget so embarrassing — it actually increased the deficit — that the Democratic-controlled Senate rejected it 97 to 0.
• Took a budget mulligan with his April 13 debt-plan speech. Asked in Congress how this new “budget framework” would affect the actual federal budget, Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf replied with a devastating “We don’t estimate speeches.” You can’t assign numbers to air.

President Obama assailed the lesser mortals who inhabit Congress for not having seriously dealt with a problem he had not dealt with at all, then scolded Congress for being even less responsible than his own children. They apparently get their homework done on time.
My compliments. But the Republican House did do its homework. It’s called a budget. It passed the House on April 15. The Democratic Senate has produced no budget. Not just this year, but for two years running.

As for the schoolmaster in chief, he produced two 2012 budget facsimiles: The first (February) was a farce and the second (April) was empty, dismissed by the CBO as nothing but words untethered to real numbers.

Obama has run disastrous annual deficits of around $1.5 trillion while insisting for months on a “clean” debt-ceiling increase, i.e., with no budget cuts at all. Yet suddenly he now rises to champion major long-term debt reduction, scorning any suggestions of a short-term debt-limit deal as can-kicking.

The flip-flop is transparently political. A short-term deal means another debt-ceiling fight before Election Day, a debate that would put Obama on the defensive and distract from the Mediscare campaign to which the Democrats are clinging to save them in 2012.

A clever strategy it is: Do nothing (see above); invite the Republicans to propose real debt reduction first; and when they do — voting for the Ryan budget and its now infamous and courageous Medicare reform — demagogue them to death.

And then up the ante by demanding Republican agreement to tax increases. So: First you get the GOP to seize the left’s third rail by daring to lay a finger on entitlements. Then you demand the GOP seize the right’s third rail by violating its no-tax pledge. A full-spectrum electrocution. Brilliant.

And what have been Obama’s own debt-reduction ideas? In last week’s news conference, he railed against the tax break for corporate jet owners — six times.

I did the math.
If you collect that tax for the next 5,000 years — that is not a typo — it would equal the new debt Obama racked up last year alone. To put it another way, 

If we had levied this tax at the time of John the Baptist and collected it every year since — first in shekels, then in dollars — we would have 500 years to go before we could offset half of the debt added by Obama last year alone.

Obama’s other favorite debt-reduction refrain is canceling an oil-company tax break.

 Well, if you collect that oil tax and the corporate jet tax for the next 50 years — you will not yet have offset Obama’s deficit spending for February 2011.

After his Thursday meeting with bipartisan congressional leadership, Obama adopted yet another persona: Cynic in chief became compromiser in chief. Highly placed leaks are portraying him as heroically prepared to offer Social Security and Medicare cuts.

We shall see. It’s no mystery what is needed.

First, entitlement reform that changes the inflation measure, introduces means testing, then syncs the (lower) Medicare eligibility age with Social Security’s and indexes them both to longevity.

And second, real tax reform, both corporate and individual, that eliminates myriad loopholes in return for lower tax rates for everyone.

That’s real debt reduction. Yet even now, we don’t know where the president stands on any of this.

Until we do, I’ll follow the Elmendorf Rule: We don’t estimate leaks. 

Let’s see if Obama can suspend his 2012 electioneering long enough to keep the economy from going over the debt cliff.