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There actually is a plan out there to get government under control. In the WaPo, Robert Samuelson comments on one amazing congressman and his sensible, innovative plan.
Paul Ryan, a six-term Republican congressman from Wisconsin who is the ranking minority member of the House Budget Committee, has yanked himself from obscurity by doing something no one else in Congress or apparently the White House has done: design a specific plan to control long-term government spending and budget deficits. That he stands virtually alone is a damning commentary on our politics. …
…Here are some features of his plan:
– Social Security: For those 55 or older today, the program would remain unchanged. For those younger, benefits would be reduced — with no cuts for the poorest workers. Workers 55 or younger in 2011 could establish individual investment accounts that would be funded with part of their payroll taxes. Government would guarantee a return equal to inflation.
– Medicare: Current recipients and those enrolling in the next decade would continue under today’s program, though wealthier recipients would pay somewhat higher premiums. In 2021, Medicare would become a voucher program for new recipients (those today 54 or younger). With vouchers, recipients would buy Medicare-certified private insurance. In today’s dollars, the vouchers would ultimately grow to $11,000. Eligibility ages for Medicare and Social Security would slowly increase toward 69 and 70, respectively.
– Spending freeze: From 2010 to 2019, “non-defense discretionary spending” — about a sixth of the federal budget, including everything from housing to parks to education — would be frozen at 2009 levels.
– Simpler taxes: Taxpayers could choose between today’s system or a streamlined replacement with no deductions and virtually no special tax breaks. Above a tax-free amount ($39,000 for a family of four), taxpayers would pay only two rates: 10 percent up to $100,000 for joint filers and 25 percent on income more than that.
In the WSJ, Kimberley Strassel tells how the Obami and other liberals are using community organizing tactics to try to smear that plan.
… The cameras rolling, the president praised Mr. Ryan for putting forward a “serious proposal.” He in fact singled out the congressman at least three times. Having done his spotlight bit, Mr. Obama then left it to the rest of the Democratic Party to systematically distort and trash the road map.
Within two days of the retreat, Obama budget director Peter Orszag had begun deflecting questions about the White House’s ugly budget by hammering on Mr. Ryan’s plan, claiming it “shifted costs” to families. Congressional Democrats held a conference call with reporters devoted to road map trashing, howling that it showed that Republicans would privatize Social Security, voucherize Medicare, and give tax breaks to the wealthy. Speaker Nancy Pelosi lambasted the Ryan plan in a speech to the Democratic National Committee.
Democrats used it to turn the health discussion, claiming it was hypocritical of Republicans to hit Democrats for slashing Medicare when Mr. Ryan’s plan would also cut the program. They used it to stoke populist fears. California’s Loretta Sanchez claimed the road map would both “privatize” Social Security and leave it to the “whims of Wall Street.”
Connecticut’s John Larson (a member of the Democratic leadership) introduced a resolution to force Republicans to oppose Social Security “privatization” in a high-profile vote. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already announced ads targeting 12 House Republicans, “calling on them to come clean with seniors” whether they support “House Republicans’ extreme budget plan that privatizes Social Security and Medicare.” As hoped, the assault re-energized liberal bloggers and the base.
Better yet for Democrats, some Republicans are falling into the trap. As with its campaign last year to smear Republican Whip Eric Cantor, the White House’s attack on Mr. Ryan is designed to isolate and discredit one of the GOP’s brightest thinkers. So it only aids the White House when “anonymous” Republican members—annoyed that they must have this debate—gripe to the press that Mr. Ryan doesn’t “speak” for them. …
Jennifer Rubin comments on Biden trying to own Iraq success.
Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, the saying goes. Well, we’ve seen that by the bushel-full from the Obami. First, they hide behind George W. Bush’s skirts on the handling of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists (whom, unlike Bush, they can’t bring themselves to call by name). Now they are claiming credit for the triumph of the Iraq war, …
Max Boot says that it’s actually a good thing for the Obami to claim an Iraqi victory as theirs.
… The best news I’ve read about Iraq in a while is that, as Jennifer points out, Joe Biden is claiming that “a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government … could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” Some might dismiss this as chutzpah from someone who, like Barack Obama, opposed the surge needed to stabilize the situation in Iraq. But, brazen or not, it’s great to see the Obama administration taking ownership of Iraq and realizing that simply pulling out all our troops can’t be the sole goal of our policy there. We have to make sure that the Iraq we leave behind is stable, secure, and preferably democratic.
Peter Wehner also weighs in.
…If Obama and Biden had had their way, they would have engineered an epic American military loss. They would have handed jihadists their most important victory ever. And in Iraq mass death, and quite probably genocide, would have followed.
It was also the previous administration, not the Obama administration, which is responsible for the Status of Forces agreement that is unwinding, in a responsible way, American involvement in Iraq.
More important, the success we’re experiencing in Iraq is due above all to the most remarkable fighting force in the world: the United States military; to commanders like David Petraeus, who implemented a new strategy when it was clear the old one was failing; and to the Iraqis themselves, who are taking impressive, if halting, steps toward self-government. …
Abe Greenwald thinks cutting NASA funding is a bad idea. Too bad the astronauts and aerospace engineers aren’t unionized; then Obama would be happy to throw money at them.
Charles Krauthammer points out that, come 2011, “for the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the U.S. will have no access of its own for humans into space — and no prospect of getting there in the foreseeable future.” Barack Obama’s budget kills NASA’s Constellation program, the successor to the Shuttle. …
… China – as the New York Times columnists never tire of telling us — is leading the world in electric bicycles, solar panels, and speed trains. It has been suggested that the next man on the Moon will be Chinese. The truth is, electric bicycles, solar panels, speed trains, and even Moon travel are decades-old novelties — the kind of stuff that a country desperate to be seen as a great innovator would love to tout. But real innovation won’t come from obscurantist autocracies. It will come from parties living in free countries. It will come from sources like the Ad Astra Rocket Company of Webster, Texas, which recently developed the most powerful plasma engine in the world; it gets as hot as the surface of the sun. As it happens, the head of Ad Astra is a former NASA astronaut with the beautifully American name, Franklin Chang-Diaz. …
Jonathan Petre, in the Daily Mail, UK, reports on a BBC interview with the Phil Jones the man who ran the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia.
Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’
The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.
Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.
The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.
Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.
The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made. …
David Warren discusses the lie in the theory of life in the Primordial Soup.
…In a series of laughable experiments through the 1960s and ’70s, Darwinian biologists mixed various recipes for this hypothetical soup, then zapped them with energy this way and that, without any success whatever. Frankenstein’s monster simply would not stir from their puddle.
This soup nonsense is still presented in biology textbooks, as if it were true. But in an important paper in the journal BioEssays this week, William Martin et al., of the Institute of Botany III in Düsseldorf, spilled the last drop of it onto the trash heap of history. They summarize effectively why it not only did not work, but could not work, under laboratory or any other conditions.
Instead, following footsteps of the geochemist Michael J. Russell, they guess the first simple cells originated in geothermal vents under the oceans, where concentrated energy could work upon a rich variety of minerals. My reader must go to the sources to read the new “kick-start” hypothesis. …
John Fund in a send off for Charlie Wilson and John Murtha gives us a taste of how Washington used to work.
…But the secrecy and skullduggery that Wilson said served the country well had a flip side. When Murtha died he had become a symbol of suspect pork-barrel projects linked to campaign contributions. Last May, he dismissed complaints by telling reporters, “If I’m corrupt, it’s because I take care of my district.” …
…Murtha was named an unindicted co-conspirator in Abscam, an FBI sting operation in which agents offered members of Congress bribes. A tape showed Murtha describing “the secret” of how a public official can take a bribe and get away with it. He told the undercover agents he was turning them down for now: “You know, you made an offer. . . . After we’ve done some business, well, then I might change my mind.” E. Barrett Prettyman Jr., the special prosecutor appointed by House Ethics Committee, was building a complaint against Murtha; he was also probing links between Abscam and O’Neill’s office.
That prompted O’Neill to shut down the probe. According to Crile’s book, O’Neill called Wilson into his office and said he wanted him to join the Ethics Committee. Wilson had been pestering him to get a lifetime seat on the board of the Kennedy Center. “It’s the best perk in town,” Wilson told Crile. O’Neill would appoint Wilson, but he’d have to join the Ethics Committee to take care of Murtha.
Wilson didn’t need any prodding: “He was a happy warrior as he raced to the rescue of his imperiled friend John Murtha,” Crile wrote. “Before Prettyman could fully deploy his investigators to move on the Murtha case, he was informed that the committee had concluded there was no justification for an investigation.” …
In the Corner, Lisa Schiffren comments on Charlie Wilson’s war.
Charlie Wilson did not, as the eponymous movie would have it, singlehandedly force the U.S. government to aid the Afghan Mujaheddin in killing Commies and liberating their country from the Soviet grip. Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey, and a large handful of congressmen and senators, dedicated staffers, and a few good people in the national-security apparatus all had a hand. But Wilson did pull strings and push buttons, at the right time, and make important things happen, while imbuing the cause with raffish Texan charm. And, most important, he pushed back hard against the permanent bureaucracy at the CIA that had chosen the wrong guys to back, and the wrong way to back them. …
Michael Rubin adds an interesting twist to this story, in the Corner.
…It’s interesting to read the declassified reports from the time. Here’s the conclusion from a CIA assessment entitled “The Costs of Soviet Involvement in Afghanistan,” from February 1987:
Despite the increasing trends, however, the economic costs resulting from these operational developments are unlikely, in our view, to be of sufficient magnitude to constitute a significant counterweight to the political and security implications the Soviets would attach to withdrawal under circumstances that could be seen as a defeat. Indeed, we believe the recent rising trend in economic cost is more a reflection of determination in Moscow to counter a better armed insurgency and this shows continued willingness to incur whatever burden is necessary.
So there you have it. Right before the Soviets decided to withdraw, the CIA concluded that nothing could force the Soviets to withdraw. I always look at this document as a useful reminder to the importance of separating intelligence analysis from policy. Intelligence should color policy, certainly, but it should not supplant it. While raw intelligence can be useful, often the intelligence community’s consensus documents are not. At the very least, they must be taken with a grain of salt. After all, a natural conclusion from this document — perhaps the one which the Agency was pushing — was that we could not win by sponsoring insurgency in Afghanistan; perhaps diplomacy would be better. Men like Charlie Wilson may have been in the minority, but fortunately they were in the right place at the right time and had a president serving over them like Ronald Reagan
John Tierney opines that corporate-backed research does not automatically signify biased research.
…Sure, money matters to everyone; the more fears that Dr. Pachauri and Mr. Gore stoke about climate change, the more money is liable to flow to them and the companies and institutions they are affiliated with. Given all the accusations they have made about the financial motives of climate change “deniers,” there is a certain justice in having their own finances investigated.
But I don’t doubt that Mr. Gore and Dr. Pachauri would be preaching against fossil fuels even if there were no money in it for them, just as I don’t doubt that skeptics would be opposing them for no pay. Why are journalists and ethics boards so quick to assume that money, particularly corporate money, is the first factor to look at when evaluating someone’s work?
One reason is laziness. …