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In Investor’s Business Daily, Jeffrey Anderson takes measure of Obama’s spending.
…Liberals like to point to deficit spending in the Reagan era. Of the eight congressional budgets that President Ronald Reagan signed, all of which were passed by a heavily Democratic House and nearly half by a Democratic Senate, the average deficit was $177 billion, or 4.1% of GDP. The average projected deficit for the two budgets that President Obama has proposed, also to a heavily Democratic Congress, is $1.412 trillion, or 9.3% of GDP.
Despite not having had to fund Cold War-level expenditures on defense (the defense budget was 64% higher under Reagan than under Obama, even as a percentage of GDP), Obama’s annual deficits are, by any measure, easily doubling Reagan’s — and that’s not even counting his 2009 deficit spending.
In truth, we’ve never amassed deficits remotely approaching those that President Obama and this Congress are amassing when we were not fighting in the World Wars or the Civil War. We’ve never run up deficits that were even close.
The historical record yields an inescapable conclusion: This White House and this Congress have been the most fiscally irresponsible in American history. And that’s setting the record straight.
Charles Krauthammer has an excellent piece on how liberals are criticizing constitutional processes rather than Obama’s poor leadership.
…Of course, just yesterday the same Paul Krugman was warning about “extremists” trying “to eliminate the filibuster” when Democrats used it systematically to block one Bush (43) judicial nomination after another. Back then, Democrats touted it as an indispensable check on overweening majority power. Well, it still is. Indeed, the Senate with its ponderous procedures and decentralized structure is serving precisely the function the Founders intended: as a brake on the passions of the House and a caution about precipitous transformative change.
Leave it to Mickey Kaus, a principled liberal who supports health-care reform, to debunk these structural excuses: “Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama’s (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. . . . But in this case there’s a simpler explanation: Barack Obama’s job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed.”
…The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public opinion polls, then in elections — Virginia, New Jersey and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.
That’s not a structural defect. That’s a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself — despite the special interests — through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.
The Economist also dismisses the claim that American institutions are the problem.
…America’s political structure was designed to make legislation at the federal level difficult, not easy. Its founders believed that a country the size of America is best governed locally, not nationally. True to this picture, several states have pushed forward with health-care reform. The Senate, much ridiculed for antique practices like the filibuster and the cloture vote, was expressly designed as a “cooling” chamber, where bills might indeed die unless they commanded broad support.
Broad support from the voters is something that both the health bill and the cap-and-trade bill clearly lack. Democrats could have a health bill tomorrow if the House passed the Senate version. Mr Obama could pass a lot of green regulation by executive order. It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favours. …
In the Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez relays a letter written by three priests about the defunding of the D.C. voucher program.
Three prominent priests from the University of Notre Dame — one a bit of a liberal icon, another one who honored Barack Obama last May — have written to Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Senator Durbin to protest the “unconscionable” termination of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. They write, in part:
“For the past decade, the University of Notre Dame, through its Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE), has served as the nation’s largest provider of teachers and principals for inner-city Catholic schools. Since 1993, we have prepared more than 1,000 teachers and hundreds of principals to work in some of the poorest Catholic schools in the nation. That experience… leads us to an unqualified conclusion: the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program provides an educational lifeline to at-risk children, standing unequivocally as one of the greatest signs of hope for K-12 educational reform. To allow its demise, to effectively force more than 1,700 poor children from what is probably the only good school they’ve ever attended, strikes us as an unconscionable affront to the ideal of equal opportunity for all.
Three decades of research tell us that Catholic schools are often the best providers of educational opportunity to poor and minority children. Students who attend Catholic schools are 42 percent more likely to graduate from high school and are two and a half times more likely to graduate from college than their peers in public schools. Recent scholarship on high school graduation rates in Milwaukee confirms that programs like the OSP can, over time, create remarkable opportunities for at-risk children. And after only three years, the research commissioned by the Department of Education is clear and strong with regard to the success of the OSP, as you both well know. … Parents of OSP students argue that their children are doing better in school, and they report that these scholarships have given their families an opportunity to break the cycle of poverty. …”
Michael Barone says rather than sitting around smiling and counting imaginary votes the GOP needs a plan to address the nation’s problems.
…A Republican Congress could take up the suggestion of recently appointed Florida Sen. George LeMieux to cut spending back to 2007 levels. The 2009 stimulus package raised the budget baselines of many domestic programs. They could be cut back again.
But beyond that loom the problems of ever-expanding entitlements: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Rep. Paul Ryan has advanced a “road map” to cut spending by means-testing benefits, replacing Medicare with vouchers to pay for health insurance for beneficiaries currently under age 55, and providing refundable tax credits for health insurance premiums for the nonelderly. It would allow but not require employees under 55 to set up personal retirement accounts in place of the current Social Security program. …
…Better to put into place public policies that will be enduring as party majorities come and go. This is what the Republican Congress elected in 1946 did: It repealed wartime wage and price controls, it revised labor law to reduce unions’ powers and it provided bipartisan support for Harry Truman’s Cold War policies. Democrats won back congressional majorities in 1948, but Republicans’ policies stayed in place, shaping prosperous postwar America.
Americans have rejected the Europeanizing policies of the Obama Democrats. Republicans may get a chance to put us on a better American path. They need to be prepared to do so.
In the WSJ, Dorothy Rabinowitz has some criticisms of Sarah that are worth Palin’s consideration.
…Though it hasn’t attracted wide attention, nothing Mrs. Palin has done recently has been worthier of notice than her endorsement of Rand Paul, now running in Kentucky’s GOP senate primary. Dr. Paul, an ophthalmologist and radical libertarian, holds views on national security and defense that have much in common with those of the far left. …
…On one or two things his own views are clear: He stands opposed to the Patriot Act and he wants to cut defense spending.
Asked about her endorsement of this candidate, Mrs. Palin informed Mr. Wallace she was proud of her choice. She admired Rand Paul’s domestic policies, not of course that she agreed with everything he stood for. It does not, apparently, occur to her that everything he stands for—and can vote on—is precisely what comes into play when, and if, he becomes a senator with her help.
Mrs. Palin regularly invokes the name of the most revered of her heroes, Ronald Reagan—among the sunniest stars ever to mount the political stage, and a leader who spoke to all of America. He did not appeal to the aggrieved. Nor did he see in the oratory of grievance, or talk of real Americans and those who were not, a political platform.
In the Corner, Michael Potemra comments on these and other criticisms.
…Which brings me to George Will, who writes: “Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska’s governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states. Conservatives, who rightly respect markets as generally reliable gauges of consumer preferences, should notice that the political market is speaking clearly: The more attention Palin receives, the fewer Americans consider her presidential timber. The latest Post-ABC News poll shows that 71 percent of Americans — including 52 percent of Republicans — think she is not qualified to be president.” …
…Will admits that Palin is “feisty and public-spirited,” and – as if to validate my comment on the Rabinowitz piece — that “millions of people vibrate like tuning forks to her rhetoric.” The gravamen of his substantive objection to Palin – i.e., as opposed to the highly questionable assertion that she can’t win — is that while she has “showed grit . . . she has also showed that grit is no substitute for seasoning.” The thing about seasoning, though, is that it can come with time. I have seen already that Palin is a political natural, so I have little doubt she has the raw political talents to win people’s affections: In this regard, she reminds me of no one so much as of Bill Clinton, who in the 1992 primaries managed to turn catastrophe into political gold. He, too, used every attack against him as an opportunity to make the central political story entirely about himself, and emerged as a result as a highly sympathetic person in the eyes of middle America — sympathetic enough to defeat an incumbent president who not long before had enjoyed a 91 percent approval rating. …
David Harsanyi takes the remaining global-warming-sky-is-falling-you-can’t-see-my-data types to task.
…We’ve all heard the average environmentalist get a bit hysterical with tales of impending catastrophes as a way to motivate us. But these reports were edited by scientists. Can we count on them to always be honest and apolitical? The only way to know is transparency.
So let’s revisit the case of National Center for Atmospheric Research senior scientist Kevin Trenberth, who this week on National Public Radio blamed the heavy snowfall, in part, on global warming, proving that even very smart experts can use weather to further the cause.
Trenberth, who has no problem taking a salary and nearly full funding from taxpayers, is not as keen on complying with Freedom of Information Act requests. …
…Then there is NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Chris Horner at the free market Competitive Enterprise Institute has been trying for years to have the organization release information about the inner workings of Goddard. As a government agency — in this case, without any the national security issues to worry about — it has an obligation to comply. …
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders discusses greenthink: no matter what the data or the weather is, it must be global warming.
…Last week, Phil Jones, the unit’s director at the time of the e-mail leak, answered tough questions posed by the BBC in an interview, during which he admitted that there has been no statistically significant warming of the planet since 1995. Jones also rejected Al Gore’s mantra when he said he did not believe that “the vast majority of climate scientists think” the debate over climate change is over.
Like the Wicked Witch of Oz, the global-warming machine is melting into a wretched puddle.
…The alarmists also have taken to scolding skeptics who have pointed to this year’s record snowfalls as dimwits who do not know the difference between weather and climate. This is choice – after all the years during which the global-warming believers pointed to every warm season, low-snowfall report and storm as proof that the “tipping point” was near. …