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David Harsanyi tells conservative commentators to stay on topic and don’t get personal.
…Take the tortured contention of noted conservative author Dinesh D’Souza. In a recent Forbes cover story “How Obama Thinks” he blames the president’s “odd” blame-America-first, re-distributionist behavior on his Kenyan father’s long lost anti-colonial philosophy.
Conservatives have an opening to make an uncluttered argument — using the empirical data of a collapsing economy — that less spending, less regulation and less government is the way to create more prosperity. Dragging Third World colonialism into it — and I can say this with near certitude — is a bad idea on a number of levels.
To begin with, no decent TV-watching American has the faintest clue what you’re talking about. And worse, the spurious claims about rampant right-wing racism will now gain fresh traction. That is, I’m afraid to say, the byproduct of bringing African descent into a perfectly constructive debate about how terrible this administration has been. …
We are reminded of David Harsanyi’s excellent article featured on September 9th that Obama, and liberals, won’t offer tax cuts for everyone because that would undermine their political power. Nevertheless, it is interesting to hear some mainstream folks suggesting tax cuts to stimulate economic recovery. Noriel Roubini, in the WaPo, recommends a short-term payroll tax cut.
…A much better option is for the administration to reduce the payroll tax for two years. The reduced labor costs would lead employers to hire more; for employees, the increased take-home pay would boost much-needed economic consumption and advance the still-crucial process of deleveraging households (paying down credit card debt and other legacies of the easy-credit years).
Most policy approaches, including the Obama proposals, have tended to subsidize the demand for capital rather than the demand for labor. That has the problem backward. In the second quarter, capital spending reached an annual growth rate of 25 percent. The argument that increased demand for capital leads to greater demand for labor (i.e., if you buy more machines you need workers to run them) has not held up. Firms are investing in capital goods, equipment and offshore offices that allow them to produce the same amount of goods with less — and lower labor costs. To avoid a chronic increase in the unemployment rate, we need to subsidize the demand for labor — achieving job creation — rather than making it cheaper to buy capital, as investment and other tax credits would do.
President Obama could fully fund the reduction in payroll tax by allowing the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year to expire. Meanwhile, the Bush-era cuts affecting middle- and low-income earners — the vast majority of Americans — would remain in place for the time being. …
Thomas Sowell presents a series on words and their meanings. In the first article, Thomas Sowell brings up an important discussion. Many well-meaning people in our society have bought into the idea that some people having more wealth than others is unfair, and that government must treat people unequally in order to make up for this unfairness. Sowell argues that making everyone’s life equal is beyond the power of progressives or the scope of any kind of “social justice”.
…No wonder “social justice” has been such a political success for more than a century– and counting.
While the term has no defined meaning, it has emotionally powerful connotations. There is a strong sense that it is simply not right– that it is unjust– that some people are so much better off than others.
…Some advocates of “social justice” would argue that what is fundamentally unjust is that one person is born into circumstances that make that person’s chances in life radically different from the chances that others have– through no fault of one and through no merit of the others.
…There are individuals who were raised by parents who were both poor and poorly educated, but who pushed their children to get the education that the parents themselves never had. Many individuals and groups would not be where they are today without that.
All kinds of chance encounters– with particular people, information or circumstances– have marked turning points in many individual’s lives, whether toward fulfillment or ruin.
None of these things is equal or can be made equal. If this is an injustice, it is not a “social” injustice because it is beyond the power of society. …
In this second article, Thomas Sowell makes an important distinction between health care and medical care. He also looks at some terms that are used to justify government’s inequal treatment of citizens.
…Among the many other catchwords that shut down thinking are “the rich” and “the poor.” When is somebody rich? When they have a lot of wealth. But, when politicians talk about taxing “the rich,” they are not even talking about people’s wealth, and what they are planning to tax are people’s incomes, not their wealth.
If we stop and think, instead of going with the flow of catchwords, it is clear than income and wealth are different things. A billionaire can have zero income. Bill Gates lost $18 billion dollars in 2008 and Warren Buffett lost $25 billion. …But, no matter how low their income was, they were not poor.
By the same token, people who have worked their way up, to the point where they have a substantial income in their later years, are not rich. …A middle-aged or elderly couple making $125,000 each are not rich, even though politicians will tax away what they have earned at the end of decades of working their way up.
Similarly, most of the people who are called “the poor” are not poor. Their low incomes are as transient as the higher incomes of “the rich.” Most of the people in the bottom 20 percent in income end up in the top half of the income distribution in later years. Far more of them reach the top 20 percent than remain in the bottom 20 percent over the years. …
Thomas Sowell, in his third article, looks at the terms liberal and conservative and how ironic these terms are now.
…The late liberal Professor Tony Judt of New York University gave this definition of liberals: “A liberal is someone who opposes interference in the affairs of others: who is tolerant of dissenting attitudes and unconventional behavior.”
According to Professor Judt, liberals favor “keeping other people out of our lives, leaving individuals the maximum space in which to live and flourish as they choose.”
…Communities that have had overwhelmingly liberal elected officials for decades abound in nanny state regulations, micro-managing everything from home-building to garbage collection. …
…Liberals are usually willing to let people violate the traditional standards of the larger society but crack down on those who dare to violate liberals’ own notions and fetishes.
…Liberals often flatter themselves with having the generosity that the word implies. Many of them might be shocked to discover that Ronald Reagan donated a higher percentage of his income to charity than either Ted Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt. Nor was this unusual. Conservatives in general donate more of their income and their time to charitable endeavors and donate far more blood. …
In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner covers a lot of ground in his post: census numbers on poverty, UK v US handling of the fiscal crisis, and how the US needs another Reagan.
The Obama administration is bracing itself for more bad news this week with the release of stunning census figures which are projected to show the biggest increase in poverty in the United States since the 1960s. As Associated Press reports:
…Interviews with six demographers who closely track poverty trends found wide consensus that 2009 figures are likely to show a significant rate increase to the range of 14.7 percent to 15 percent. Should those estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year. It would be the highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980 when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis.
The new figures are an indictment of President Obama’s handling of the economy, and will add to the growing perception that his Big Government agenda has been a spectacular flop. Despite a huge $787 billion stimulus package (with another $50 billion in spending on the way), and a wave of public bailouts, unemployment continues to rise towards 10 percent, and the housing market remains on a downward trajectory. …
The president started attacking John Boehner two weeks ago. So, the NY Times being a loyal organ of the Dem party ran a hit piece last Sunday; front page, above the fold. A couple of the blogs we follow noticed. In the Economist’s Democracy in America Blog, W. W. in Iowa City blogs that Congressman Boehner has received less lobby money this year than Speaker Pelosi. It is amazing how much time and effort has to be spent simply refuting liberals’ lies and distortions.
“WELL, somebody has it out for John Boehner,” I muttered to my empty kitchen as I scanned the front page of my freshly unsheathed Sunday edition of the New York Times. “A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists”, the headline read. But isn’t “tightly bound to lobbyists” packed into the very meaning “Congressman”? Presumably anticipating questions in this vein, the Times reports that “While many lawmakers in each party have networks of donors, lobbyists and former aides who now represent corporate interests, Mr. Boehner’s ties seem especially deep.” And seeming is believing, it seems, because I believed it. “Maybe the bastard has it coming,” I said to the dog, who had ambled in.
Well, I just want to say: I’m sorry, John Boehner. You’re not especially bad.
Timothey Carney, the Washington Examiner’s indispensable lobbying sleuth, today sets the record straight:
[F]rom 1999 until today, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Boehner has raised $299,490 from lobbyists. For comparison, Harry Reid, Blanche Lincoln, and Chuck Schumer have each raised more money from lobbyists in this cycle alone. This election cycle, Boehner is not even in the top 20 recipients of lobbyist cash. He’s raised less than $40,000 from lobbyists this cycle—compared to Nancy Pelosi’s $71,000 from lobbyists. Sure, Boehner is too close to lobbyists, but the money trail says he isn’t closer than Nancy Pelosi. …
John Steele Gordon also comments on the NY Times story on Boehner, in Contentions.
…The story is astonishingly thin. Are his ties to lobbyists “especially tight”? Who knows? The Times gives no examples whatever of the dealings of other Congressional leaders with lobbyists. The Times writes, “From 2000 to 2007, Mr. Boehner flew at least 45 times, often with his wife, Debbie, on corporate jets provided by companies including R. J. Reynolds. (As required, Mr. Boehner reimbursed part of the costs.)” So he didn’t do anything against House rules, apparently. But how does his aeronautical hitchhiking compare with, say, that of Steny Hoyer, the Democratic majority leader, or Sander Levin, the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee? The Times doesn’t bother to say, which raises the suspicion that Democratic leaders like flying around in private jets about as much as Republican ones do. …
…This article, which alleges no wrongdoing and gives no comparisons, is simply an attempt to further the Democrats’ plan to demonize Boehner. It is water carrying, plain and simple, proving only that the Times’s ties with the Democratic Party are especially tight.
To round all this out, in the Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden gives us accurate information about Congressman Boehner. Turns out the man the president is trying to picture as an elitist was the second of 12 children in a middle class suburban Ohio family. Of course, it took a reporter from Great Britain to find the story.
…Mr Boehner, 61, is the second of 12 who grew up in a German-Irish family in Reading, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati. All but two of them still live within a few miles of each other. Two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.
The future Congressman started work as a janitor and took seven years to get his degree – the first in the family to do so – because he had several jobs to pay his way. He joined a plastics and packaging company, rising to president before entering local politics by being elected to the town board
Bob Boehner, 62, the oldest of the 12, …said: “We were conservative because we had to be. There wasn’t the money to spend frivolously on things. We grew our own vegetables up on the hill. We learned early on that if you wanted something you had to go out and work for it.”
His brother’s childhood, he thinks, was good training for Congress, where, if he becomes Speaker, he will have 435 members to control. “He tried to make the younger ones do their homework and get the room cleaned up. He was somewhat of an authority figure to the younger ones.
“John is still an everyday person and we need more people like that in Congress because too many people there have never had a job and never had to balance a budget before.” …
Discovery.com reports on an amazing lightweight armor that may have helped Alexander the Great, in Discovery.com. Think 2,300 year old Kevlar.
A Kevlar-like armor might have helped Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) conquer nearly the entirety of the known world in little more than two decades, according to new reconstructive archaeology research.
“While we know quite a lot about ancient armor made from metal, linothorax remains something of a mystery since no examples have survived, due to the perishable nature of the material,” Gregory Aldrete, professor of history and humanistic studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, told Discovery News.
“Nevertheless, we have managed to show that this linen armor thrived as a form of body protection for nearly 1,000 years, and was used by a wide variety of ancient Mediterranean civilizations,” Aldrete said. …