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David Goldman comments on the state of the economy and what lies ahead.
…We see the magical incantation, “There’s no place like home!,” in numerous guises. The unemployed–20% of Americans according to a Gallup poll of 20,000 individuals–are more likely to support President Obama than the general public. They still hope against hope that Obama will wave a magic wand and allow them to click their heels and go home. I dubbed him “Obama bin Lottery” in January 2008 after his surprise South Carolina primary victory. With nothing to lose, the unemployed might as well hope…
…Americans have trouble realizing how much trouble they have. The numbers trickling out during the past couple of weeks suggest a Wile E. Coyote effect, to mix pop culture metaphors. During 2009, most people just didn’t look down. But with 30% of home mortgages at the waterline or below it, and a 20% effective unemployment rate, the household balance sheet is shot–and so is the balance sheet of small business. In January, Americans took a collective look down, and the numbers began to plunge like the Road Runner’s canine nemesis. The first to go, of course, was consumer confidence, a squishy number to be sure, but one that does not often show a 10-point drop. …
…The US economy simply can’t run on 20% unemployment. Consumers will go to the mattresses, retail and service business will drop like flies, investors will pull in their horns, and things will get worse. The only way to reverse the problem is to persuade capital to take more risk, and the only available policy lever to accomplish this is the elimination of taxes on capital income–interest, dividends, and capital gains. As the Obama administration is proposing the precise opposite (an increase in taxation of all these categories supposedly for Medicare) it is more likely that policy will aggravate the problem rather than cure it. …
John Hinderaker of Power Line posts about the Obami refusal to back the UK in the newest dispute with Argentina.
…Why Barack Obama hates England is hard to say, but his antipathy is distressingly real. Now, Obama has declared that the U.S. is neutral with regard to the Falklands. The Telegraph headlines: “Et tu, Barack? America betrays Britain in her hour of need”:
Washington has declined to back Britain in its dispute with Argentina over drilling rights in the waters surrounding the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands. …
…For this alliance to survive, both countries must recognise their obligations and, from time to time, that involves one of us setting aside more localised concerns for the sake of the cause. Tony Blair would have preferred it if President Bush had been prepared to wait for a second UN resolution before launching the invasion of Iraq, but he decided that Britain should follow America into battle nevertheless. He recognised that the preservation of the Atlantic alliance had to be prioritised above all else, both for our sake and the sake of the world. …
…So it is truly shocking that Barack Obama has decided to disregard our shared history and insist that we have to fight this battle on our own. …
It is astonishing that any administration could make such a mess of both domestic and foreign policy in barely more than a year. One wonders whether we will have any allies left by the end of President Obama’s term in January 2013.
Toby Harnden has a post on Jeb Bush criticizing Sarah Palin.
…Bush then delivers what amounts to a devastating critique of Palin: “I don’t know what her deal is. My belief is in 2010 and 2012 public leaders need to have intellectual curiosity. The world is really an amazing place but it is very complex, it is very fast moving. If you think you’ve got it all figured out, the minute you start thinking that is the first day of your demise.”
Just in case Bush thinks he’s stopped talking about Palin, he adds: “So if she has those skills and she wants to run then she’ll be a great candidate.”
It is hard to dispute that Bush is right on both counts. Palin clearly possesses a rare and natural political talent. But thus far she has displayed very little willingness to build on this by studying the world and coming up with some intelligent conclusions or questions about it. …
In Investor’s Business Daily, David Hogberg interviews Thomas Sowell about his new book, Intellectuals and Society.
…IBD: What incentives and constraints do intellectuals face?
Sowell: One of the incentives is that, to the extent that intellectuals stay in their specialty, they have little to gain in terms of either prestige or influence on events. Say, an authority in ancient Mayan civilization just writes about ancient Mayan civilization, then only other specialists in ancient Mayan civilization will know what he is talking about or even be aware of him.
So intellectuals have every incentive to go beyond their area of expertise and competence. But stepping beyond your area of competence is like stepping off a cliff — you may be a genius within that area, but an idiot outside it. …
…IBD: How about those who argue that we can use government to move society in a more conservative direction, like compassionate conservatism? Do they suffer from the vision of the anointed?
Sowell: To some extent, yes. Compassionate conservatism meant that Republicans added to the housing problems created by the Democrats rather than mitigating them.
George W. Bush, for example, was for a law that allowed the Federal Housing Administration to do away with nuisances like down payments on houses. And even his father was for the notion that the federal government should intervene if there were statistical differences among groups in housing or mortgage approvals.
These are people who seem to think that the way to be clever politically is to accept some of the premises of Democrats but reach different conclusions. But if you accept the premises, in many cases you’ve accepted the conclusions. …
In the Atlantic, Corby Kummer reports on a fascinating agricultural movement afoot. And Wal-Mart is behind it.
…I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.
The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.
Ron McCormick, the senior director of local and sustainable sourcing for Walmart, told me that about three years ago he came upon pictures from the 1920s of thriving apple orchards in Rogers, Arkansas, eight miles from the company’s headquarters. Apples were once shipped from northwest Arkansas by railroad to St. Louis and Chicago. After Washington state and California took over the apple market, hardly any orchards remained. Cabbage, greens, and melons were also once staples of the local farming economy. But for decades, Arkansas’s cash crops have been tomatoes and grapes. A new initiative could diversify crops and give consumers fresher produce. …
John Tierney looks at the latest nutritional mandate in the making; the evidence for which you can take with a grain of …something.
…That’s the beauty of the salt debate: there’s so little reliable evidence that you can imagine just about any outcome. For all the talk about the growing menace of sodium in packaged foods, experts aren’t even sure that Americans today are eating more salt than they used to. …
…Dr. McCarron and his colleagues analyzed surveys from 33 countries around the world and reported that, despite wide differences in diet and culture, people generally consumed about the same amount of salt. There were a few exceptions, like tribes isolated in the Amazon and Africa, but the vast majority of people ate more salt than recommended in the current American dietary guidelines.
The results were so similar in so many places that Dr. McCarron hypothesized that networks in the brain regulate sodium appetite so that people consume a set daily level of salt. If so, that might help explain one apparent paradox related to reports that Americans are consuming more daily calories than they used to. Extra food would be expected to come with additional salt, yet there has not been a clear upward trend in daily salt consumption evident over the years in urinalysis studies, which are considered the best gauge because they directly measure salt levels instead of relying on estimates based on people’s recollections of what they ate…