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Writing in The Daily, the new offering for the iPad, Shikha Dalmia points out many of the strengths of our culture.
Americans, hit first by outsourcing and then a recession, are becoming deeply pessimistic about their country’s ability to maintain its economic leadership. America’s Aristophanes, Jon Stewart, commented during a recent interview with the author of “India Calling,” Anand Giridhardas: “The American dream is still alive — it’s just alive in India.” Likewise, 20 percent of Americans in a December National Journal poll believed the U.S. economy was no longer the strongest. Nearly half picked China instead.
But there are at least five reasons why neither India nor China will knock America off its economic perch anytime soon, at least not by the only measure that matters: Offering the best life to the most people. …
… 5. America doesn’t have a culture of hype. An important reason U.S. gloom-and-doom is unjustified is that there is so much gloom-and-doom. Indians and Chinese, by contrast, have drunk their own Kool-Aid. Their moribund economies have barely kicked into action and they are entertaining dreams of being the next economic superpowers. That bespeaks a profound megalomania. There is not a culture of hope in these countries, as Giridhardas told Stewart, but a culture of hype.
By contrast, when America’s government responds ineffectually to the recession, Americans go into panic mode. Grassroots movements like the Tea Party emerge to rein in the government. Pay Pal founder Peter Theil has even given $850,000 to the Seasteading Institute to establish new countries on the sea to experiment with government. This might be wacky, but it puts an outside limit on how out-of-whack Americans will let their institutions get before they start fixing them.
This, ultimately, is the biggest reason to believe that the American dream is and will stay alive — in America.
Christopher Hitchens savages the administration over its slow response to Mid-East events.
… For weeks, the administration dithered over Egypt and calibrated its actions to the lowest and slowest common denominators, on the grounds that it was difficult to deal with a rancid old friend and ally who had outlived his usefulness. But then it became the turn of Muammar Qaddafi—an all-round stinking nuisance and moreover a long-term enemy—and the dithering began all over again. Until Wednesday Feb. 23, when the president made a few anodyne remarks that condemned “violence” in general but failed to cite Qaddafi in particular—every important statesman and stateswoman in the world had been heard from, with the exception of Obama. And his silence was hardly worth breaking. Echoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had managed a few words of her own, he stressed only that the need was for a unanimous international opinion, as if in the absence of complete unity nothing could be done, or even attempted. This would hand an automatic veto to any of Qaddafi’s remaining allies. It also underscored the impression that the opinion of the United States was no more worth hearing than that of, say, Switzerland. Secretary Clinton was then dispatched to no other destination than Geneva, where she will meet with the U.N. Human Rights Council—an absurd body that is already hopelessly tainted with Qaddafi’s membership. …
“Mega dittos,” from Peter Wehner.
… On a more fundamental level, what the Obama administration did was create quite a dangerous precedent. It has now signaled to the most malevolent regimes in the world that the way to delay (or perhaps even avoid) American condemnation, let alone American action, is to threaten the lives of American citizens. The message sent to, and surely the message received by, despots around the world is this: If you want to neuter America, threaten to harm its citizens. Mr. Obama will bend like red-hot steel pulled from a furnace.
There were, of course, other options available to the president, including informing Mr. Qaddafi through the appropriate channels that a terrible fate would await him and his pack of jackals if a single American was harmed (see here). The president did very nearly the opposite. He showed weakness, irresolution, fear. I wonder if people have focused on just how troubling this action, and the mindset it manifests, really is. …
Wehner has more to say about the president’s manifest shortcomings.
President Obama today said, “I don’t think it does anybody any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified or their rights are infringed upon.”
I wonder if the president, who loves to portray himself as the high-minded arbiter of what is and what is not appropriate in American political discourse, might say something — anything — about the denigration and vilification of the governor of Wisconsin, who has been compared to Mubarak, Mussolini, bin Laden, and Hitler. There is nothing comparable being said about public employees. …
Robert Samuelson asks if organized labor is obsolete.
… It’s hard for us to recall now how dominant unions were immediately after World War II. By the mid-1950s, unions represented 36 percent of private-sector workers. Most major industries were organized: railroads, coal, steel, autos, telephones, tires, airlines, trucking. Strikes in crucial industries constantly threatened to hobble the entire economy, though in practice, companies stockpiled steel and coal in advance of contract expirations, and Congress cut short railroad strikes.
Even this understates unions’ influence. Most small businesses weren’t worth organizing, and large, nonunion firms were so fearful of being organized that many paralleled union demands in their own pay and personnel policies. Wages rose annually, reflecting inflation plus a bit more; fringe benefits (pensions, health insurance, vacations) expanded; seniority prevailed in wages to minimize arbitrary favoritism.
Labor’s fall has been stunning. In 2010, unions represented 6.9 percent of private-sector workers. That’s lower than the 12 percent in 1929, before passage of the 1935 Wagner Act – the National Labor Relations Act – which gave workers the right to organize and required employers to recognize unions that won a secret ballot.
Many theories explain this collapse: greater management pushback and intimidation; business expansion in anti-union regions, the South and West; more white-collar office workers and fewer blue-collar factory workers. All these theories contain some truth, but unions’ downfall mainly reflected their inability to adapt to change. …
Ed Morrissey explains one of the ways the Wisconsin teacher’s union was raping the taxpayers - union (WEA) supplied medical insurance.
… When (Gov)Walker says that the PEU reforms will allow counties, cities, and school districts more latitude in budget cuts, this is what he means. The protesters in Madison have avoided this particular point, perhaps because it exposes one of the real stakes in the fight. The WEA, perhaps the most powerful union in the state, makes a fortune off of selling its insurance at inflated prices to districts around the state. Milton, for instance, saved $382 per month per employee when it got an arbitrator to agree to end the WEA Trust concession. Spread that around to the thousands of teachers in Wisconsin, and taxpayers can get a pretty good idea what PEU reform might mean in reducing stressed budgets at every level of government in Wisconsin.
The Wall Street Journal noticed this yesterday as well:
“Under the current collective- bargaining agreements, the school district pays the entire premium for medical and vision benefits, and over half the cost of dental coverage. These plans are extremely expensive.
This is partly because of Wisconsin’s unique arrangement under which the teachers union is the sponsor of the group health-insurance plans. Not surprisingly, benefits are generous. The district’s contributions for health insurance of active employees total 38.8% of wages. For private-sector workers nationwide, the average is 10.7%.”
No doubt the WEA gets a good deal for its members, but it’s getting a better deal for itself. …
Mark McKinnon in The Daily Beast says events in WI will not go well for the unions.
The manufactured Madison, Wis., mob is not the movement the White House was hoping for. Both may find themselves at the wrong end of the populist pitchfork. While I generally defend collective bargaining and private-sector unions (lots of airline pilots in my family), it is the abuse by public unions and their bosses that pushes centrists like me to the GOP. It is the right and duty of citizens to petition their government. The Tea Party and Republicans seek to limit government growth to protect their pocketbooks. Public-union bosses want to increase the cost of government to protect their racket. …
Christopher Caldwell adds more fuel to the fire.
During the holiday break this winter, a woman in my neighbourhood was at the supermarket with her son when they ran into the son’s teacher. “See you Monday,” the mother said. The teacher gaily informed her she would not be back until mid-month, as she had planned a vacation in Central America. Teachers used to content themselves with the months off they enjoy in summers and at holidays, but they have got used to more. One can understand why American public employees ardently defend their unions, and the benefits they win. But one can also understand why, in a time of straitened budgets, union-negotiated contracts might be among the first places to make savings.
A fierce budget battle has been running for more than a week in Madison, Wisconsin. It goes far beyond salaries and benefits, to touch on the deeper question of whether collective bargaining has any place in government employment. Governor Scott Walker, a Republican elected last autumn with support from the Tea Party movement, believes it does not. His “budget repair” bill not only requires state employees to contribute to their pension and health plans. It would also end collective bargaining for benefits. Democratic senators, lacking the votes to defeat the bill, fled the state, denying the quorum necessary to bring it to a vote.
Mr Walker is not making a mountain out of a molehill. Wisconsin has a $137m budget gap to fill this year and a $3.6bn deficit over the next two. The big year-on-year leap reflects, in part, the expiration of federal stimulus spending, much of which was used to avoid laying off government workers. Citizens of other advanced countries sometimes make the mistake of assuming that the US has a skeletal bureaucracy. That is wrong. Once you include state, county and city employees, it is a formidable workforce and an expensive one. State employees account for up to $6,000bn in coming pension costs. Wisconsin’s difficulties are milder than those elsewhere, which means that similar clashes are arising in other states, especially where Republicans rule. …