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Time for a good look at Charles Murray’s latest effort. First a review in the Wall Street Journal.
So much for the idea that the white working class remains the guardian of core American values like religious faith, hard work and marriage. Today the denizens of upscale communities like McLean, Va., New Canaan, Conn., and Palo Alto, Calif., according to Charles Murray in “Coming Apart,” are now much more likely than their fellow citizens to embrace these core American values. In studying, as his subtitle has it, “the state of white America, 1960-2010,” Mr. Murray turns on its head the conservative belief that bicoastal elites are dissolute and ordinary Americans are virtuous.
Focusing on whites to avoid conflating race with class, Mr. Murray contends instead that a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.
He is particularly concerned with the ways in which working-class whites are losing touch with what he calls the four “founding virtues”—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion, all of which have played a vital role in the life of the republic.
Consider what has happened with marriage. …
Here’s a review from Real Clear Books.
Americans, the saying goes, don’t like to talk about class — but they certainly enjoy reading about it. They also love to see how they stack up against their peers.
One of the most notorious and snobby books on the topic, Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, capitalizes on this repressed American passion with its “Living Room Scale,” which measures social class based on your décor. A worn Oriental rug will earn you eight points; a new one (and, by extension, new money) will lower your score. A ceiling 10 feet or higher is good; the presence of Reader’s Digest, framed diplomas, or “any work of art depicting cowboys” (sorry, pardners) is not.
Charles Murray, the prominent political scientist, doesn’t shy away from awkward subjects — he’s best known for The Bell Curve, which stirred up a progressive hornet’s nest in the mid-1990s — and he tackles the charged issue of class in his new and important book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. America, Murray writes, “is coming apart at the seams — not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.” Culture, not money, divides the new upper and lower classes, which live in increasingly different worlds: one rarefied, walled-off, and at the helm of the country; the other dysfunctional, adrift, and hapless when it comes to the game of life.
Tracking white Americans to avoid blurring trends with race and ethnicity, the numbers Murray presents are startling: In the new upper class, which amounts to about 20 percent of the country, out-of-wedlock births are rare: around 6-8 percent. For the more dysfunctional working class, which accounts for around 30 percent of the country, the number is mind-boggling: 42-48 percent. The numbers also turn a few stereotypes on their heads: In the lower working class, for instance, the rate of church attendance has dropped at nearly double the rate as that of the supposedly secularized elite.
America’s working class, Coming Apart argues, has increasingly forsaken traditional values like marriage, religion, industriousness, and honesty — and, as a result, it is rotting from within. Happiness levels are down; participation in the labor force is down; television watching (an average of 35 hours a week) is up. …
WSJ Live Chat featured Mr. Murray.
Question from reader Alan: I read and reviewed your book on Amazon. Most reviewers believe your book is important because it accurately portrays the shrinking middle class. However, many disagree with your perception of the CAUSE. You seem to believe that the middle class is shrinking because of a decline in MORALITY — of middle class people being less willing to marry, go to church, and find work today than before. Most of the reviewers believe the middle class is shrinking because of ECONOMICS, because it is less easy to obtain work that pays an income that allows one to support a family. In other words, many believe that lack of MONEY, not lack of MORALITY, is what is shrinking the middle class.
Charles Murray: Actually, I don’t say the middle class is shrinking. But the economics question is the big one. Short story: working class wages didn’t rise over the last 50 years, but neither did they fall. And the bad things regarding labor force participation increased during the boom. When you talk to people in working class communities about men, the women aren’t telling you that their guys are looking desperately for work but can’t find it. An amazing number of them aren’t interested in working.
Question from reader Florida Bob: Stimulus only works if it encourages Americans to purchase-American made goods. We seem to be creating more jobs in China than America. Most of the jobs being created here are service jobs, jobs that create nothing that is trade-able for the imported manufactured goods and energy that they consume.
Charles Murray: This book isn’t about life in the Great Recession. It’s about what happened to work in the boom years of the 1980s, 1990s, and part of the 2000s when jobs were plentiful, including low-skill jobs paying good wages.
Reader Doug81: Can Mr. Murray comment on how there is a cultural divide between “classes” on how we treat money? In my opinion, the people of “Belmont” take advantage of excellent mortgage offers and credit card rebates while the people of “Fishtown” pay high interest on bad loans or loan-like transactions.
Clarification from Ryan Sager: Fishtown – for those who haven’t read the excerpt – is a real neighborhood in Philadelphia that Mr. Murray uses as a stand-in for the white working class.
Charles Murray: We’re talking about IQ more than culture. It helps to be living in a neighborhood where smart actions about money are common, but the main breakdown is IQ. Lots of smart people in Fishtown do the right thing, but (politically incorrect warning) there are more smart people in Belmont than in Fishtown.
Reader Oscar Looez-Guerra: Are we encouraging a divided society by delaying the assimilation of immigrants?
Charles Murray: Absolutely. But I have to say that all the immigrants I run across, and there are lots in my region, seem to act more like real Americans than a lot of the people already here.
Reader Randall Ward: What do you believe has been the root cause of the degeneration of the people on the bottom?
Charles Murray: The 60s have a heavy load of blame to bear, both in the political reforms of that era and the films/television cultural shifts. But that doesn’t tell us much about where we go from here. …
Just before we get to the humor section, we have a story from the Sun-Times where the joke of a Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, gets dishonorable mention. You see, over the past five years Chicago Public Schools has passed out a quarter of a billion dollars of unused vacation and sick pay to retirees. Duncan got $50,000.
The cash-strapped Chicago Public Schools system spends tens of millions of dollars annually on a perk that few other employers offer: cash to departing employees for unused time off.
Since 2006, the district paid a total $265 million to employees for unused sick and vacation days, according to an analysis of payroll and benefit data obtained by the Better Government Association under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.
By far the largest share — $227 million — went to longtime employees for sick days accumulated over two or three decades.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently ordered a halt on paying unused sick time to non-union employees at City Colleges of Chicago after the BGA found at least $3 million in such payouts to former employees over the last decade. Among the biggest beneficiaries was former Chancellor Wayne Watson, who has received $300,000 of a promised $500,000 payout for 500 unused sick days.
“This policy is unacceptable to the mayor and not consistent with the city’s sick day policies for its own employees,” said Jennifer Hoyle, a spokeswoman for Emanuel. The mayor also directed other city agencies, including CPS, to halt such payments, review their policies and devise plans to end the practice permanently.
At CPS, the top payouts went to top brass, including more than 300 longtime principals and administrators, who received more than $100,000 during the six-year period from 2006 to 2011, the BGA found. The highest payment topped $250,000.
Beneficiaries included former schools CEO Arne Duncan, now U.S. Secretary of Education, who received $50,297 for unused vacation time when he left in January 2009, according to the data. Duncan now believes the policy should be re-evaluated. …
Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.
Fallon: Starbucks closes its very first East Coast store after 19 years. It just couldn’t keep up with its main competition, a Starbucks across the street.
Conan: Now word that the government may be required to release the Osama bin Laden killing video. Obama says this is, “Unhelpful, inflammatory and please release it two days before the election?”
Leno: President Obama is working on a new tourism plan to make it easier for foreigners to get into the U.S. We have that already. It’s called Mexico.
Letterman: Newt Gingrich wants to build a colony on the Moon. OK, you say, but why? Well, he wants to be the first American to get divorced on the Moon.
Letterman: Wow, Super Bowl. Let’s break it down: $184 million for potato chips, $250 million for pretzels, $500 million for beer, $4 for celery.
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Bill Kristol says it is not just about the economy.
… focusing a campaign only on the economy is risky. The economy is unpredictable, and may end up doing well enough in 2012 that it doesn’t automatically help the Republicans—even if the nominee is someone who can boast of his success in the private sector and knowledge of how business works. …
… Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen how Obama-care threatens freedom of religion (see Jonathan V. Last’s piece in this issue). We’ve been reminded of Eric Holder’s pathetic and ideological mismanagement of the Department of Justice (see Mark Hemingway’s editorial). We’ve seen several instances of this president’s weakness in foreign policy (see Elliott Abrams’s editorial). We’ve had reminders from the Congressional Budget Office of the looming entitlement and budget disaster and of the Obama administration’s gross irresponsibility on that front.
So there’s plenty besides the economy for the GOP to call attention to, to shout about, to use to illustrate the short and long-term dangers of Obama administration policies. A successful Republican presidential candidate will have to be about far more than the economy, narrowly understood, in order to win the election and to lay the groundwork for successful governance. Ronald Reagan famously asked at the end of the 1980 campaign whether we were better off than we had been four years before. But he had spent his whole campaign laying the predicate for that question by explaining why the Carter administration’s foreign and domestic policies had failed, not just economically but socially, and not just at home but in the world. He was also able to explain why liberal policies would continue us on a downward path. Reagan never left any doubt that the fundamental problem wasn’t just a few quarters of subpar economic performance. The problem was the arrogant destructiveness and wrongheaded fecklessness of modern liberalism. It still is.
Mark Steyn says Komen didn’t have it coming.
As Sen. Obama said during the 2008 campaign, words matter. Modern “liberalism” is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of “tolerance” are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to “celebrate diversity” coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity. Thus, the Obama administration’s insistence that Catholic institutions must be compelled to provide free contraception, sterilization and abortifacients. This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity.
The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: In Sweden, expressing a moral objection to homosexuality is illegal, even on religious grounds, even in church, and a pastor minded to cite the more robust verses of Leviticus would risk four years in jail. In Canada, the courts rule that Catholic schools must allow gay students to take their same-sex dates to the prom. The secular state’s Bureau of Compliance is merciless to apostates to a degree even your fire-breathing imams might marvel at.
Consider the current travails of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. This is the group responsible for introducing the pink “awareness-raising” ribbon for breast cancer – as emblematic a symbol of America’s descent into postmodernism as anything. It has spawned a thousand other colored “awareness-raising” ribbons: my current favorite is the periwinkle ribbon for acid reflux. We have had phenomenal breakthroughs in hues of awareness-raising ribbons, and for this the Susan G. Komen Foundation deserves due credit.
Until the other day, Komen were also generous patrons of Planned Parenthood, the “women’s health” organization. The Foundation then decided it preferred to focus on organizations that are “providing the lifesaving mammogram.” Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms, despite its president, Cecile Richards, testifying to the contrary before Congress last year. Rather, Planned Parenthood provides abortions; it’s the biggest abortion provider in the United States. For the breast cancer bigwigs to wish to target their grants more relevantly is surely understandable.
But not if you’re a liberal enforcer. Sen. Barbara Boxer, with characteristic understatement, compared the Komen Foundation’s Nancy Brinker to Joe McCarthy: …
Jennifer Rubin has Komen comments too.
… You might agree or not but the presumptuousness of liberal members of Congress who believe it is within their purview to bully private charities suggests that the left really does not understand the important distinction between public policy and private, voluntary civil institutions. (See my colleague Greg Sargent’s piece on the letter that two dozen members sent to the Komen Foundation.) …
… Pardon me, but this is nuts. Planned Parenthood can raise its own money (which it did in spades in the wake of the flap). Those who want to give to a breast cancer charity can donate with the peace of mind that their money will be used to fight breast cancer. (Donors did so generously as a result of the controversy.) Now Planned Parenthood’s bosses have every right under current law to do what they do and raise money to fund their organization. But shame on them for intimidating other groups that might contemplate the same move as the Susan G. Komen Foundation made.
And to members of Congress, let me say: Butt out. Don’t you have enough to handle not doing your own jobs without hectoring charities to do your bidding?
Ross Douthat wonders why the media is so blind about abortion.
IN the most recent Gallup poll on abortion, as many Americans described themselves as pro-life as called themselves pro-choice. A combined 58 percent of Americans stated that abortion should either be “illegal in all circumstances” or “legal in only a few circumstances.” These results do not vary appreciably by gender: in the first Gallup poll to show a slight pro-life majority, conducted in May 2009, half of American women described themselves as pro-life.
But if you’ve followed the media frenzy surrounding the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation’s decision — which it backpedaled from, with an apology, after a wave of frankly brutal coverage — to discontinue about $700,000 in funding for Planned Parenthood, you would think all these millions of anti-abortion Americans simply do not exist.
From the nightly news shows to print and online media, the coverage’s tone alternated between wonder and outrage — wonder that anyone could possibly find Planned Parenthood even remotely controversial and outrage that the Komen foundation had “politicized” the cause of women’s health.
Steven Malanga writes in the Journal about the court that has broken New Jersey.
When he decided against running for president last fall, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he had lots more to do to fix his “broken” state. Certainly true on spending and taxes, where Mr. Christie has made significant progress. But there’s another issue he’s only begun to take on: the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Last month Mr. Christie nominated two new members to the court, easily one of the most activist in the nation. His appointments could reshape the seven-member panel, which over the past half-century has transformed the Garden State, seizing control of school funding and hijacking the zoning powers of towns and cities, among other moves.
“I don’t think the supreme court has any business being involved in setting the budget of the state government,” the governor complained last year. Yet it is, extensively.
New Jersey’s supreme court is the product of the state’s 1947 constitution, which jettisoned the unwieldy 16-member Court of Errors and Appeals. The new court established in its place was shaped by Arthur Vanderbilt, a former dean of New York University’s law school who served as the court’s first chief justice. Vanderbilt is best remembered for persuading President Dwight Eisenhower to appoint to the U.S. Supreme Court William Brennan, who then led that court’s liberal activist wing for more than three decades.
The New Jersey court was power-hungry from its inception, but its ambition began bearing serous fruit, especially regarding education policy, in the 1970s. …
Politico has the story of Dick Armey dispensing with Newt.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), head of FreedomWorks, said Sunday presidential candidate Newt Gingrich won’t have another comeback.
“I don’t think Newt will be able to replicate that magic moment,” Armey said, adding he believes Gingrich’s peak in South Carolina was a momentary surge and he has “played that string out.”
“I feel bad for him. I think he’s digressed; taking a second-rate campaign into a first-rate vendetta,” Armey said of Gingrich’s attacks on GOP front-runner Mitt Romney.
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Josh Kraushaar of National Journal with the first of three reports on the election. He says Obama is struggling in the battleground states.
President Obama’s reelection team has spun multiple pathways to an electoral vote majority, but a glance at his state-by-state approval ratings throughout 2011 suggests the campaign has been doing a lot of bluffing.
First, the good news for Team Obama: His political standing is in respectable shape in traditionally Democratic Midwestern battlegrounds, like Wisconsin, Michigan and the more Republican heartland state of Iowa (46 approval/46 disapproval). Obama’s numbers in Virginia are better than in other battleground states – 45 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove. And his numbers in North Carolina (44/49 approve/disapprove) and Florida (44/48 approve/disapprove) and even Georgia (45/48 approve/disapprove) aren’t good, but given his overall numbers, they are relatively decent.
The bad news: His job approval ratings in the other battleground states are solidly underwater and, in many states, worse than publicly perceived. …
Kraushaar’s second report is on Romney’s Bain record and the failure of Newt to gain traction with this line of campaigning.
President Obama’s re-election team has been focused on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital as a major part of its offensive against the former Massachusetts governor, hoping to portray him as a heartless capitalist who laid off workers while restructuring companies
Two new polls conducted over the last week — one nationally and one in Florida — raise questions on the potency of that message. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll, released today, finds that a narrow 40 percent plurality view Romney’s work “buying and restructuring companies” unfavorably, with 35 percent viewing it favorably. Among independents, it’s a near-even split: 35 percent view Romney’s work at Bain favorably, while 36 percent view it unfavorably.
In the battleground state of Florida, a Mason-Dixon poll conducted for the Tampa Times and Miami Herald, showed favorable results for Romney. Nearly half (46 percent) of Florida voters viewed Romney’s business background positively, while just 30 percent negatively. …
The Third is on the disappearance of Obama’s fundraising advantage.
Every presidential election, there’s a new development that changes the nature of campaigns that one party, often the one out of power, takes advantage of. In 2008, it was the Obama team’s impressive use of social media to connect with new young voters and expand the electorate. In 2004, it was the Bush campaign’s savvy use of micro-targeting technologies to identify narrow slices of the electorate, and get them to show up and vote Republican.
This year, it’s the Republicans’ adept and aggressive use of super PACs to even the financial playing field, blunting the often-massive money advantages that an incumbent president has at his disposal. With the emergence of American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS and Restore Our Future, a well-stocked Romney super PAC, the Obama fundraising juggernaut no longer looks so imposing. If Romney is the Republican nominee, he won’t be overwhelmed with a wave of negative advertising, and will have the resources to fight back.
Take a look at the end-of-year numbers. …
Also from National Journal, Ron Brownstein looks at the numbers for the president.
… In the 2011 numbers, the situation looks much more difficult for Obama. From 2010 to 2011, Gallup found, his average approval ratings dropped in every state except Connecticut, Maine and (oddly enough) Wyoming. As a result, to reach 270 Electoral College votes based on the 2011 numbers, he would need to win 20 states plus the District of Columbia where his approval rating stands at 44.5 percent or more. Since one of the states above that line is Georgia, which is also a stretch for Obama in practice, to reach 270 he would more likely need to carry Oregon and North Carolina, where his approval ratings stood at 44.5 percent and 43.7 percent, respectively. (It’s worth filing away that the scenario based on either year’s numbers – Virginia and North Carolina stand right at the tipping point between victory and defeat for Obama.)
In sum then, Obama in 2010 could reach an Electoral College majority by carrying states where his approval rating stood at least at 46.6 percent, something that would be difficult but hardly impossible. To reach a majority based on the 2011 results, he’d need to carry states where his approval stood at 43.7 percent or above. That’s a much more daunting prospect. …
Think the GOP is having a bad time in the selection process, Frank Fleming says look what the Dems are stuck with.
It’s a crucial election year. As another global financial crisis looms and rogue states pursue nuclear weapons, the American people are desperately looking for a strong leader to show them the way to a brighter tomorrow.
So it’s unconscionable that the Democratic primaries have yet to produce a single serious candidate for president.
This election is a great opportunity for the Democrats. After the setbacks the party has suffered, the Tea Party is finally dying down, and people are getting fed up with the Republicans in Congress. If the Democrats could come up with a strong candidate for the White House, he or she would easily win the election.
Yet, for some reason, many of the most promising Democrats chose not to run in the primaries, and those who did run are not appealing candidates. Indeed, the front-runner who has swept the early primary states despite a lack of enthusiastic support, Barack Obama, is just not a viable candidate in the general election. …
Last week Ann Coulter was touting Romneycare. David Harsanyi is not as enthused.
… No doubt, the impending presidential debate will center on the state of the economy — and general election voters are far less ideologically motivated than primary voters. Yet grander themes can move people. Obama will continue to spin tales about a nation strangled by capitalistic excess and inequity. It is an arching theme that plays on the fears of many nervous Americans and is sure to animate grass-roots supporters in urban tent environments everywhere.
Republicans, in turn, have lost a genuine opportunity to point to the purest example of Obama’s aversion to economic and individual freedom. It’s the mandate that allows Obamacare to assault religious freedom. It’s the mandate, coupled with increasing regulatory burdens, that many people fear will limit consumer choice and competition.
The entire project falls apart without the mandate.
No doubt, Mitt or Newt will continue to promise to overturn the health care reform law — and, who knows, the winner may. Or perhaps the Supreme Court will save us all by deeming the mandate unconstitutional. But to think, after all the anger and frustration caused by Obamacare — not to mention its persisting unpopularity — one of the strongest arguments against it has been dulled before the GOP presidential nominee could even make it.
Walter Russell Mead posts on the decline in global warming.
As the world suffers through a mix of weather (warm winter temperatures) in the continental US and climate (cold weather) in Alaska and Europe, some interesting new numbers are starting to trickle in.
Preliminary reports from the Energy Information Administration’s “Annual Energy Outlook” (which will be fully published in April) suggest that any carbon crisis may not be quite as imminent as thought. Not so long ago, the EIA predicted carbon emissions levels would rise by 37 percent between 2005 and 2035. The EIA — get this – now thinks that global CO2 emissions in 2025 will be 6 percent lower than they were in 2005.
Check the report for yourself, but to Via Meadia and others this looks like a serious reduction in the forecast of carbon emissions over the next couple decades. There are likely numerous reasons for the change; easier access to cleaner fuel sources like shale gas, the rising price of oil and cheapening of solar and wind are but several.
And there is one other thing that is clear: the people who put these forecasts together have no idea what they are doing. This is one of the cases in which the use of the word forecast should be banned; these are guesses, not forecasts, and it’s a big deal. …
The Economist reports on satellite info that has forced China to be more forthcoming about pollution.
“PM2.5” seems an odd and wonky term for the blogosphere to take up, but that is precisely what has happened in China in recent weeks. It refers to the smallest solid particles in the atmosphere—those less than 2.5 microns across. Such dust can get deep into people’s lungs; far deeper than that rated as PM10. Yet until recently China’s authorities have revealed measurements only for PM10. When people realised this, an online revolt broke out. Such was the public pressure that authorities caved in, and PM2.5 data are now being published for Beijing and a handful of other cities.
What of the rest of China? At the moment, only PM10 data are available. But the government’s hand may soon be forced here, too. Though pollution data are best collected near the ground, a plausible estimate may be made from the vantage-point of a satellite by measuring how much light is blocked by particles, and estimating from those particles’ chemical composition the likely distribution of their sizes. And a report prepared for The Economist by a team led by Angel Hsu of Yale University does just that, drawing on data from American satellites to map out PM2.5 pollution across the entire country. …
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Mark Steyn Alert. He will be on C-Span 2 Sunday from noon to 3 o’clock.
If you’ll forgive some end-of-week plugola, as you might have noticed from various promotional graphics around the page, I’ll be on C-Span2?s Book TV this Sunday just ahead of the Superbowl from 12 noon Eastern for a full three hours talking about my oeuvre, and taking viewers’ questions thereupon. Oeuvre-wise, I’m flattered they think mine will stretch to a full three hours, but, if it doesn’t, I’m happy to do wardrobe malfunctions by request.
Charles Krauthammer thinks getting rid of Assad in Syria is important for many reasons.
Imperial regimes can crack when they are driven out of their major foreign outposts. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not only signal the liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow. It prefigured the collapse of the Soviet Union itself just two years later.
The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria could be similarly ominous for Iran. The alliance with Syria is the centerpiece of Iran’s expanding sphere of influence, a mini-Comintern that includes such clients as Iranian-armed and -directed Hezbollah, now the dominant power in Lebanon; and Hamas, which controls Gaza and threatens to take the rest of Palestine (the West Bank) from a feeble Fatah.
Additionally, Iran exerts growing pressure on Afghanistan to the east and growing influence in Iraq to the west. Tehran has even extended its horizon to Latin America, as symbolized by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s solidarity tour through Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Cuba.
Of all these clients, Syria is the most important. It’s the only Arab state openly allied with non-Arab Iran. This is significant because the Arabs see the Persians as having had centuries-old designs to dominate the Middle East. Indeed, Iranian arms and trainers, transshipped to Hezbollah through Syria, have given the Persians their first outpost on the Mediterranean in 2,300 years. …
Ted Olson, attorney for the Koch brothers, tells what it is like to be on Obama’s enemies list.
How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president’s re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?
What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the president’s surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president’s party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly—and accurately—stated that you have no involvement?
Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an attractive political punching bag by the president’s re-election team. This is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president’s or anyone else’s office.
What Messrs. Koch do, in fact, is manage businesses that provide employment to more than 50,000 people in North America in legitimate, productive industries. They also give millions of dollars to medical researchers, hospitals and cultural institutions. Their biggest offense, apparently, is that they also contribute generously to nonprofit organizations that promote personal liberty and free enterprise, and some of those organizations oppose policies advocated by the president.
Richard Nixon maintained an”enemies list” that singled out private citizens for investigation and abuse by agencies of government, including the Internal Revenue Service. …
Charles Murray has written a new book. David Brooks gushed about a few days ago. Of course, the Brooks solution involves government coercion.
… Today, Murray demonstrates, there is an archipelago of affluent enclaves clustered around the coastal cities, Chicago, Dallas and so on. If you’re born into one of them, you will probably go to college with people from one of the enclaves; you’ll marry someone from one of the enclaves; you’ll go off and live in one of the enclaves.
Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.
Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.
People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.
Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. …
Pickerhead got off his own rant about Omaha Scrooge in the August 21, 2011 Pickings. Now, the Dark Side of Saint Warren comes from Charles Gasparino.
… in all my years in journalism, I’ve never seen a business figure get such a free pass from the media even when his public pronouncements are oozing with hypocrisy, let alone when he steps over the line into sleaze — as Buffett has done on more than one occasion.
But then “St. Warren” wears his liberal politics on his sleeve: He wholeheartedly backed Obama back in 2008, and now is lending his name (and his secretary’s) to Obama’s cockamamie tax scheme, a k a the Buffett Rule — which would barely make a dent in the federal deficit, but would certainly squeeze small-business owners and other job-creators.
Now, Buffett’s hypocrisy on taxes is well known to readers of these pages: He decries the fact that rich investors like him get taxed mainly at the lower capital-gains rate of 15 percent. Yet he made his vast fortune enjoying that favorable treatment, and largely kept his mouth shut until now, as he nears the end of his long career. Plus, he plans to use a charitable trust to further shield much of his income from taxes.
Much less has been said about Buffett’s unsaintly investment record. I won’t bore you with every gory detail of his questionable associations, which include no-lose investments in Goldman Sachs and General Electric just before the companies received massive federal aid during the financial crisis.
But other items really take the shine off St. Warren’s halo — like his insistence that the ratings agencies didn’t play a key role in setting up the 2008 financial meltdown.
In fact, the ratings biz was rife with conflicts of interest, since the agencies were paid by the same entities they were rating. Most people figure that’s why these “watchdogs” ignored major signs of trouble in the housing markets as they slapped all those Triple-A ratings on the toxic housing-related debt that was at the heart of the financial crisis.
But Buffett has publicly defended the rating agencies as bit players in the debacle, caught up in the mania much like nearly everyone else. His obvious motive: He held a major stake in rating agency Moody’s Investors Service, so Berkshire got a nice cut out of all those fees that Moody’s “earned” as it fueled the crisis.
It’s hard to believe a conservative businessman would be able to get away with that hypocrisy — not to mention the association with a business that helped do so much damage to the US economy. …
Caroline Baum tells government; Just fix the darn potholes, we’ll do the rest.
… I’m all for changing the tax code — to something we can comply with via a postcard-size return. Creating new exemptions or tax breaks to induce companies to do what the government wants them to do isn’t the answer.
The tax code shouldn’t favor manufacturers over service providers; farmers over miners; exporters over importers; borrowers over savers. As part of the oath of office, presidents should be required to commit to the following:
The tax code should be designed to raise the revenue the government needs to perform its legitimate functions (Obama and Ron Paul may disagree on what constitutes “legitimate”), not to produce socially desirable behavior (buy homes, have children).
It should promote economic growth, not punish success.
It should be constant, not an ever-changing vehicle for managing the business cycle.
When it comes to the government’s involvement in the private sector, we need more Darwin (natural selection) and less Lenin (central control). Everyone knows the government can’t pick winners and losers. …
Four charts from Kenneth Green at American.com show the slowdown of Gulf oil permits the administration denies.
Thanks to the people at the New Orleans Regional Economic Alliance, one can cut through all the claims about how oil drilling in the United States is back to normal since the Gulf oil spill.
The figures below show the trends in both shallow- and deep-water drilling permit approvals in the gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As can be seen, the Obama administration did not let that crisis go to waste, it used it to implement another plank in its anti-fossil fuel agenda. …
… Regardless of the Obama administration’s claims that they aren’t hindering oil exploration and development in the Gulf, a few minutes of looking at their own data tells the real story: they’re both cutting it down, and stretching it out.
Imagine; last year you’re playing in a college bowl game, and one year later – the Super Bowl. WSJ has a story on the Giants’ 12 rookies on the field today.
For almost two weeks now, Tyler Sash has tried to stay out of David Diehl’s way. Because every time Diehl, the veteran offensive lineman, catches sight of Sash, the rookie safety, he shakes his head, frowns and mutters something:
“You lucky rookies.”
“Your first year in, and you’re in the Super Bowl?”
“How is this fair?”
So much for no crying in football.
“No, I get why he says all that,” Sash said. “Kind of.”
And there’s the beauty to the Giants’ enormous rookie class: They only kind of get this. Here on Sunday, against the Patriots, they will be a part of Super Bowl XVI, the greatest spectacle of sport in America. They will compete for the Lombardi Trophy and immortality—and not one of the Giants’ 12 first-year players is fully registering what that means. According to Stats LLC, only six Super Bowl teams have had more first-year players, including the 2007 Giants. …
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Spengler says the president’s Egypt policies have placed him in foreign policy hell.
It won’t decide the 2012 election, but the meltdown of Barack Obama’s Islamophile foreign policy has to hurt. Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons humiliates a president so committed to dialogue with the evil lunatics in Tehran that he refused to support a mass outpouring of democracy demonstrators during the summer of 2009. Obama’s closest foreign policy friendship is with the Islamist president of Turkey, who has jailed more journalists than China and steered his country towards imminent economic disaster. Tayyip Erdogan may not be a terrorist, as Rick Perry said in last week’s debate, but he backs them, including Hamas. …
… To adapt Freud, Egypt has gone from ordinary unhappiness to hysterical misery, thanks in large measure to the Obama administration’s decision to pull the rug out from under Mubarak. It would have happened eventually, to be sure, but the point is that it happened on Obama’s watch, as the result of Obama’s actions.
Since he, his ideas, and his allies would make military units weaker and weaker, there is something unseemly about Obama’s use of the SEALs as campaign props. WSJ OpEd tells the story.
America’s premier Special Operations force is once again in the headlines after a team of Navy SEALs rescued two hostages from captivity in Somalia last week. Elite U.S. forces have carried out such operations periodically over the past decade, always with skill and bravery. The difference in recent months is that the details of their work haven’t remained secret. On the contrary, government officials have revealed them for political gain—endangering our forces in the process.
The floodgates opened after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last May, and the Obama administration’s lack of discretion was on display again at last week’s State of the Union address. As President Obama entered the House chamber, in full view of the cameras, he pointed to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and exclaimed: “Good job tonight, good job tonight.” Clearly something had happened that he wanted the world to know about.
After delivering his speech, which included multiple references to the bin Laden raid, the president again thanked Mr. Panetta. “That was a good thing tonight,” he said as if to ensure that the viewing public, if they missed it initially, would get it a second time around.
Sure enough, shortly thereafter, the White House announced the successful rescue of the hostages in Somalia by U.S. Special Operations forces. …
Right wing enforcer Ann Coulter touts RomneyCare.
If only the Democrats had decided to socialize the food industry or housing, Romneycare would probably still be viewed as a massive triumph for conservative free-market principles — as it was at the time.
It’s not as if we had a beautifully functioning free market in health care until Gov. Mitt Romney came along and wrecked it by requiring that Massachusetts residents purchase their own health insurance. In 2007, when Romneycare became law, the federal government alone was already picking up the tab for 45.4 percent of all health care expenditures in the country.
Until Obamacare, mandatory private health insurance was considered the free-market alternative to the Democrats’ piecemeal socialization of the entire medical industry.
In November 2004, for example, libertarian Ronald Bailey praised mandated private health insurance in Reason magazine, saying that it “could preserve and extend the advantages of a free market with a minimal amount of coercion.”
A leading conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, helped design Romneycare, and its health care analyst, Bob Moffit, flew to Boston for the bill signing.
Romneycare was also supported by Regina Herzlinger, Harvard Business School professor and health policy analyst for the conservative Manhattan Institute. Herzlinger praised Romneycare for making consumers, not business or government, the primary purchasers of health care.
The bill passed by 154-2 in the Massachusetts House and unanimously, 37-0, in the Massachusetts Senate — including the vote of Sen. Scott Brown, who won Teddy Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate in January 2010 by pledging to be the “41st vote against Obamacare.” …
Jennifer Rubin dances a bit on Newt’s grave. We enjoyed it too.
Newt Gingrich gave his post-primary speech tonight while gracelessly declining to congratulate the man who beat him by double digits. According to the Romney campaign, Gingrich hadn’t called to congratulate the Florida winner as of 9:30 p.m. ET.
The speech was vintage Gingrich, comparing his predicament to Lincoln at Gettysburg and vowing to conduct a “people’s campaign.” He made one small run at Romney, calling him “the Massachusetts moderate,” and then wandered into a rather trite recitation of his commitment to change. He rambled a bit, getting nostalgic about his Contract with America and assuring us he’d been studying “how to do this” since 1958. (He was running for president as a child?) He is going to get rid of White House czars, move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and halt the war on religion. If there was a theme in there, it was hard to spot.
He obnoxiously ended by pledging: “My life, my fortune, my sacred honor.” But he’s not doing any of that. And it’s quite an insult to American patriots who have said that and meant it. …
Roger Simon posts on why Gingrich lost so big.
For a supposedly smart guy, Newt Gingrich made a bonehead error in Florida that not only cost him that state but almost certainly any serious chance of the Republican nomination. And in so doing, he, almost idiotically, undercut the very thing that had made his candidacy successful in the first place.
After his solid victory in South Carolina, Gingrich did not continue the obvious strategy that got him there – running against Barack Obama by presenting himself to Republican voters as the great orator and thinker who could bring down the noxious incumbent, the man who rose above internecine intra-party squabbles for the greater good of his country.
Instead, he did the exact opposite. He spent the balance of his time in Florida running against Romney when he had already beaten the former governor in South Carolina. Talk about dumb. Newt let his personal antipathy overwhelm his good sense. He played defense about the picayune and the irrelevant when he should have played offense on the philosophical and substantial.
No wonder Gingrich’s poll numbers dropped and dropped. What the Republican electorate cares about is Obama and who can beat him. Newt took his eye off the ball, wasted time and demeaned himself attacking Romney — not the least of which was an extraordinarily vicious (not to mention untrue) accusation that Romney denied kosher food to Holocaust victims. …
Jennifer Rubin also posts on the VP selection process.
If Mitt Romney goes on to win big in Tuesday’s Republican presidential primary and pile up victories in February and on Super Tuesday (March 6), the vice-presidential buzz will start in earnest. Rather than begin with names, it is more useful first to think about the considerations that go into the VP selection. Any presidential nominee is going to want someone who could assume the presidency if need be and who is trustworthy and discreet. But there are two schools of thought in vice-presidential selection.
The first is “amplification.” Bill Clinton selected Al Gore to highlight the New South, moderate-reformer message he was trying to convey. To a certain extent, Gore did the same in selecting a moderate, pro-defense Democrat, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman in 2000.
The alternative is the “balancing”approach. Barack Obama selected Joe Biden as a Washington insider, foreign policy “guru” (don’t laugh, this was his rationale) and blue-collar-friendly running mate. Likewise, George W. Bush selected the Washington-experienced, former defense secretary, Dick Cheney. …
Wired with a UCLA psyche prof with lessons on how to study better.
… “If you study and then you wait, tests show that the longer you wait, the more you will have forgotten,” Bjork said.
But here’s the cool part: If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session. Bjork explains it this way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.”
Note that there’s a trick implied by “provided the retrieval succeeds.” You should space your study sessions so that the information you learned in the first session remains just barely retrievable. Then, the more you have to work to pull it from the soup of your mind, the more this second study session will reinforce your learning. If you study again too soon, it’s too easy.
Along these lines, Bjork also recommends taking notes just after class, rather than during — forcing yourself to recall a lecture’s information is more effective than simply copying it from a blackboard. You have to work for it. The more you work, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more awesome you can become. …
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Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Prof lists the low lights of the SOTU.
Obama gave his State of the Union address almost a week ago, and there’s been time to identify the real lowlights. It is tough to rank them, but these three stood out:
1. Obama almost completely ignored the most important threat to the state of the Union: its parlous fiscal situation. He mentioned the issue almost in passing, and then primarily to flog his idiotic tax proposal (more on this below). He completely ignored any discussion of entitlements, and entitlement reform. This should be the overriding priority: addressing this issue, or not, will largely determine the future state of the Union. It borders on the criminal for a president allegedly giving the country an honest appraisal of the state of the nation to give such short shrift to the most crucial political and economic issue of the day. Alfred E. Newman couldn’t have done any worse.
2. He flogged his fairness and justice theme. Get ready for a hugely divisive campaign based on these issues. I was hoping there would have been a camera on Valerie Jarrett during these parts of the speech, just to see whether her lips moved when he gave it.
This was yet another paean to the European welfare state model, though of course he didn’t frame it that way. But his was the “social model” rhetoric that is standard in Germany, for instance.
Which is truly staggering, given that the European model is on the brink of extinction. They may stagger on for awhile, but that model cannot be sustained. …
WSJ editors say rather than a Buffett rule, perhaps Obama should call for a Solyndra rule.
President Obama keeps pushing the (Warren) Buffett rule that nobody making more than $1 million a year should pay less than 30% in taxes. He’d do better by the economy if he adopted a Solyndra Rule, in which no commercial energy company should receive millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies.
After the demise of Solyndra (with its $535 million loan guarantee) and Beacon Power ($43 million loan guarantee), last week saw the bankruptcy of Indiana-based lithium-ion battery maker Ener1. In 2009 an Ener1 subsidiary was awarded a grant worth up to $118 million from the Energy Department, with Vice President Joe Biden touring and touting its factory a year ago.
Like Solyndra, Ener1 was a foolhardy bet for taxpayer cash. Founded in 2002, Ener1 had not turned a profit by the time of its grant and has proceeded to hemorrhage the $55 million of the DOE money it has received to date. Its losses in fiscal 2010 were $165 million. …
Debra Saunders thinks the president has decided to do nothing.
Toward the end of his State of the Union speech, President Obama observed that Washington politicians should learn from the example of the U.S. military: “When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails.”
Obama recalled the successful Navy SEAL mission, which under his watch took out Osama bin Laden, and observed, “the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other – because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s someone behind you, watching your back.”
At first blush, it seemed like a stirring call to action. But when you look at the speech as a whole, and in context, it was a sad admission. Obama constantly carps about his lack of support from the Republican-led House. I think the president has decided that he cannot succeed in the face of political opposition. So he is not charging up those stairs.
Unless Washington walks in lockstep behind Obama, he’s not going to try to get anything done. …
And Mark Steyn has a SOTU column.
Had I been asked to deliver the State of the Union address, it would not have delayed your dinner plans:
“The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You’ve been a terrific crowd!”
I gather that Americans prefer something a little more upbeat, so one would not begrudge a speechwriter fluffing it up by holding out at least the possibility of some change of fortune, however remote. Instead, President Obama assured us at great length that nothing is going to change, not now, not never. Indeed the Union’s state – its unprecedented world-record brokeness – was not even mentioned.
If, as I was, you happened to be stuck at Gate 27 at one of the many U.S. airports laboring under the misapprehension that pumping CNN at you all evening long somehow adds to the gaiety of flight delays, you would have watched an address that gave no indication its speaker was even aware that the parlous state of our finances is an existential threat not only to the nation but to global stability. The message was, oh, sure, unemployment’s still a little higher than it should be, and student loans are kind of expensive, and the housing market’s pretty flat, but it’s nothing that a little government “investment” in green jobs and rural broadband and retraining programs can’t fix. In other words, more of the unaffordable same.
The president certainly had facts and figures at his disposal. He boasted that his regulatory reforms “will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years.” Wow. Ten billion smackeroos! That’s some savings – and in a mere half a decade! Why, it’s equivalent to what the Government of the United States borrows every 53 hours. So by midnight on Thursday, Obama had already re-borrowed all those hard-fought savings from 2017. “In the last 22 months,” said the president, “businesses have created more than 3 million jobs.” Impressive. But 125,000 new foreign workers arrive every month (officially). So we would have to have created 2,750,000 jobs in that period just to stand still.
Fortunately, most of the items in Obama’s interminable speech will never happen, any more than the federally funded bicycling helmets or whatever fancies found their way onto Bill Clinton’s extravagant shopping lists in the Nineties. …
Thomas Sowell columns on CA high speed rail.
California has a huge state debt and Washington has a huge national debt. But that does not discourage either Governor Jerry Brown or President Barack Obama from wanting to launch a very costly high-speed rail system.
Most of us might be a little skittish about spending money if we were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. But the beauty of politics is that it is all other people’s money, including among those other people generations yet unborn.
The high-speed rail system proposed for California has been envisioned as a model for similar systems elsewhere in the United States. A recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle used the high-speed rail system in Spain as an analogy for California.
Spain is about the same size as California, and has a similar population density — and population density is the key to the economic viability of mass transportation, from subways to high-speed rail.
It so happens that I have ridden on Spain’s high-speed rail system. It was very nice, especially since I did not have to pay the full costs, which were subsidized by the Spanish taxpayers.
While the Spanish government has been subsidizing the passengers on its high-speed rail system, the European Union has been subsidizing the Spanish government. Someone once said that government is the illusion that we can all live off somebody else. Spain’s high-speed rail system is not even covering its operating costs, never mind the enormous costs of setting up the system in the first place. One reason is that half the seats are empty in the high-speed trains in Spain. …
Next month Queen Elizabeth will mark 60 years on the throne. The Economist reviews five new books on her.
… as a constitutional monarch, ruling with the tacit consent of the majority, she is not the only judge of the trade-off between necessary display and indispensable discretion. The public have a say as well. Some of the queen’s closest brushes with disaster have involved a lack of visibility, most painfully in 1997 when she remained in Scotland with the royal family after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. She only returned to London after pleas from her new, young prime minister, Tony Blair (and lynch-mob demands to “Show Us You Care” from the tabloids).
The double nature of the queen—an unusually private woman with extraordinary public duties—poses a test for all who try to write about her. Including Mr Marr’s book, five new biographies have been prepared for 2012, the queen’s diamond jubilee year. The authors boast of watching the queen at work, interviewing officials from the royal household and of trawling through archives. They quote family members, friends and people with a claim to know the queen.
In the process, all five biographers wrestle with the question neatly framed by their subject herself: if to see the queen is to believe in her, what vantage point allows the most authentic experience of faith? Which queen is the most “real”, the private woman or the public figure? Each offers a different answer. …
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Christopher Booker reacts to SOTU from Great Britain.
When I happened to wake up in the middle of the night last Wednesday and caught the BBC World Service’s live relay of President Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress, two passages had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief.
The first came when, to applause, the President spoke about the banking crash which coincided with his barnstorming 2008 election campaign. “The house of cards collapsed,” he recalled. “We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them.” He excoriated the banks which had “made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money”, while “regulators looked the other way and didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behaviour”. This, said Obama, “was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work.”
I recalled a piece I wrote in this column on January 29, 2009, just after Obama took office. It was headlined: “This is the sub-prime house that Barack Obama built”. As a rising young Chicago politician in 1995, no one campaigned more actively than Mr Obama for an amendment to the US Community Reinvestment Act, legally requiring banks to lend huge sums to millions of poor, mainly black Americans, guaranteed by the two giant mortgage associations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
It was this Act, above all, which let the US housing bubble blow up, …
James Pethokoukis posts on the Grabell piece we had yesterday from the NY Post.
Recall the original Obama economic team. It consisted of President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and White House economists Lawrence Summers, Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee and Jared Bernstein. It was the Democrats’ Best and Brightest — but not one with a smidgen of executive experience in either the private of public sector. And into their hands was entrusted an $800 billion stimulus spending plan, a package whose details were fleshed out by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. What could go wrong?
Lots it turns out. And Michael Grabell, a reporter for ProPublica, documents the many failing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in “Money Well Spent? The Truth Behind the Trillion-Dollar Stimulus, the Biggest Economic Recovery Plan in History,” out this week. Rather than focus on questionable Keynesian economics behind the stimulus, Grabell focuses on its execution and management. …
Jennifer Rubin writes about the most persecuted man in America.
The one incident from Newt Gingrich’s speakership that stands out in most people’s minds is the pout-a-thon concerning Air Force One. Howard Kurtz and Lois Romano recall:
“Newt Gingrich was walking out of Washington’s Sheraton-Carlton in the fall of 1995 when he turned to his press secretary and said, “I guess I’ve given you a problem for the rest of the day.”
Tony Blankley conceded that it would be “tricky” to defend him. After all, Gingrich had warned a roomful of reporters that his spokesman would kill him for voicing a complaint that the House speaker himself admitted was “petty.”
Gingrich and his fellow Republicans had just shut down the federal government in a dramatic spending showdown with Bill Clinton, and now he was carping that the president never talked to him during a 25-hour flight on Air Force One and had him “get off the plane by the back ramp .?.?. Where is their sense of manners?” The next morning, when New York’s Daily News depicted Gingrich as a bawling, diaper-clad baby, House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt arranged for a giant reproduction to be unveiled on the House floor. Republicans called an unprecedented vote that forced the Democrats to take the poster down — but they were furious with their leader for creating the distraction.”
This is quintessential Newt Gingrich — thin-skinned, self-absorbed, destructive and, yes, “petty.” He excels in converting his own missteps into tales of martyrdom. All of this has manifested itself in the campaign in big ways and small. …
Want to know one of the reasons college tuition keeps climbing? Marc Perry posts on costs at U. of Michigan.
From an open letter to President Obama on December 16, 2011 from University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman:
“Higher education is a public good currently lacking public support. There is no stronger trigger for rising costs at public universities and colleges than declining state support.”
According to the Washington Post, “President Barack Obama will announce a plan to shift some federal dollars away from colleges and universities that don’t control tuition costs and new competitions in higher education to encourage efficiency as part of an effort to contain soaring college costs. Obama will spell out his plans Friday at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.”
One issue that will probably not receive a lot of attention today from either President Obama or President Coleman is the contribution of rising administrative positions and salaries to the rising cost of college tuition. For example:
1. According to data from the Chronicle of Higher Education (also available from IPEDS), the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor has 53% more full-time “administrators and professionals” (9,652) than full-time faculty (6,305), or a ratio of 1.53 administrative and professional positions for every full-time faculty member. Couldn’t those administrative/professional expenses have something to do with rising tuition?
Speaking of getting well by doing good, the Daily Mail, UK went to Haiti to see how the aid is getting thru to those in need.
… Ricardo lifts the faded sheet that serves as his front door. His three-week-old baby lies asleep on the single bed that fills the family’s home, while his two-year old son screams at the back entrance.
The heat under the plastic roof is so intense his wife Roseline, 27, drips with sweat as she describes living in such hell. She looks exhausted. If she is lucky, she says, she has one meal a day, but often goes two days without food, putting salt in water to keep her going.
Since giving birth she has passed out a number of times and does not produce enough breast milk to feed her new son. She shows me a small can of condensed milk she gives him; she cannot afford the baby formula he needs.
So had they seen any of the huge sums of aid donated to alleviate such hardship? They shake their heads — just one hygiene kit from the local Red Cross. ‘I have heard about this aid but never seen it,’ says Roseline. ‘I don’t think people like us stood a chance of getting any of it.’
Ricardo says it makes him angry. ‘If I looked back two years ago I would never have thought I would still be here in this camp. If the aid organisations really cared about our lives, they could have done something. But how can I have hope for my future, living like this?’
The family’s story shames all those international organisations that flocked to Haiti after the earthquake two years ago, which killed an estimated 225,000 people. It was one of the most devastating natural disasters of recent years — and the world responded in sympathy. The international community claimed to have given £6.5?billion to heal Haiti’s wounds, while donations poured in to charities.
Earlier this month, on the quake’s second anniversary, aid agencies pumped out press releases proclaiming their successes. Add up all the people they claim to have helped and the number exceeds the population of Haiti.
The reality is rather different — and shines a stark light on the assumptions, arrogance and deficiencies of the ever-growing global relief industry. …
Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.
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John Steele Gordon on taxes and Buffett BS.
… According to Buffett’s article in the New York Times last August, he pays far less in taxes than the working stiffs in his office:
“Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.”
If Warren Buffett submitted a filing at the SEC this dishonest, he’d be in big trouble. But, since this fits the party line, the president took it as gospel, and the mainstream media has carefully refrained from asking any inconvenient questions. (h/t Powerline).
By conflating payroll (FICA) taxes and income taxes, Buffett is playing the intellectual equivalent of three-card monte. FICA taxes are collected only on wages, to a limited amount, in order to provide a limited income in retirement. Technically, they are not taxes at all, but “contributions,” (although I wouldn’t recommend deciding not to contribute). The fact that the federal government commingles these contributions with general revenues in order to make the federal deficit look better is a disgrace. Since Buffett’s income comes overwhelmingly from investment income and he is one of the richest people in the world, of course the people working for him in his office pay a higher percentage of their incomes in FICA taxes. …
James Pethokoukis blogs on just how progressive the US tax system is.
And Pethokoukis writes on 11 things the president neglected to tell us in SOTU.
1. The top 1 percent pay 36.7 percent of federal income taxes and earn 16.9 percent of adjusted gross income (as of 2009).
2. The top 0.1 percent pay 17.1 percent of taxes and earn 7.8 percent of adjusted gross income.
3. The average income tax rate for the top 1 percent is 24 percent. The bottom 50 percent? Just 1.85 percent.
4. The bottom 50 percent pay just 2.3 percent of income taxes. …
Jennifer Rubin says Romney’s rate of taxation and charitable giving is 42% of his income. Saint Barack gives only 1%. Or course he pays a higher rate.
… Another way of looking at it is that in 2011 the Romneys paid out 42 percent of their income in taxes and charity. Here’s how I got there: Total tax (line 60) + foreign taxes (line 47) + state taxes and real-estate taxes + other taxes (Schedule A, line 9) + charitable contributions (Schedule A, line 19) divided by Adjusted Gross Income (1040 line 37).
Let’s compare this percentage to that of average Americans. A 2009 Urban Institute study found: “The average charitable contribution per return filed in 2009 was about 2.0 percent of [adjusted gross] income.”
As for the effective marginal rate, Jim Pethokoukis writes: “While Romney’s tax rate is — in his own words — ‘probably closer to 15 percent than anything,’ that’s still higher than the 8.2 percent average effective income tax rate (as of 2010) of U.S. households (once you factor in various tax credits). Indeed, nearly half of U.S. households pay no income tax at all. Their average effective tax rate is actually negative. Even if you add in the payroll tax, the effective tax rate of the middle fifth of U.S. taxpayers is 12.8 percent.”
So, yes, Romney is much wealthier than most Americans. But he also gives away or pays in taxes in absolute and percentage terms far more than most Americans. …
Back to Pethokoukis who says it is fair to compare the weakness of Obama’s recovery to the strength of Reagan’s.
Ronald Reagan inherited a Long Recession. The economy declined 0.3 percent in 1980, grew at a subpar 2.5 percent in 1981, and then plunged 1.9 percent in 1982. The lengthy downturn was really the culmination of more than a decade of bad economic policy. But the Reagan Recovery was stunning. GDP rose 4.5 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984. It was Morning in America, and Reagan won reelection by a landslide.
Barack Obama also inherited a Long Recession. According the National Bureau of Economic Research, the U.S. economy entered recession in 2007 and stayed there until June 2009. But the Obama Recovery has been terribly weak. The economy grew at a 2.8 percent pace in the second half of 2009, 3.0 percent in 2010, and — according to new Commerce Department data – 1.7 percent in 2011. We’ll see what happens in the 2012 election, but Obama’s current approval rating is 43 percent, according to Gallup.
As economist Lawrence Kudlow of CNBC notes:
After 10 quarters of recovery, the Reagan growth rate was 6 percent. Compare that with Obama’s 2.4 percent. Or compare Obama’s 2.4 percent with the 4.6 percent post-World War II average recovery rate after 10 quarters.
But Obamacrats and other liberals say the Reagan-Obama comparison is unfair. After all, Reagan didn’t have to deal with a collapsed housing bubble. …
Speaking of the housing bubble mentioned in the pull quote above, it is instructive to remember one of the few times Barack Obama has taken a stand was when, on July 6, 1994, he sued Citibank for not loaning enough to minorities. So, the great loan and housing collapse of ’07 and ’08 was in part caused by a lawsuit filed by Barry Obama. MediaCircus had a post on the story in 2008.
Do you remember how we told you that the Democrats and groups associated with them leaned on banks and even sued to get them to make bad loans under the Community Reinvestment Act which was a factor in causing the economic crisis (see HERE ) … well look at what some fellow bloggers have dug up while researching Obama’s legal career. Looks like a typical ACORN lawsuit to get banks to hand out bad loans.
In these lawsuits, ACORN makes a bogus claim of Redlining (denying poor people loans because of their ethnic heritage). They protest and get the local media to raise a big stink. This stink means that the bank faces thousands of people closing their accounts and get local politicians to lobby to stop the bank from doing some future business, expansions and mergers. If the bank goes to court, they will win, but the damage is already done because who is going to launch a big campaign to get the bank’s reputation back?
It is important to understand the nature of these lawsuits and what their purpose is. ACORN filed tons of these lawsuits and ALL of them allege racism.
Thanks to the IUSB Vision Weblog for providing additional details of this story.
We pulled the docket down, but here’s a brief for your summary: …
NY Post OpEd examines the shortcomings of the 2009 stimulus and explains . . .
… Things could have been different.
The incoming administration could have led more from the outset to ensure the stimulus was quicker, more targeted and written with Republican support. The president and his aides could have tackled criticism head-on instead of letting it fester.
In explaining the stagnant economy, President Obama has said that the recovery was trammeled by the European debt crisis, rising gas prices and the impact of the Japanese earthquake on the supply chain. But if the stimulus had been designed to generate more thrust on the front end, the American economy might have been in stronger shape to withstand these headwinds.
Others say that businesses are scared stiff with uncertainty and a lack of confidence. It might not be this way if the president and congressional leaders had focused on long-term infrastructure and energy bills instead of health-care reform. Health care was one of the few growing sectors during the recession. And by setting Congress down one of the most divisive policy paths, the administration was left with an atmosphere in which everything the president proposed, including ideas that Republicans supported in the past, were now considered radical and corrosive.
The stimulus money wasn’t enough to transform American infrastructure, the education system or the energy sector. But it was just enough for Republicans to be able to say, “We tried that already.”
Despite the historic investments in the stimulus, there seems little chance landmark bills to continue the programs will pass. Left with only a down payment on his major initiatives, Obama now faces a tough election and may end up like many of the homeowners who ran out of money during the Great Recession.
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Mark Steyn says we have Newt in our face because of Romney’s weaknesses.
The nature of this peculiar primary season — the reason it seems at odds with both the 2009–2010 political narrative and the seriousness of the times — was determined by Mitt Romney. Even if you don’t mind Romneycare, or the abortion flip-flop, or any of the rest, there’s a more basic problem: He’s not a natural campaigner, and on the stump he instinctively recoils from any personal connection with the voters. So, in compensation, he’s bought himself a bunch of A-list advisers and a lavish campaign. He is, as he likes to say, the only candidate with experience in the private sector. So he knows better than to throw his money away, right? But that’s just what he’s doing, in big ways and small.
Small: It’s a good idea to get that telegenic gal (daughter-in-law?) to stand behind him during the concession speech but one of those expensive consultants ought to tell her not to look so bored and glassy-eyed as the stiff guy grinds through the same-old-same-old for the umpteenth time. To those watching on TV last night, she looked like we felt.
Big: Why is the stump speech so awful? “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap. And he paid others to approve it.
Similar thoughts from Jonah Goldberg.
I’ve always been ambivalent about this field. I’ve never been wildly anti-Newt nor pro-Romney, or vice versa. I have long thought that Romney would be the best candidate to beat Obama, and I still believe that — but just barely. His Al Gore like inability to break through his android shell is really grating on me. It’s unfair, of course. I think Romney’s an honest, smart and decent man who would probably make a fine president. As I’ve been writing for a very long time, Romney has an authentic inauthenticity problem. In other words, he seems like he’s faking things even when he’s not. He may take positions he doesn’t hold in his heart, but all politicians do that. The problem is that the vast majority of the time he’s no more passionate or convincing about the positions he almost surely does hold in his heart. …
John Hood sums up.
A competent presidential campaign, one that could really pose a challenge to a sitting president with a massive war chest and organization, would never settle for the media spin that Mitt Romney had a 15 percent federal tax burden over the past two years.
A competent campaign, and candidate, would explain that Romney’s rea federal tax rate on his investment income was more than 40 percent (being conservative, after deductions and such), since the revenue stream was subject to both a personal tax rate and the corporate tax rate. A competent campaign would then point out that state taxes would bring the effective income tax rate on Romney’s investment income to 50 percent or higher. Every time a reporter or opposing candidate tried to say Romney’s tax rate was 15 percent, a competent campaign would call them out for misleading the American people.
A competent campaign would then point out that this effective income tax rate of 50 percent is much, much higher than what the average worker pays in federal and state taxes on wage income. Such a campaign would then say that by taxing investment so punitively and then redistributing the revenue to failed giveaway programs and government boondoggles, America is eating its seed corn and deterring investors from creating new jobs.
Is the Romney campaign competent? Is Romney himself? If they can’t do this, they can’t beat Obama in the fall.
Ann Coulter thinks a vote for Newt is a vote for Obama.
… — Romney supports entitlement reform along the lines of the Paul Ryan plan, as he has said plainly, but without histrionics, in the debates.
Just last year, Gingrich went on “Meet the Press” and called Ryan’s plan — supported by nearly every House Republican — “right-wing social engineering.”
He apologized for those remarks, then took back his apology, still later doubled down, calling the Ryan plan “suicide,” and now — currently, but it could change any minute — Gingrich supports Ryan’s entitlement reform efforts.
For the latest updates on Newt’s position on the Ryan plan, go to http//twitter.com/#whatcheapshotgrandstandymovewillworknow?
– As for crony capitalism, Romney made all his money in the private sector by his own diligence and talent — even giving away all the money he inherited from his parents. He’s never lived in Washington or traded on access to government officials.
Meanwhile, without the federal government, Gingrich would be penniless. He has been in Washington since the ’70s, first as a congressman, then becoming a rich man on the basis of having been a congressman.
Most egregiously, he took $1.6 million to shill for Freddie Mac, one of the two institutions directly responsible for the housing crash that caused the financial collapse. (Or one of three, if you consider Barney Frank an institution.)
If the tea party stands for anything, it stands in absolute opposition to government insiders shoring up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the very time those institutions were blowing up the economy.
– Romney could not be more forceful in saying he will issue a 50-state waiver to Obamacare his first day in office and then seek its formal repeal. Whether you like a state-wide insurance mandate or not, it’s a world of difference when the federal government does it. Conservatives, having read the Constitution, ought to understand this.
It was on account of the difference between state and federal powers that the Supreme Court overturned the federal Violence Against Women Act. The court was not endorsing rape, but reminding us that states make laws about rape, not Congress. …
Jennifer Rubin says Gingrich laid an egg in the last debate before the Florida vote.
… Gingrich had a perfectly dreadful night, appearing angry and then sheepish, nasty and then defensive. He didn’t have well-prepared defenses on his time with Freddie or strong attacks on Romney’s earnings. He played to type in defending his fantastical idea for a space colony. And he sniped at conservatives who have come forward to question whether he was all that close to Reagan, calling it part of an organized effort by Romney. For starters, that’s called a “campaign,” and if he can’t handle Romney he’ll be no match for Obama; Moreover, I’d be surprised if the Romney camp had a hand in every statement and article that criticized him over the last week or so. (They aren’t that good.) Conservatives have had enough of him, and have come forward out of fear he might actually get the nomination. After tonight they have less to fear. Not only did Romney have the best debate of the primary season, but Santorum’s strong showing should bleed votes away from Gingrich as well. …
Charles Krauthammer thinks the president played small ball in his last SOTU because he . . .
… Can’t run on his record. Barely even mentioned Obamacare or the stimulus, his major legislative achievements, on Tuesday night. Too unpopular. His platform is fairness, wrapped around a plethora of little things, one mini-industrial policy after another — the conceit nicely encapsulated by his proclamation that “I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or to Germany.” As if he can command these industries into existence. As if Washington funding a thousand Solyndras will make solar economically viable.
Soviet central planners mandated quotas for steel production, regardless of demand. Obama’s industrial policy is a bit more subtle. Tax breaks for manufacturing — but double tax breaks for high-tech manufacturing, which for some reason is considered more virtuous, despite the fact that high tech is less likely to create blue-collar jobs. Its main job creation will be for legions of lawyers and linguists testifying before some new adjudicating bureaucracy that the Acme Umbrella Factory meets its exquisitely drawn criteria for “high tech.”
What Obama offered the nation Tuesday night was a pudding without a theme: a jumble of disconnected initiatives, a gaggle of intrusive new agencies and a whole new generation of loopholes to further corrupt a tax code that screams out for reform.
If the Republicans can’t beat that in November, they should try another line of work.
We learn from the New Editor that raising taxes in Illinois might have been a mistake.
From the Illinois Policy Institute:
Almost a year after Illinois’ record income tax increase, the state’s unemployment woes contrast starkly with the slow but positive national economic recovery. Unemployment rates in 46 states dropped since January 2011, and some dramatically. Illinois’ unemployment rate, on the other hand, was 9.8 percent in December, up from 9 percent in January 2011. Simply put, Illinois placed more people on the unemployment rolls than any other state in the country.
On a related note, I was watching IL Gov. Pat Quinn on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program this morning and noted that Gov. Quinn talked of the state’s ‘investment in educational spending’ being an important part of recovery. However, an examination of education spending in Illinois reveals that huge portions of overall spending, and majority portions of new education spending are going not to classroom spending, but to funding for teacher pensions.
How is that ‘investment spending’?
Over at NR’s Campaign Spot, Jim Geraghty sees another company touted by Obama have trouble.
The RNC notices that another one of Obama’s favorite companies, solar panel manufacturer Amonix, is hitting hard times. The company only officially “opened” its plant in North Las Vegas in May of 2011. The company got a $6 million tax credit to build the facility in 2009, and Obama touted the company in 2010. This week, 200 of the plant’s 300 employees got pink slips. …
Sixteen noted scientists with an OpEd in the WSJ think we can relax on the global warming front.
A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.
In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”
In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the “pollutant” carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. …