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In NewsBusters, Tom Blumer reviews the bad economic news that the media isn’t reporting.
…The government almost always runs an April surplus because it’s the biggest month for tax collections. Individual filers have to settle up what’s left of their previous year’s liabilities with Uncle Sam on April 15, and the first installments of current-year individual and corporate estimated taxes are also due.
But as seen in the chart that follows, April receipts have cratered during the past two years by stunning amounts compared to April 2007 and 2008. The April 2010 plunge continues a nearly unbroken trend of year-over-year declines in monthly receipts going back almost two years…
In Real Clear Markets, John Tamny explains the reason why oil prices haven’t fallen.
…In each instance commentators mistake the symptom of expensive oil for its true cause. Von Mises frequently touched on money values in his brilliant expositions on markets, and it’s because the dollar has no true value or fixed definition that oil is presently expensive. In short, oil is dear because the dollar in which it’s priced is cheap. …
…The good news, however, is that this can be fixed. As evidenced by the dollar’s major decline versus gold this decade, the dollar is very cheap. The dollar’s debased nature explains expensive spot oil prices, high prices at the pump, and most important of all, it helps explain a difficult job outlook. With so much soggy money flowing into commodities least vulnerable to dollar weakness, the entrepreneurial economy where most jobs are created is losing out. …
Peter Wehner comments on a lecture he heard given by General Petraeus about the dramatic turnaround in Iraq.
…It is fashionable in some circles to emphasize the limits of policy when it comes to improving everyday life in a nation, particularly in one as shattered as Iraq was. That is of course sometimes the case. But in other instances, when the intellectual foundation is right and when the correct lessons from history and human experience are drawn, things can unfold much faster and much better than we anticipate.
A second lesson to draw from General Petraeus’s lecture is that we are witnessing one of the most remarkable, far-reaching reforms of an institution in our lifetime. (David Brooks devotes his column to this topic.) All large institutions are difficult to reform. Old habits are hard to uproot. People become settled in their ways, invested in policies they have advocated. Thinking becomes rutted. And there is of course a widespread human reluctance to engage in searching self-examination and to admit mistakes. All of which makes the transformation we are witnessing amazing. The intellectual orientation of the Army is significantly different from what it was less than a half-decade ago. How that occurred, and precisely how the (intellectual) tectonic plates shifted, is something that will be studied for decades to come. …
David Brooks also attended the lecture and writes about the change that occurred within the Army.
…Five years ago, the United States Army was one sort of organization, with a certain mentality. Today, it is a different organization, with a different mentality. It has been transformed in the virtual flash of an eye, and the story of that transformation is fascinating for anybody interested in the flow of ideas. …
…The process was led by these dual-consciousness people — those who could be practitioners one month and then academic observers of themselves the next. They were neither blinkered by Army mind-set, like some of the back-slapping old guard, nor so removed from it that their ideas were never tested by reality, like pure academic theoreticians.
It’s a wonder that more institutions aren’t set up to encourage this sort of alternating life. Business schools do it, but most institutions are hindered by guild customs, by tenure rules and by the tyranny of people who can only think in one way.
Spengler is not a fan of General Petraeus.
…Petraeus accomplished the same thing with (literally) bags of money. Starting with Iraq, the American military has militarized large parts of the Middle East and Central Asia in the name of pacification. And now America is engaged in a grand strategic withdrawal from responsibility in the region, leaving behind men with weapons and excellent reason to use them.
Petraeus’ “surge” of 2007-2008 drastically reduced the level of violence in Iraq by absorbing most of the available Sunni fighters into an American-financed militia, the “Sons of Iraq,” or Sunni Awakening. With American money, weapons and training, the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime have turned into a fighting force far more effective than the defunct dictator’s state police. And now the American military is doing the same thing in Afghanistan, and, under General Keith Dayton, in Palestine. America is pouring money – which is to say weapons – into disputed areas of Afghanistan, and building the core of a Palestinian army. The latter’s mission is to impose a pro-Western Palestinian government on a population of whom two-thirds oppose the two-state solution. It more likely will end up fighting Israel. …
…Petraeus made his reputation on the surge, and needs someone to blame for its prospective failure. His choice is Israel. A great deal of ink has been spilled over Petraeus’ March 16 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which the CENTCOM commander blamed the Israel-Palestine conflict for inflaming Muslim sentiment against the United States. …
In Forbes, Reihan Salam discusses the oil spill and energy alternatives.
…We only have one non-terrible option for reducing our reliance on oil, and that’s sharply increasing our reliance on nuclear power. As Peter Huber observes in the latest issue of City Journal, the success of antinuclear activists in killing the 100 nuclear power plants that were in the pipeline as of 30 years ago has led to an increase in coal consumption in the neighborhood of 400 million tons a year. …
David Warren gives his thoughts on the British election.
…The pound took its beating in world currency markets at the prospect of a “hung parliament.” This is because the people holding the debt know that big bold changes are required — deep spending cuts, or vertiginous new taxes, or both — to restore solvency. They know a minority government can’t deliver such goods, and they are now looking hard at lethal violence in response to mere half-measures in Greece. The financiers may not have a very nuanced picture, but they do get the gist. …
Mark Steyn also weighs in.
…And what was that worth in the end? There was a swing of over six per cent against Labour, and barely three-fifths of that went to the Conservatives. I can’t say I’ve ever cared for Cameron, but, whenever I raised the point with Tory heavyweights, I was told that they didn’t personally care for him either but “he smelt like a winner”. As I wrote over four years ago:
This is dangerously close to the rationale of Democratic primary voters in 2004, when they told pollsters that what they liked most about John Kerry was his “electability”. Sadly, electability isn’t enough to get you elected. …
In the Corner, Peter Robinson follows up on a Steyn comment.
“I seem to recall,” Mark Steyn writes below, that when a couple of months ago David Cameron and his Tory Party still commanded an enormous lead over Gordon Brown and Labour, “more than a few Republican ‘reformers’ were recommending the Cameronization of the Republican Party.” Now that Cameron has blown his lead to produce the first hung Parliament in more than three decades, Mark seems to suppose, no one will ever again hold up the present Tory Party as a model for the GOP.
Silly him.
Herewith David Brooks on the NewsHour, not 24 hours ago, speaking of the “impact” of the British election “on the Republican Party”…