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Some of our favorites continue to find fault with last week’s faux summit. Mark Steyn first.
In years to come – assuming, for the purposes of argument, there are any years to come – scholars will look back at President Barack Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit and marvel. For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it’s difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia and Thailand …but not even mentioning Germany.
Yet that’s what Obama just did: He held a nuclear gabfest in 2010, the biggest meeting of world leaders on American soil since the founding of the United Nations 65 years ago – and Iran wasn’t on the agenda.
Granted that almost all of Obama’s exciting innovative “change we can believe in” turns out to have been exhumed direct from the sclerotic Seventies to stagger around like a rotting zombie in polyester bell-bottoms from some straight-to-video sequel, there’s still something almost touchingly quaint in the notion of an international summit on nuclear “nonproliferation” in the 21st century. Five years ago, when there was still a chance the world might prevent a nuclear Iran rather than pretending to “contain” it, I remember the bewildered look from a “nonproliferation expert” on a panel I was on after I suggested non-proliferation was a laughably obsolescent frame for this discussion. You could just about enforce nonproliferation back in the Cold War when the only official nuclear powers were the Big Five at the U.N. Security Council and the entry level for the nuclear club was extremely expensive and technologically sophisticated. Now it’s not. If Pakistan and North Korea can be nuclear powers, who can’t? North Korea’s population is starving. Its GDP per capita is lower than Ghana, lower than Zimbabwe, lower than Mongolia. Which is to say its GDP is all but undetectable.
Yet it’s a nuclear power.
That’s what anachronistic nonproliferation mumbo-jumbo gets you. …
… In a characteristic display of his now-famous modesty, President Obama reacted to the hostility of the Tax Day tea parties by saying, “You would think they should be saying ‘thank you’” – for all he’s done for them. Right now, the fellows saying “thank you” are the mullahs, the Politburo, Czar Putin and others hostile to U.S. interests who’ve figured out they now have the run of the planet. …
Charles Krauthammer next.
… So what was the major breakthrough announced by Obama at the end of the two-day conference? That Ukraine, Chile, Mexico and Canada will be getting rid of various amounts of enriched uranium.
What a relief. I don’t know about you, but I lie awake nights worrying about Canadian uranium. I know these people. I grew up there. You have no idea what they’re capable of doing. If Sidney Crosby hadn’t scored that goal to win the Olympic gold medal, there’s no telling what might have ensued.
Let us stipulate that sequestering nuclear material is a good thing. But, it is a minor thing, particularly when Iran is off the table and Pakistan is creating new plutonium for every ounce of Canadian uranium shipped to the United States.
Perhaps calculating that removing relatively small amounts of fissile material from stable, friendly countries didn’t quite do the trick, Obama proudly announced that the United States and Russia were disposing of 68 tons of plutonium. Unmentioned was the fact that this agreement was reached 10 years ago — and, under the new protocol, doesn’t begin to dispose of the plutonium until 2018. Feeling safer now?
The appropriate venue for such minor loose-nuke agreements is a meeting of experts in Geneva who, after working out the details, get their foreign ministers to sign off. Which made this parade of world leaders in Washington an exercise in misdirection — distracting attention from the looming threat from Iran, regarding which Obama’s 15 months of terminally naive “engagement” has achieved nothing but the loss of 15 months. …
In Contentions, John Steele Gordon notes the garbage the administration’s house economists must spew. His targets are Krugman and Summers.
If an astronomer were to casually claim that Ptolemy was right and the sun revolves around the earth, or if a paleontologist were to suddenly subscribe to Archbishop Ussher’s idea that the world was created as we know it now in the night preceding October 23, 4004 BCE, they would be laughed out of their disciplines. The evidence for the modern understanding of such matters is, after all, overwhelming. So to make such a claim would require massive and unequivocal data to back it up.
However, if an economist does the equivalent, the entire profession, instead of collapsing in laughter, says, ” . . . . oh, look! A squirrel!” Economists, it seems, suffer no loss of respect by their peers if they utter ex cathedra pronouncements that are in flat contradiction of the most basic tenets of the discipline. All they have to do is to be advancing a political agenda at the time, and all — no matter how ridiculous — is forgiven. …
David Harsanyi looks at Tea Party folks.
Yesterday, I waded into a mass of Tea Party protesters gathered at the front of Colorado’s Capitol and completely forgot to brace myself for a “small-scale mimicry of Kristall- nacht” (as New York Times columnist Frank Rich once characterized these events).
As it turns out, earlier I happened to peruse a new CBS/New York Times poll detailing the attitudes of Tea Party activists, who, it turns out, are more educated than the average American, more reflective of mainstream anxieties than any populist movement in memory and more closely aligned philosophically with the wider electorate than any big city newsroom in America.
What seemed to be the biggest news derived from the poll nationally? A plurality of Tea Party activists do not deem Sarah Palin qualified for the presidency — proving, I suppose, that some people have the ability to be exceptionally fond of a political celebrity without elevating her to sainthood. …
Robert Samuelson says when it comes to taxes, today might be the good old days.
Almost nobody likes tax day, but people may look back nostalgically on tax day 2010 and those of earlier years because, almost certainly, taxes are going up in the future, and they may go up a lot. With hindsight, tax day 2010 may seem almost dreamy.
Why? For starters, almost half of U.S. households aren’t paying any income taxes on their 2009 earnings. The exact figure is 47 percent, says the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, two think tanks. Among elderly households, 55 percent pay no income tax; among all households with children (including those headed by single parents), the nonpaying share is 54 percent. By contrast, only 38 percent of married couples filing jointly don’t pay. (Of course, this doesn’t mean people pay no federal taxes; about three quarters of households pay more in Social Security payroll taxes than in income taxes.)
The personal exemption and standard deduction, combined with the child tax credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, shield many poor and middle-class families from the income tax. In 2009 they got extra protection from President Obama’s Making Work Pay tax credit, which was $400 for single workers (phasing out at $75,000 of income) and $800 for a couple (phasing out at $150,000 of income). Without that credit, probably only 40 percent of households or less wouldn’t have paid income taxes. President Obama has proposed that the credit be renewed for 2011. But given the massive federal budget deficits, there’s a good chance that the credit will someday expire.
So that’s one pressure for higher taxes. But it’s peanuts compared to the real threat: an aging America. …
A couple of Corner Posts from Mark Steyn. One on Obama’s latest biography and one on Apartheid practiced by Palestinians.
… Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israel Defense Forces general who now serves as Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategic affairs minister, posed the following query in an interview published in the Jerusalem Post: “If we are talking about coexistence and peace, why the [Palestinian] insistence that the territory they receive be ethnically cleansed of Jews? Why do those areas have to be Judenrein? …
The next appointment to the Court is critical, right? Stuart Taylor says not so much.
At both ends of the ideological spectrum, politicians, activists, journalists, and academics like to stress how big a change the next Supreme Court justice could make in the course of the law. The appointment will, says the conventional wisdom, be among President Obama’s most important legacies.
Many also stress how far to the right (say liberals) or left (say conservatives) of center the Supreme Court has been in recent years, the better to dramatize the need to correct the perceived imbalance.
And the dominant media image has been of “the conservative Court” (recent articles in The Washington Post), or “the Supreme Court’s conservative majority” (New York Times editorials), or a Court “as conservative as it’s been in nearly a century” (Newsweek commentary by my friend Dahlia Lithwick).
All this brings to mind three contrarian theses.
First, it simply won’t make much difference in the next five or so years — if ever — whom Obama picks from the lists of moderately liberal, extremely liberal, and just plain liberal candidates leaked by the White House.
Indeed, I can’t think of a single case or issue that would foreseeably be decided differently depending on whether the nominee turns out to be the most or the least liberal of those under serious consideration. …
WSJ’s Weekend Interview is with Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.
‘I said all during the campaign last year that I was going to govern as if I was a one-termer,” explains New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on a visit this week to the Journal’s editorial board. “And everybody felt that it was just stuff you say during a campaign to sound good. I think after the first 12 weeks, given the stuff I’ve done, they figure: ‘He’s just crazy enough to do it.’”
Call it crazy, or just call it sensible: Mr. Christie is on a mission to make New Jersey competitive once again in the contest to attract people and capital. During last fall’s campaign, while his opponent obliquely criticized Mr. Christie’s size, some Republicans worried that their candidate was squishy—that he wasn’t serious about cutting spending and reining in taxes. Turns out they were wrong.
Listen to Mr. Christie’s take on the state of his state: “We are, I think, the failed experiment in America—the best example of a failed experiment in America—on taxes and bigger government. Over the last eight years, New Jersey increased taxes and fees 115 times.” New Jersey’s residents now suffer under the nation’s highest tax burden. Yet the tax hikes haven’t come close to matching increases in spending. Mr. Christie recently introduced a $29.3 billion state budget to eliminate a projected $11 billion deficit for fiscal year 2011. …