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John Fund tells us about tomorrow’s congressional race in upstate New York.
With so many contradictory polls out there, it’s useful information when actual voters cast ballots. That’s why this coming Tuesday’s special House election in New York’s Hudson River Valley is important.
It will be the first gauge of President Barack Obama’s early days, and as the National Journal reports “it’s his stimulus package that’s the focus of the debate here.” The furor over the bonuses given out by American International Group (AIG), which a loophole in the stimulus bill allowed, has only heightened the attention that the race is getting both in New York and in Washington where officials in both parties are hoping for a win. …
The Economist thinks the kid president has been very weak. Jennifer Rubin wonders why they’re surprised.
David Broder thinks the kid president is getting rolled by Nancy Pelosi. Jennifer Rubin wonders why he’s surprised.
Stephen Moore exposes some of the lies in the kid’s budget.
… Welcome to the Obama doctrine. It is built on the high stakes economic gamble that the public and the bond markets will tolerate trillions of dollars of borrowing to pay for massive expansions in government spending on popular income transfer programs. The corollary to this doctrine is that the left will create a political imperative to jack up tax rates to pay for higher spending commitments made today.
But the news on the red ink front is much worse than the president or even the CBO’s budget report suggests. If all of Obama’s “transformational” policy objectives–from global warming taxes to universal health care to doubling the Department of Energy’s budget–are enacted, the debt is likely to increase from about 40 percent of GDP today to close to 100 percent of GDP by 2018. The ten-year debt is likely to be at least $6 trillion higher–or more than one-half trillion of higher deficits a year from now until forever–than the Obama budget projects.
These are uncharted levels of debt for the United States–though not for such high-flying nations as Argentina, Bolivia, and Mexico. This hemorrhaging of U.S. government debt will be happening at precisely the time when, in a rational world, the government would be running surpluses, in anticipation of the retirement of some 80 million baby boomers who will soon collect multiple trillions of dollars of government benefits from Medicare and Social Security.
There are three ways that the Obama administration is understating the spending and debt levels embedded in the president’s budget policies. …
Interesting Columbia University related piece comparing the life of a 60′s pretend radical to the real hardships of growing up in war-torn England. Rick Richman has the story in Contentions.
… Everybody is influenced to some extent by the circumstances in which they grew up. I grew up in England after the Second World War, after a period of destruction on a global scale. It’s hard for people in the United States to grasp how long the effects of that war lingered in England. The bombed and derelict buildings stayed that way for many, many years. Rationing of food was still typical into the early and mid-1950s. Normal life certainly didn’t resume when peace came in 1945. I vividly recall to this day the first time I went to a candy store (sometime in the 1950s) when I could finally buy anything I wanted without producing the dreaded coupons that rationed out some tiny portion for so many years.
Growing up in that post-war environment in one of the many devastated European countries leaves a lasting mark on you. And in England, it wasn’t just that our industrial base was bombed or obsolete but that what was lost with it was an international role and standing that would never be recovered. After two world wars involving incalculable sacrifice, the post-war world was one of shortage and struggle, and the future looked dim.
Many families I knew, including my own, had missing members buried in distant graves somewhere at home or abroad. Lots of survivors had broken bodies and no jobs. Two generations of women who might have chosen to marry found themselves single after the slaughter of the two world wars, with no opportunity to have partners and families of their own. The physical damage, the bomb sites and the derelict factories also signaled the end of an earlier way of life, and large pockets of past grandeur remained to remind us of what had been, along with the glorious English countryside. Magnificent public buildings and parks, and marvelous museums, theaters and galleries preserved the great residue of English culture, for better or worse. …
David Harsanyi wants out of the drug war.
This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that our nation’s “insatiable” appetite for illegal drugs is in large part to blame for the violence in northern Mexico.
And it would, clearly, be poor form to single out violent Mexican drug cartels for the violence. It does, after all, take a village.
Clinton went on to say that over the past three decades, the drug war has failed to control demand and, with weapons smuggled from the United States, we are fueling Mexico’s drug wars and murder.
So what are we going to do about it? Continue the drug war, of course.
A war on drugs — in whatever form it is implemented — will never alleviate our “insatiable” appetite for illicit drugs, anyway. Appetite, or demand, is not affected by laws. Laws only affect the cost. And I don’t know how many times I cursed Nancy Reagan’s name for the outrageous price of Californian Skunk. …
Shut your lights off for an hour and save the world. Hardly says Bjorn Lomborg.
… It will take more than the metropolitan borough of South Tyneside, population 152,000, to solve global warming. Even if a billion people turn off their lights this Saturday, the entire event will be equivalent to switching off China’s emissions for six short seconds. In economic terms, the environmental and humanitarian benefits from the efforts of the entire developed world would add up to just $21,000.
The campaign doesn’t ask anybody to do anything difficult, such as coping without heating, airconditioning, telephones, the internet, hot food or cold drinks. Conceivably, if you or I sat in our houses watching television, with the heater and computer running, we could claim we’re part of an answer to global warming, so long as the lights are switched off. The symbolism is almost perverse. …
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