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George Will highlights two Republican candidates from South Carolina who have campaigned on ideas.
The libretto of this operatic election season, understandably promoted by Democrats and unsurprisingly sung by many in the media, is that Republicans have sown the seeds of November disappointments by nominating candidates other than those the party’s supposedly wiser establishment prefers. This theory is inconvenienced by two facts: South Carolina’s Nikki Haley and Tim Scott.
“I am a policy girl,” Haley, 38, says demurely. But she is a savvy politician who in 2004 won a state legislature seat by defeating the longest-serving incumbent. Although the state’s Republican establishment opposed her nomination for governor, she won because for two years she has been traveling around the state asking this question: Does anyone think it odd that in 2007 only 8 percent of the decisions by the state House, and only 1 percent of the state Senate’s decisions, were made by recorded votes?
The political class and its parasitic lobbyists preferred government conducted in private. Haley, whose early campaign strategy was exuberantly indiscriminate (“go anywhere and talk to anybody”) won the gubernatorial nomination by defeating the state’s lieutenant governor, its attorney general and a congressman. …
And then we head to the other end of the Republican spectrum, where the Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski’s desperate attempts to hold on to the Senate seat given to her by her father.
…Republican voters last month rejected the incumbent daughter just as they rejected the incumbent father. Princess Lisa lost the primary to Tea Party-backed Fairbanks lawyer Joe Miller — who also boasted the endorsement of Palin.
Republicans are poised to make historic gains against a power-drunk Democratic Party spending America into bankruptcy, but Sen. Murkowski apparently doesn’t care a whit about party or country. To stoke her own ego, she is set to launch a divisive write-in campaign against her own party’s nominee.
…As the Tea Party grass-roots revolt rages, the people have made it clear the Murkowskis represent the past. Defeating her even in her own party’s primary was an extraordinary signal of no confidence for an incumbent senator.
Palin supported the father some years ago in the name of party unity. Now Lisa Murkowski, this princess of a party dynasty, refuses to do the same — just because her name isn’t the one in lights. If there’s any Achilles’ heel that can be exploited against such RINOs, it’s obviously their oversized egos.
In Forbes, Joel Kotkin looks at how sections of the country with a lot of government and stimulus-financed funds are improving, at the expense of the rest of the taxpayers and the national debt. What will happen after the elections is hard to predict: whether there will be enough politicians with faith in market forces to allow productive markets to flourish, to everyone’s benefit.
…It is not surprising then that the capital district enjoys the highest job growth since December 2009 of any region. Indeed, the Great Recession barely even hit the imperial center. Given its current trajectory, it’s likely to remain the primary boom town along the east coast.
There are other less obvious regional winners from Obamanomics. Wall Street, despite its recent wailing, has fattened itself on the Fed’s cheap money. It may benefit further from highly complex new financial regulations that will drive smaller, regional competitors either out of business or into mergers with the megabanks.
Manhattan – a liberal bastion dependent on arguably the greediest, most venal purveyors of capitalism – enjoyed a revived high end consumer economy of high fashion, fancy restaurants and art galleries. Silicon Valley’s financial community also is seeing a surfeit of grants and subsidies for the latest venture schemes, keeping Palo Alto and its environs relatively prosperous. Perhaps this is the positive “change” that Time recently credited in its paen to the stimulus.
Other regional winners from the Obama economy generally can be found in state capitals and University towns, particularly those with the Ivy or elite college pedigrees that resonate with this most academic Administration. One illustration can be seen in the relatively strong recovery of Massachusetts – home to many prestigious Universities and hospitals – which has seen jobs grow by 2.2 percent since the Obama ascension. …
David Goldman sees the bubbles bursting in the public sector and the financial sector after the November elections.
…A great deal of Obama’s $800 billion stimulus went to cover state and local budget gaps. It was political life-support for the hard core of the Democratic party political base, the public employee unions whose generous pension deals have turned into an estimated $3 trillion underfunding gap. As bond yields remain depressed and equity returns remain non-existent that gap will grow.
And we are about to get a Republican Congress populated by candidates who ran on a promise of no more bailouts. In a deep and prolonged recession, the voters simply won’t approve new taxes (or new deficits) to bail out public employees who have it better than most employees in the private sector. The drumbeat against government employees sounds nightly on Fox News.
…The cure for the crisis is to break the public employee unions. It’s as simple as that. Layoffs, salary and pension givebacks, hiring of non-union employees, and so forth will enable cities and states to adjust to the misery of their circumstances. …
In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner blogs that media liberals are starting to see the writing on the wall, and in their newspapers.
…The Post also ran another headline yesterday on its front page – “Republicans making gains ahead of midterm elections” – which would undoubtedly have sent a shudder through the White House. It carried a new poll commissioned jointly with ABC News, which showed public faith in Barack Obama’s leadership has fallen to an all-time low, with just 46 percent approval. The Washington Post-ABC News survey revealed high levels of public unease with President Obama’s handling of the economy, with 57 percent of Americans disapproving, and 58 percent critical of his handling of the deficit.
For most of the year, America’s political and media elites, including the Obama team itself, have touted the notion of an economic recovery (which never materialised), significantly underestimated the rise of the Tea Party movement, and questioned the notion that conservatism was sweeping America. It is only now hitting home just how close Washington is to experiencing a political revolution in November that will fundamentally change the political landscape on Capitol Hill, with huge implications for the Obama presidency. What was once a perspective confined largely to Fox News, online conservative news sites, or talk radio is now gaining ground in the liberal US print media as well – historic change is coming to America, though not quite the version promised by Barack Obama.
Daniel Foster posts on the Florida polls, in the Corner.
From Sunshine State News:
Republican Marco Rubio, garnering surprising strength among independent voters, holds a double-digit lead over his two chief rivals in Florida’s U.S. Senate race, a new Sunshine State News Poll reports. The survey of likely voters shows Rubio with 43 percent, independent Charlie Crist with 29 percent, Democrat Kendrick Meek with 23 percent and the remaining 5 percent undecided. …
The Schumpeter Blog in the Economist discusses the diminishing value of American higher education, thanks to government policies, and whether needed reforms will occur.
…College fees have for decades risen faster than Americans’ ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison.
As costs soar, diligence is tumbling. In 1961 full-time students in four-year colleges spent 24 hours a week studying; that has fallen to 14, estimates the AEI. …
…The most plausible explanation is that professors are not particularly interested in students’ welfare. Promotion and tenure depend on published research, not good teaching. Professors strike an implicit bargain with their students: we will give you light workloads and inflated grades so long as you leave us alone to do our research. Mr Hacker and Ms Dreifus point out that senior professors in Ivy League universities now get sabbaticals every third year rather than every seventh. This year 20 of Harvard’s 48 history professors will be on leave. …
…The Goldwater Institute points to a third poison to add to rising prices and declining productivity: administrative bloat. Between 1993 and 2007 spending on university bureaucrats at America’s 198 leading universities rose much faster than spending on teaching faculty. Administration costs at elite private universities rose even faster than at public ones. For example, Harvard increased its administrative spending per student by 300%. In some universities, such as Arizona State University, almost half the full-time employees are administrators. Nearly all university presidents conduct themselves like corporate titans, with salaries, perks and entourages to match. …
We get interesting anecdotal evidence from a recent graduate at The Frisky.com. Jessica Wakeman writes about her high-priced, impractical education.
I have a lot of regrets about my college education.
I regret that tuition was $40,000 a year, so that my classmates were mostly rich, white kids. I regret that I am paying back thousands in student loans. I regret that my journalism program forced me to take an introductory class on reporting, even though I’d already written articles for my hometown newspaper for two years. … I regret that I wasted time, money, and precious sanity on a required math class that gave me the anxiety attacks of your worst nightmares.
And most of all, I regret that I took as many gender and sexuality studies courses as I did.
Gender and sexuality studies classes ostensibly teach you to analyze the world with a critical lens, focusing on how one’s gender or sexuality impacts their life. Some classes deal with theoretical issues; others focus on literature, history or religion. Lots of gender and sexuality studies students go on to work in law, labor organizing, or social work. …my transcript from that time includes gems like the History of Prostitution, an introduction to grassroots organizing, and a class about pop culture …
…But I could have benefited from more politics, history and literature classes—to learn more about the world in general, rather than one tiny little sliver of the world. There’s a difference between what I thought was “cool” to learn about at the time and what has actually proved useful in life. … I probably could have learned a lot about sex work and labor abuse by reading magazine and newspaper articles on the subjects. But learning more about colonialism? Globalization? The World Wars? Important books? Religion? Supreme Court decisions? That knowledge would have provided such a better foundation for me as a writer than what I think I received from gender studies classes.
…Today I just find myself playing catch-up, reading the great books and researching great moments in history that I should have learned in school.
In Business Insider.com, Vincent Fernando spots an unbelievable story. Read his blog to find out the reason he gives for China’s housing bubble.
Property stocks in China were weak today due to media reports that the Beijing and Shanghai authorities were investigating the high vacancy rate for Chinese property. Markets are worried they’ll be shocked by what they discover and clamp down on speculation even harder than they have.
How large might the vacancy problem be? Here’s a taste:
Recent statistics show that there are about 64 million apartments and houses that have remained empty during the past six months, according to Chinese media reports. On the assumption that each flat serves as a home to a typical Chinese family of three (parents and one child), the vacant properties could accommodate 200 million people, which account for more than 15% of the country’s 1.3 billion population. But instead, they remain empty. This is in part because many Chinese believe that a home is not a real home unless you own the flat. …
J.E. Dyer, in Hot Air, describes what how little the new “green” lightbulbs offset carbon emissions. You’ll enjoy his summation of the facts, which is the only funny thing about this green debacle.
Hot Air’s headlines linked a Washington Post piece today on the closing of the last US manufacturing plant for the humble incandescent light bulb. The article’s focus is on the “irony” of US engineers having come up with the compact-fluorescent lightbulb (CFL), as well as the way to manufacture it efficiently, but the actual manufacturing jobs – which are labor-intensive – having migrated overseas.
Of course, only if you’re a Washington Post writer does it seem ironic to you that manufacturers move their plants to where taxes are lower and all employer costs cheaper. But the article has other unintended ironies – or, at least, fatuous and utterly unexamined statements. The most important one occurs in paragraph 6, near the beginning, and it comes in for critical scrutiny not at all. In fact, it’s expressed in vague, impressionistic terms that ought to get a journalist horsewhipped by a serious editor. Here’s what WaPo tells us about the US decision to force the phase-out of the incandescent bulb…