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David Warren packs a lifetime of wisdom, absorbed and reflected, in today’s look at potentials in developing world economies. This optimistic view of things will serve as a tonic for items that follow.
… Thailand had a history of freedom. So did the U.S. and Canada, for that matter, when our people opened the vast granaries of our west. And it is just this history of freedom that is lacking in other, benighted lands.
There were fewer mental obstacles in Thailand to letting the people solve their own problems. That and, to my mind, that alone, made it a shining example for agricultural and every other form of economic development — even while the country provided a rather poor example of democratic constitutional development, with one pathetic coup after another since the fall of the old Siamese absolute monarchy in 1932.
Indeed, here is the most heretical thought. It may be precisely because the politicians rendered themselves so ineffectual in Thailand that the country has prospered.
On paper and in principle — in common sense — the problems of food supply can be solved. Foreign aid gets in the way, both by removing incentives to expand local production and by lining the pockets of dictators who persist with heavily statist schemes. The “global warming” environmental movement, meanwhile, assures an ever-heavier hand for this statism in the future, which is why it is so evil.
The London Times thinks the administration misreads the power structure in Moscow.
President Obama has made his first mistake in Russia even before he arrives in Moscow today. His attempt to cast Vladimir Putin as yesterday’s man and to drive a wedge between the Prime Minister and President Medvedev demonstrates a misreading of relations in the Kremlin.
Mr Medvedev is in office but not in power and whether he becomes President in more than name depends on Mr Putin’s support and intentions. Mr Medvedev may represent a more accommodating face of Russia but this is only because Mr Putin wants him to.
Mr Obama declared: “I think that it’s important that even as we move forward with President Medvedev that Putin understand that the old Cold War approaches to US-Russian relations is outdated . . . Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.” That suggests that Mr Medvedev’s outlook differs from that of his mentor despite a lack of evidence. Mr Putin is not known as a bad judge of character and he himself described his successor as “no less a Russian nationalist than I am”. …
… Mr Obama is coming to the table like a card shark to a casino, ready to charm his hosts and pull aces from his sleeve to win support for crucial objectives in Afghanistan and Iran. But Russia is a land of chess players, cautious and calculating. Mr Putin does not respond to charm — and he has just closed Russia’s casinos.
Kevin Hassett thinks CA’s budget woes should sink health care “reform”.
Last week, we discovered that the state of California will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
With California mired in a budget crisis, largely the result of a political impasse that makes spending cuts and tax increases impossible, Controller John Chiang said the state planned to issue $3.3 billion in IOU’s in July alone. Instead of cash, those who do business with California will get slips of paper.
The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat.
It takes years and years to make a mess as terrible as the California debacle, but the recipe is simple. All that you need is two political parties that are always willing to offer easy government solutions for every need of the voters, but never willing to make the tough decisions necessary to finance the government largess that results. Voters will occasionally change their allegiance from one party to the other, but the bacchanal will continue regardless of the names on the office doors.
California has engaged in an orgy of spending, but, compared with our federal government, its legislators should feel chaste. The California deficit this year is now north of $26 billion. The U.S. federal deficit will be, according to the latest numbers, almost 70 times larger. …
David Harsanyi’s latest looks at stimulus results.
After being asked when the public should begin judging the success of the nearly $800-billion stimulus plan, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs answered, “I think we should begin to judge it now.”
Let’s take his advice.
The administration warned that if we failed to support a stimulus package, unemployment would hit a dire 9 percent by 2010. With the stimulus, unemployment, it claimed, would stay in the 8-percent range.
This week, the Labor Department announced that the jobless rate jumped to 9.5 percent, higher than any time since August 1983.
It’s not as if the administration was close. As the New York Times notes, “the difference between the situation that the Obama advisers predicted and the one that has come to pass is about 2.5 million jobs. It’s as if every worker in the city of Los Angeles received an unexpected layoff notice.”
Don’t get too dejected, though. We still have an economic plan with a heaping dose of hope. …
Roger Simon posts pessimism.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen my country so divided and depressed on the Fourth of July in my lifetime and – no matter what Bob Dylan dreamed up – I’m not young, forever or otherwise. That includes the Vietnam War period when both sides at least had some conviction and excitement for the future, even if wrong. Not so now. The current situation is grim.
Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness. Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan – if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all – has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.
On the foreign policy front, it’s more embarrassing. …
More of this from Power Line.
Country Store asks why Obama and the dems don’t just offer US taxpayer funded health care to everyone in the world? Makes sense to Pickerhead. After all, the One says his health care plan will save money. We’ll save more money still if we cover the world!
… Such a deal – we install a massive bureaucracy, pay 1.5 trillion additional dollars in taxes, and ration healthcare to the elderly so that everyone who sneaks across the border gets great medical care. Why not cut down on wear and tear on the Border patrol and just pay for all medical care for everyone in the world. I’m sure the US taxpayers would mind too much.
WSJ reports some toll roads have banished cash.
… On Saturday, an authority that runs the E-470 toll road near Denver is ditching its coin handlers and going entirely cashless. Drivers will no longer be able to dig through piles of loose change in their dashboard trays to come up with toll money. Instead, they will have to equip their vehicles with transponders that deduct tolls automatically, or face the prospect of paying heftier fees when a bill arrives in the mail.
The Denver switchover follows a similar move on Wednesday by the North Texas Tollway Authority, which turned the 32-mile President George Bush Turnpike outside Dallas into an entirely cashless facility. Together, transportation experts say, these conversions mark the first time in the U.S. that existing toll roads have abandoned their pay-with-cash lanes and gone entirely electronic. …
Counterintuitive enough to have attracted our interest, an Economist article tracing babies’ names seems to indicate the internet has shrunk our contacts.
Under the heading of; You Can’t Make It Up, a picture from the NY Times story of Madoff payments to Austrian banker reveals Bernie Madoff’s long lost sister. The WSJ was kinder to her. It remains to be seen whether she actually made off with some money.
WSJ with interesting elephant pic.