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Nile Gardiner provides another reason for us to leave the UN.
If further evidence is needed that the United Nations is a complete basket case in the arena of human rights, look no further than the world body’s decision to stay away from this Friday’s Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo. The winner of this year’s peace prize is Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who will not be allowed to travel to Norway by the authorities in Beijing. His family is also barred from traveling. …
Spengler gives reasons why the Tea Party will have longevity.
…The Tea Party represents creditors of the government who do not want to be cheated out of their savings; that is, people close to retirement age who fear slow confiscation by inflation. Government that run huge deficits normally reduce them by debasing the currency, in order to repay their debts in inflated money.
…Elite commentators tend to dismiss the Tea Party as a mob of engaged boos. On the contrary, pollster Scott Rasmussen, reports, the Tea Partiers tend to be older than 45, married, wealthier and better educated than the general population, and concerned first of all with federal spending and deficits. The most important thing to know about such people is that there are more of them than ever before in American history.
…This is not the first time that monetary issues have motivated the formation of an important third party. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a prolonged deflation under the gold standard drew Western farmers to the inflationist Free Silver movement. Permitting silver coinage would have increased the money supply, raised the price level and helped debtors. The movement was powerful enough to take over the Democratic Party in 1896, when its candidate William Jennings Bryan (an unknown 36-year-old congressman) excoriated Eastern creditor interests and their ”cross of gold” imposed by Eastern creditor interests. …
We’ll wait to Sunday’s post for a complete wrap-up of the tax-cut deal and the petulant president’s presser, but for now Jennifer Rubin gives us a flavor.
… Juan Williams once remarked that Obama wasn’t the sort of fellow you’d want with you in a foxhole. When the crowd is swooning and the votes are going his way, no one can take a victory lap like Obama can. But when crisis hits — for the country or for his and his party’s political fortunes — he too often resorts to grouching and a self-pitying tone. It’s not going to win him new admirers, and it’s quite likely to annoy his already disillusioned liberal base.
Jennifer has some more.
Vice President Biden has been dispatched to calm down the Democratic troops on the Hill. But that’s not likely to alleviate the apparent despair within the liberal base. A tweet from Chris Hayes of the Nation seemed to sum up the sentiment: “Just so we’re clear: Democrats, currently in charge of Cong and WH, are about to ratify single defining domestic policy of W.” …
Rubin again, calling it the worst press conference – ever.
I don’t mean just for Obama. I mean any president. Or head of state. When I wrote this morning that he doesn’t do well in defeat, you didn’t know how right I was, huh? Let’s count the ways.
Calling Republicans “hostage takers.” Not helpful. Saying Republicans opposed middle class tax cuts. Not true — they wanted no tax increases for anyone. Accusing Republicans of holding out tax cuts for the rich as the “Holy grail.” Also wrong. As Republican strategist Mike Goldfarb tweeted, and as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said, beating Obama in 2012 is the Holy Grail. Then Obama started ranting at the media and bashing the left, which, if we are to believe statements from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, seems poised to abandon him on this. Obama also dragged in the “public option” for no apparent reason other than to remind everyone of the last time he disappointed liberals. Admitting he’s had a whole bunch of lines in the sand. Umm. Thunk.
On Twitter, there is shock and awe among pundits and reporters. Is Obama melting down? Has he lost control of the conversation? Yikes. Whoever let him go out there and do this rant-a-thon should be fired. Oh, was it Obama’s idea? I think his own party is indeed going to go into “riot mode.” A House GOP leadership aide pronounced the performance “angry” and out-of-touch. That’s being generous.
In the NYPost, Charles Gasparino tells us, don’t worry about bankers. The Fed is taking good care of them.
…Obama’s policies, insiders tell me, may be bad for the middle class — but they’ve been pretty good for the banking class.
…they love the fact that the White House has gone out of its way to support (some people think prod) Ben Bernanke’s policies of 1) keeping interest rates at rock-bottom levels and 2) pumping the banking system with $600 billion in cash, known in economic circles as “quantitative easing” and in less formal circles as “printing money.”
Both measures are supposed to spur lending to small business as banks, flush with cash, start to lend again and businesses can expand. But the direct beneficiaries of the “easy money” are the banks — which continue to hoard the cash, and (according to Leopard) are ready to rake in billions of dollars in fees as that backlog of deals starts to emerge next year.
Big bankers also don’t mind the inflation that Bernanke’s policies risk: Inflation usually pushes (nominal) stock prices up — and when the stock market rises, financiers and traders make a killing, even if the rest of us need a wheelbarrow filled with cash to buy a loaf of bread. …
Robert Samuelson criticizes the Deficit Commission’s lack of guiding principles that led to some arbitrary plans.
…One task of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform – co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson – was to discredit this self-serving morality. Otherwise, changing the budget will be hard, maybe impossible. If everyone feels morally entitled to existing benefits and tax breaks, public opinion will remain hopelessly muddled: desirous in the abstract of curbing budget deficits but adamant about keeping all of Social Security, Medicare and everything else. Politicians will be scared to make tough decisions for fear of voter reprisals.
…Answers exist. It’s not in the national interest to subsidize farmers, because food would be produced at low cost without subsidies. It’s not in the national interest to subsidize Americans, through Social Security and Medicare, for the last 20 or 25 years of their lives because healthier people live longer and the huge costs make the budget unmanageable. It’s not in the national interest to subsidize mass transit, because most benefits are enjoyed locally: If the locals want mass transit, they should pay for it.
…The biggest blunder of their approach involved huge proposed cuts in defense, about a fifth of federal spending. National security is government’s first job. Bowles and Simpson reduced it proportionately with all other discretionary spending as if there’s no difference between a dollar for defense and a dollar for art subsidies. Nor was there much effort to identify programs that should be eliminated because they fail the national need test. Good programs would have been cut along with the bad. Finally, spending on the elderly, now about two-fifths of the budget, was treated too gently. Social Security’s full eligibility age would have increased slowly to 69 years around 2075. These programs are essential, but eligibility ages should be raised faster and, for wealthier recipients, benefits cut more. …
In the NYTimes, Ross Douthat takes a more optimistic view of the Deficit Commission results.
…Most importantly, we have at least a rough sense of how and where a compromise might ultimately be negotiated. As Barro wrote last week:
Conservatives’ reactions to the Bowles-Simpson Chairmen’s Mark … have been heartening: while some hardcore anti-tax groups (such as Americans for Tax Reform) have attacked the plan for raising taxes, the bulk of conservative commentators and politicians have sounded cautiously optimistic notes about the plan …. [Meanwhile], a lot of liberal analysts and think tankers have drawn distinctions between Bowles-Simpson, which they don’t like, and Rivlin-Domenici, another bipartisan plan which they like a lot better. There are good reasons for the Left to feel better about the Rivlin-Domenici plan: its tax components are more progressive, and raise more revenue overall; it doesn’t raise the eligibility age for Social Security. But the two plans are fundamentally similar in a lot of ways, so if conservative policy elites like Bowles-Simpson and liberal policy elites can live with Rivlin-Domenici, that bodes well for coming up with a compromise plan that works for both sides.
None of this makes a compromise inevitable, or even necessarily likely. (The fact that Paul Ryan didn’t join the “yes” votes represents a missed opportunity, I think, for the reasons that Allahpundit sketches here.) But if America does manage to pull back from the fiscal precipice, there’s a good chance that we’ll remember the Simpson-Bowles proposals as a significant and clarifying step toward figuring how to make that pullback work.
As pointed out by several commentators featured in Pickings, the nation would be better off if the government did less: less taxing, less regulating, less meddling. John Steele Gordon has the latest example.
The American Congress — not itself unknown for doing nothing in particular on occasion — has an opportunity in the next couple of weeks to do nothing at all and render the country a considerable service thereby.
What it needs to do nothing about is ethanol, one of the truly epic boondoggles in American history. As the ball falls in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, both the 45-cent-a-gallon tax credit on ethanol (which goes to companies that blend ethanol and gasoline, i.e., Shell, Exxon, et al.) and the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on foreign ethanol will expire, unless Congress acts.
The 45-cent tax credit costs the government $5-6 billion a year and is opposed by such strange bedfellows as the Sierra Club and the National Taxpayers Union. Those in favor are, no surprise, ethanol producers and the farmers who grow the corn it is made from. The 54-cent tariff, which, of course, is paid by American consumers, keeps cheaper foreign (mostly Brazilian) ethanol out of the American market.
…Since federal law now mandates that motor fuel contain 10 percent ethanol, both the tax credit and the tariff favor only the few (corn farmers and ethanol producers) at the expense of the many (taxpayers and drivers). …
In the Denver Post, Vincent Carroll comments on the cowardly Colorado Senators’ opinions on ethanol subsidies. Carroll reminds us what Al Gore says, now that he is out from under the lobbyists’ thumbs.
…Gore may have broken a tie vote in the Senate over ethanol tax credits when he was vice president, but last month in Greece he admitted that “first-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake.”
“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies,” he added, noting the diversion of 40 percent of our corn crop into ethanol also “has an impact on food prices.”
To be sure, Gore continues to have a soft spot for the even more outlandish subsidies for biofuels produced from grasses and other non-edible organic material — although there still isn’t a single large-scale commercial producer of such fuels. Fifteen years from now, if Gore sticks with his schedule for confronting inconvenient truths, he may well be admitting that cellulosic ethanol subsidies were a boondoggle, too.
Make no mistake: Ending corn ethanol subsidies could hike fuel prices, especially if the tariff survived, because the federal renewable fuels standard requires oil companies to blend an escalating amount of ethanol into gasoline. If senators were truly focused on consumers, they’d call for an end to the fuels standard, too. …
And we have a cartoon that’s not to be missed.