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Krauthammer says there’s nothing more important than 2012.

We’re in the midst of a great four-year national debate on the size and reach of government, the future of the welfare state, indeed, the nature of the social contract between citizen and state. The distinctive visions of the two parties — social-democratic vs. limited-government — have underlain every debate on every issue since Barack Obama’s inauguration: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, health-care reform, financial regulation, deficit spending. Everything. The debt ceiling is but the latest focus of this fundamental divide.

The sausage-making may be unsightly, but the problem is not that Washington is broken, that ridiculous ubiquitous cliché. The problem is that these two visions are in competition, and the definitive popular verdict has not yet been rendered.

We’re only at the midpoint. Obama won a great victory in 2008 that he took as a mandate to transform America toward European-style social democracy. The subsequent counterrevolution delivered to that project a staggering rebuke in November 2010. Under our incremental system, however, a rebuke delivered is not a mandate conferred. That awaits definitive resolution, the rubber match of November 2012. …

More thoughts like that from Andrew Malcolm.

In a local government cabinet meeting some years ago, the elected official asked his veteran budget expert what the public revenue and expense forecasts were for the next quarter.

The budget expert began rummaging in his notes and inquired, “What do you want them to be?”

There was dead silence around the shiny table until the savvy budget guy smiled. He’d captured the essence of many government numbers.

We’re reminded of that revealing episode in recent days by the Howdy Doody Show playing out in our nation’s capitol over the phony debt ceiling and the sham cuts and numerical maneuverings, as if they were the issues at hand instead of the genuine struggle for dominant political position come Nov. 6, 2012. …

And Mike Rosen from the Denver Post.

… The 2012 election will be a pivotal and potentially irreversible turning point in our nation’s history. The voters will have to decide in which direction we go. Obama, Democrats and the left are poised to launch us into the stratosphere of government spending. At 25 percent of GDP, we’re already at a level not seen since World War II?. The Congressional Budget Office projects entitlement spending and interest on the national debt to propel us to 40 percent by 2075.

This is the flight plan of statists. Their economic guru, Paul Krugman, is a delirious Keynesian, cheerleading for even larger deficits than those that have failed to stimulate the economy under Obamanomics. Greece offers an object lesson in this folly. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked, “If you’re going to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.” Observing the destruction in Stalin’s wake, the obvious but unspoken question was, “Where’s the omelet?” The same could be asked of Krugman about Obama’s promised omelet.

Obama still continues to blame his economic failures on George W. Bush and, lately, on businesses reluctant to hire new workers. When he’s not complaining about their corporate jets, he berates them for sitting on trillions in cash. Apparently he doesn’t understand that businesses aren’t in business to sit on cash, especially when interest rates are near zero. They generate profits by investing, expanding and hiring workers. They’re not doing that because of his economic policies, suffocating regulations, threatened tax increases, favoritism to unions and the prospect of costly government mandates for employees. …

Overlooked in all the debt-limit mess were the awful numbers on the Obama depression. James Pethokoukis has the story.

More evidence, as if we needed it, that the U.S. economy is in sad shape. America’s gross domestic product grew just 1.3 percent in the second quarter, according to the Commerce Department. And first-quarter growth was revised down to just 0.4 percent. This is now the weakest two-year recovery since World War II.

More importantly, it means we’re in the danger zone for another recession. Research from the Federal Reserve finds that since 1947, when two-quarter annualized real GDP growth falls below 2 percent, recession follows within a year 48 percent of the time. (And when year-over-year real GDP growth falls below 2 percent, recession follows within a year 70 percent of the time. …

Shikha Dalmia shows the lies behind CAFE standards.

… In an effort to bring its global warming initiative back from the dead, the administration has announced that it wants automakers to raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, of their fleets from the 34.2 miles per gallon that it mandated in 2009 (which the companies are still scrambling to meet) to 56.2 mpg by 2025. Not a single car—big or small, hybrid or non-hybrid—currently delivers this kind of mileage (with the exception of electrics). But CAFE backers are pooh-poohing industry claims that these standards are unattainable. “Virtually every major improvement in U.S. fuel economy and emissions over the last quarter of a century started as a stringent government standard that automakers … initially insisted was impossible to meet,” harrumphed a recent Detroit Free Press editorial. “Then the same companies turned their engineers loose and met or exceeded the threshold.”

Did they?

Not really. Rather, they unleashed armies of lobbyists on Washington to poke holes in the CAFE regime. For example, companies that don’t meet CAFE standards face fines. But the fines are so low that many luxury brands prefer to pay up rather than comply. Likewise, companies get CAFE credits, the auto equivalent of indulgences, for flex-fuel vehicles built with gasoline as well as ethanol tanks. Fitting them with both doesn’t add much to manufacturing cost, which is why carmakers happily churn them out even though everyone knows that few drivers ever use ethanol.

But to the extent that carmakers have complied with CAFE, it is less through radical innovation and more by simply slashing vehicle weight. In the 15 years after CAFE standards were first introduced in 1974, vehicle weight diminished by 23 percent. But every 100-pound weight reduction results in a 4.7 to 5.6 percent increase in the fatality rate. A 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concluded that CAFE’s downsizing effect contributed to between 1,300 and 2,600 deaths in a single representative year, and to 10 times that many serious injuries. …

Joel Kotkin was in the Journal writing about the end of Los Angeles.

.. The machine that now controls Los Angeles by default consists of an alliance between labor and the political leadership of the Latino community, the area’s largest ethnic population. But since politicians serve at the whim of labor interests, they seldom speak up for homeowners and small businesses.

Mayor Villaraigosa, a former labor organizer, has little understanding of private-sector economic development beyond well-connected real-estate interests whom he has courted and which have supported him. He has been a strong backer of L.A. Live, a downtown ports and entertainment complex, and other projects that have benefited from favorable tax treatment and major public infrastructure investments. He’s currently supporting a push to build a new downtown football stadium, though L.A. has no professional football team. His biggest priority is to build the so-called subway to the sea, a $40 billion train line to connect downtown with the Pacific.

But L.A.’s downtown employs a mere 2.5% of the region’s work force; New York’s central business districts, by contrast, employ roughly 20%. …

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David Harsanyi is enjoying democracy these days.

There is still a slim chance that this summer’s debt ceiling debate won’t end with demagoguery’s winning the day. That’s an unusual development, yes, and something to be thankful for, however fleeting the interruption.

After all, whenever politicians moan and groan about how Washington isn’t “working,” or, as the president likes to say, whenever his agenda crashes against democracy, that the system is “broken,” well, it’s probably not. …

… Recently, Obama joked with a La Raza crowd, “The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you, not just on immigration reform.” He was joking, but when many of the crowd cheered heartily and chanted “Yes, you can,” we learned a little about expectations on the left. No doubt, Obama would like things to go a lot more smoothly. But without two houses of Congress jumping off the ideological deep end with him, Washington is working a lot better than it used to. That’s bad news for Obama.

Jennifer Rubin spots a White House attempt to look relevant.

Josh Kraushaar, National Journal,  looks at the 2012 race.

…For some time, the conventional wisdom has been that 2012 will be a close presidential contest, with a best-case scenario for Republicans of winning the race with a map similar to George W. Bush’s 2004 victory over Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.  

But if the president can’t turn things around, that logic could prove badly outdated. If Obama is struggling in the Democratic-friendly confines of Michigan and Pennsylvania (as recent polls have indicated), it’s hard to see him over-performing again in more-traditional battlegrounds such as Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia.

Unless the environment changes significantly, all the money in the president’s reelection coffers won’t be able to expand the map; it can only defend territory that’s being lost. And just as House Democrats played defense to protect the growing number of vulnerable members in last year’s midterms, Obama is looking like he’ll be scrambling to hold onto a lot of the states that he thought would be part of an emerging Democratic majority.

 Jonah Goldberg describes the leadership we have.

… Imagine you’re in a burning office building. Obama’s plan for getting out alive: “Okay, you guys break up into different groups and come up with a series of proposals about how we get out of the building. I will then negotiate with each of you separately and then together, and then separately. Then I’ll get on Skype and tell the world what I think of your respective plans and criticize you for their lack of seriousness. I will insist that we have balanced approach of applying both water to the fire and opening the windows, which some say will only provide more oxygen for the flames. But my base says window-opening is essential. Oh and I will blame all of the gasoline I threw around on the lower floors of this building on the guy who moved out two years ago. And I will veto any plan that requires we have a new plan should we get stuck on another floor. And, did I mention this mess was created by the former tenant and….ahhh what’s that smell?

Political reporters from around the country get a primer on Rick Perry from a columnist at Texas Monthly. 

Here we go again. As you know, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, is contemplating a presidential run, which means that any day now, your boss will be sending you down here to take the measure of the man. Though he managed to avoid the 2012 spotlight longer than any other candidate, Perry, the nation’s longest-serving governor, has lately become, in the words of a recent NPR report, “the eight-hundred-pound gorilla on the sidelines of this race.” The trickle of stories about him has become a stream, and the minute Perry declares his candidacy, that stream will become a flood, a flood that will carry you straight to Austin. I am writing you this note in the hope that it will help you avoid the political and sociological clichés that Texas is subjected to every time one of our politicians seeks the national stage.

It’s an experience we’re all too familiar with. A Texan has occupied the White House in 17 of the past 48 years—just over a third of the time. Texas has become an incubator for presidents, as Virginia and Ohio were in America’s distant past. I’ll grant you that the presidents we have sent to Washington, from LBJ to ?George W. Bush, have not always served as the best advertisements for Texas. Nevertheless, we have endured a disproportionate amount of bad writing about our state from journalists who don’t know very much about the place, and I for one can’t bear to suffer through another campaign of it.

So please, heed this advice. Rick Perry, as you have no doubt already discovered, is not the easiest man to write about. He is secretive and leery of the media (sometimes to the point of hostility), and he has a strategically valuable knack for being underestimated by his critics. I have been writing about him since the eighties, when he began his career in the Texas Legislature. Along the way I have learned a few things, which I have arranged in this handy list of Eight Points to Keep in Mind When Writing About Rick Perry. …

The administration can save us from the latest job killer from the EPA. WSJ with the details.

President Obama won praise from businesses in January when he promised to bring “reason and balance” to a “21st-century regulatory system.” Yet now, fewer than six months later, his administration is preparing to issue the single most expensive environmental regulation in U.S. history, a job-killing rule it is under no obligation to impose on the struggling economy.

There’s nothing reasonable or balanced about the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to tighten national air-quality standards for ozone emissions at this time. For one thing, it’s premature, coming a full two years before the EPA is scheduled to complete its own scientific study of ozone emissions in 2013. …

The New Editor with hypocrisy alert.

The Economist’s Democracy in America blog draws a simile between Indulgences sold by the medieval Church and the tax “indulgences” sold by the criminal class in Washington.

MICHAEL MUNGER, a professor of political science at Duke University, insightfully compares “tax expenditures” to the Catholic church’s practice of selling indulgences, which fomented the Reformation by sending Martin Luther into fit of righteous pique. Mr Munger reminds us that

‘ Indulgences were “get out of purgatory free!” cards. Of course, it was the church that had created the idea of purgatory in the first place. Then the church granted itself the power to release souls from purgatory (for a significant fee, of course). 

As Luther put it, in his Thesis No. 27, “as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out.” ‘

If high tax rates are a sort of purgatory (and who doubts it?), then tax credits are indeed akin to indulgences. Mr Munger writes: …

 Politico says the Navy has rescinded the Silver Star awarded to the man who vouched for John Kerry’s bravery. So when are they going to go get his Purple Hearts? 

Here’s a welcome change of pace. The NY Times reports the bizarre story of a jilted lover who framed his ex. Definitely a plot for Law and Order – Criminal Intent.

Soon after Seemona Sumasar started dating Jerry Ramrattan, she had an inkling that something might be wrong.

He said he was a police detective, but never seemed to go to work. He seemed obsessed with “C.S.I.,” “Law & Order” and other television police dramas.

About a year after he moved into her house in Queens, their relationship soured. One day, he cornered her, taped her mouth and raped her, she said. Mr. Ramrattan was arrested.

But he soon took his revenge, the authorities said. Drawing on his knowledge of police procedure, gleaned from his time as an informer for law enforcement, he accomplished what prosecutors in New York called one of the most elaborate framing plots that they had ever seen. ..

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Thomas Sowell says it’s time to get rid of the debt ceiling.

… Regardless of what it is supposed to do, what the national debt-ceiling actually does is enable any administration to get all the political benefits of runaway spending for the benefit of their favorite constituencies — and then invite the opposition party to share the blame, by either raising the national debt ceiling, or by voting for unpopular cutbacks in spending or increases in taxes.

The Obama administration is a classic example. When all its skyrocketing spending bills were being rushed through Congress without even being read, the Democrats had such overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives that Republicans had all they could do to get a word in edgewise — even though their words had no chance of stopping, or even slowing down, the spending of trillions of dollars.

Now that the bill is coming due for all that spending and borrowing, Republicans are suddenly being invited in to share the blame for either raising the national debt ceiling or for whatever other unpopular measures will be legislated.

Many years ago, someone said, “If you didn’t invite me to the big take-off, don’t invite me to the crash landing.” This was Obama’s big spending spree, but “bipartisanship” requires Republicans to either split the bill or be blamed if the government shuts down or defaults. …

Robert Samuelson on the “crisis of the old order.”

We are witnessing “the crisis of the old order.” The phrase, coined by the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to describe the failure of unfettered capitalism in the late 1920s, also applies to the present, despite different circumstances. Everywhere, advanced nations face similar problems: overcommitted welfare states, aging populations, flagging economic expansion. These conditions define the global crisis and explain why it struck the United States, Europe and Japan simultaneously. We need to move beyond daily partisan fireworks to see this larger predicament.

The old order, constructed by most democracies after World War II, rested on three pillars. One was the welfare state. Government would protect the unemployed, aged, disabled and poor. Capitalism would be tamed. A second was faith in economic growth; this would raise everyone’s living standards while permitting income redistribution. Growth was ordained, because economists had learned enough from the 1930s to cure periodic recessions. Finally, global trade and finance served countries’ mutual interests.

All three pillars are now wobbling. To be sure, the financial crisis worsened matters, and each country’s situation is different. America’s welfare state is less generous than Germany’s. Greece’s crisis began because it had vastly underreported its budget deficit; Ireland’s stemmed from a burst housing bubble that led to a costly bank bailout. But these differences obscure large similarities. …

Jennifer Rubin reviews Monday’s speeches.

President Obama’s decision to give a speech Monday was proof that things have not gone well for him. He threw (another) tantrum in the Friday news conference, he turned down a bipartisan deal presented to him Sunday and thereby took himself out of the limelight. Tonight’s speech was not intended to “solve” the impasse but to make sure Obama would get credit if a deal is struck and avoid blame if it is not.

The speech itself was part panic attack, part platitudes and a whole lot of class warfare (corporate jets! hedge fund managers!). …

… Then it was House Speaker John Boehner’s turn. He touted his small-business background and made clear that ordinary people don’t get to simply borrow more and more. He reminded us that Obama wanted a clean debt bill, but the House insisted on a new way of doing business. Then he recapped the president’s intransigence:

“What we told the president in January was this: the American people will not accept an increase in the debt limit without significant spending cuts and reforms.

And over the last six months, we’ve done our best to convince the president to partner with us to do something dramatic to change the fiscal trajectory of our country. . .something that will boost confidence in our economy, renew a measure of faith in our government, and help small businesses get back on track.” …

More from Jonathan Tobin.

President Obama’s speech tonight on the debt ceiling debate was not an attempt to bridge the gap between his position and that of his congressional opponents. By repeating the rhetoric he has been using all through this debate by attempting to demonize Republicans, it was clear his goal was not to make a deal but to exacerbate a situation he has already described as a crisis. …

 … In response, House Speaker John Boehner’s short speech simply indicated the Republicans understand Obama is either bluffing or actually wants a default because he believes it is in his political interest. …

And Ed Morrissey weighs in.

For the fifth time in three weeks, Barack Obama seized the bully pulpit in the debt-ceiling debate, this time using a prime-time speech instead of a press conference to do so.  And for the fifth time in three weeks, Obama literally did nothing with it except to utter the same platitudes and clichés as he did on the previous four occasions.  Obama offered no solutions, no specifics for a solution, and spent 15 minutes avoiding both.

And at least one media outlet noticed:

“President Barack Obama elbowed his way back into the debt ceiling debate Monday night, three days after Republicans shoved him out, but he offered no hint of a solution to the escalating political and financial crisis.”

Politico also got the impression that Obama was delivering a campaign speech rather than a solution to a crisis that Obama himself has hyped considerably: …

Furthermore, a NY Times blog calls BS on the administration’s Chicken Little strategy.

… The administration may have made a strategic mistake in warning too soon that the market would react negatively. It ultimately undercuts the government’s negotiating position because the doomsday scenario has not played out, even though the deadline is fast approaching.

“They have lost all credibility,” said Neil M. Barofsky, the former special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. “It’s so typical of the way Treasury and the Fed treat everything — it is always to warn that Armageddon is coming.”

The Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, is among those who may have miscalculated.

He has consistently held out Aug. 2 as the cutoff date for lawmakers to reach a compromise. After that, Mr. Geithner has said the government might not be able to continue sending out Social Security checks or Medicare payments. “On Aug. 2, we’re left running on fumes,” he told the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

He told me back in May that he was expecting to reach a deal by mid-July, way ahead of the final deadline. “Why would you want to experiment? In July, you’d want this done.”

But increasingly, the market seems to believe it was a false deadline. …

Mona Charen columns on some Dem BS about the Clinton economy.

As the fight continues over whether to raise taxes to ratify the additional $3.6 trillion President Obama and the Democrats have spent in just 27 months, you hear the same refrain from Democrats — we must raise taxes to the levels of the Clinton administration. This is always followed by flights of exaggeration portraying the Clinton-era economic record as “The Greatest Peacetime Expansion in American History,” or in world history, or in galactic history.

They seem to think it was the tax hikes that produced the prosperity.

The economy did expand during the Clinton presidency — though not quite as much as it had during the Reagan years. Reagan’s presidency required a steep recession to undo the mistakes of his predecessors. Despite that, his overall record was astounding. Real GDP increased 32 percent under Reagan (it was 31 percent under Clinton). Disposable income grew 22.7 percent under Reagan versus 20.4 percent under Clinton. Obviously, both look luxurious from this remove.

Reagan overcame serious economic woes, including raging inflation and interest rates. Clinton was more fortunate in his timing. …

Andrew Malcolm has late-night jokes.

Conan: The American space shuttle program is over after 30 years. NASA will now have to pay Russia $63 million to fly every U.S. astronaut into space. Another $15 million if he checks a bag.

Leno: Your federal government at work: The FAA has ordered the owner-pilot of his own one-helicopter company to give himself a surprise random drug test.

Leno: Daniel Craig is here tonight to talk about Cowboys & Aliens. No, not California farming. It’s his new movie called ‘Cowboys & Aliens.’

Fallon: Philadelphia has a new plan to ticket pedestrians texting without looking as they walk. As opposed to the previous punishment -– lampposts.

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First up, BBC News published a translation of the text messages between a mother and her 16 year-old daughter who was on Utoeya island in Norway where last week’s shooting took place.

Julie

We are hiding in the rocks along the coast.

Mum

Good! Should I ask your grandfather to come down and pick you up when everything is safe again? You have the option.

Julie

Yes.

Mum

We will contact Grandpa immediately.

Julie

I love you even if I still misbehave from time to time.  

And I’m not panicking even if I’m shit scared.  

Mum

I know that my darling. We love you too very much. Do you still hear shooting? …

Quoting from The Federalist by Edward Banfield, Peter Wehner essays on political mess in Washington and counsels acceptance of it.

…”it is the nature of men to have divergent opinions and interests, and to subordinate the common good to their private and particular interests… the harsh fact is that American society — any society– is not a band of brothers but a set of competitors. Man is a creature more of passion than of reason; he is vain, avaricious, shortsighted.”

The founders believed the common good existed and was worth aspiring to. They conceded some people  of “superlative virtue” can be expected to set aside their interests for the interest of others. But above all they knew this: the nature of man — “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good” — ensured factional struggles were inevitable.

That is what we see played out in politics, and in life, every day. Sometimes it’s more apparent (and more frustrating) than others. But the genius of the founders is that they built a system of government based on what human beings are rather than what we wish them to be. They also understood, in their more enlightened moments at least, the human failures they saw in others also resided in themselves, that few of us are unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good.

Every day we’re reminded the American system of government is far from perfect. But so, of course, are we.

Clive Crook, writing London’s Financial Times, has a fair minded liberal’s view of recent Washington events.

When I moved from Britain in 2005 to live and work in the US, I was a born-again admirer of the American people, the American project and the American system of government. I had no patience with the view that the country was entering its twilight years. I was a militant anti-declinist.

Six years on, I am having second thoughts. I am not quite ready to defect, but like any fair-minded observer I am impressed by Washington’s determination to prove the pessimists right.

You could say that the debt-ceiling impasse, which prompts such thoughts, is out of the ordinary and no basis for prediction. It is an extreme case, admittedly: regardless of how it is resolved, Congress and the White House have lately taken fiscal irresponsibility to a new level. In another way, though, the breakdown is representative. Dysfunction in Washington is now so acute that many areas of policymaking have all but shut down.

We anti-declinists have always had two main answers to this kind of gloom. The first is that the underlying strengths of the US economy have nothing to do with Washington, and remain undimmed. The second is that the country’s founders deliberately built dysfunction into the constitution, because they wanted to keep the federal government in check. …

Toby Harnden has a Brit’s view of the GOP race.

The debate convulsing Washington right now is how to prevent the United States defaulting on its national debt while also forcing President Barack Obama to slash spending and Republicans to abandon their fetish of resisting any increase in tax revenues.

It’s a big, important battle involving a clash of political philosophies and the grinding practicality of running a country in economic crisis when there are no easy answers that will satisfy everyone or be guaranteed to work.

Despite what’s at stake in the debt ceiling negotiations, however, the Republican presidential candidates have been missing in action, preferring to stick to vapid talking points or, in the case of the frontrunner Mitt Romney, choosing not to comment at all on the different proposals being offered. …

… To the dismay of many activists, most of the current crop of Republican candidates are acting as if they’re from Venus rather than Mars. …

… Those yearning for an alpha male to join the Republican race look like their wish will be granted. Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor whose tirades against voters have become YouTube classics, seems determined to hold on until 2016.

But Governor Rick Perry of Texas is poised to throw his Stetson into the ring this summer. It was Perry who, last year, was out jogging when he spotted a coyote bearing down on his daughter’s Labrador. Taking out his.380 Ruger pistol, loaded with hollow-point bullets, Perry shot the coyote dead. …

… It remains to be seen whether, four years after George W. Bush left office, Americans are ready for another swaggering Texan in the White House.

But for Republicans who see a vulnerable Obama and doubt whether a safety-first opponent can beat him, an injection of testosterone into the 2012 race can’t come soon enough.

For those who think the GOP is losing in the debt limit debate, Mark Tapscott has soothing words.

Republicans have gained a 10 point lead over Democrats in Rasmussen Reports latest national survey on who the public most trusts to deal effectively with economic issues.

The 10 point lead is the widest margin held by either party in months and has opened up in recent weeks as President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner have become the central players in the debate over how to deal with the approaching debt-ceiling crisis. …

While admitting to having enough of the Palin drama, Pickerhead notes that woman sure can turn a phrase. Ed Morrissey on Sarah’s latest stroke of brilliance.

John Boehner’s (momentary) dismissal of Barack Obama as a partner in deficit-reduction talks has the effect of making him a “lame duck president,” Sarah Palin wrote last night on her SarahPAC website — and she’s pretty happy about it, too.  Palin praises the leadership of the Republican caucus for sticking to their promises, and then reminds readers about the history of this President and the deficit: …

We started with Peter Wehner and now we’re about to close with him as he comments on the “petulant and inept president.”

The negotiations about raising the debt ceiling remain extremely fluid, and it’s still too early to draw any definitive conclusions at this stage. But just a week away from the August 2 deadline, a few things do seem clear.

The first is the president’s angry and narcissistic press conference on Friday badly damaged the president, even with those, like David Brooks, who have  been sympathetic to Obama’s substantive position.

It’s been clear to some of us for a while that Barack Obama is a man of uncommon self-admiration, quite thin-skinned, and increasingly consumed by his grievances. Obama has masked these traits pretty well so far, but on Friday his mask slipped more than it ever has. And that is bound to hurt him.

Second, Democrats on Capitol Hill are rapidly losing confidence in the president’s competence as a negotiator. Obama’s conduct during the debt ceiling  negotiations – from his flip-flops to his irrelevant deadlines to his backtracking on his agreements with various parties – has been so erratic and uneven that  his own party has decided the best hope of reaching an agreement is to sideline him. …

Jeff Jacoby takes on the population idiots.

… Has there ever been a more persistent and popular superstition than the idea that having more kids is a bad thing, or that “overpopulation’’ causes hunger, misery, and hopelessness? In the 18th century, Thomas Malthus warned that human population growth must inevitably outstrip the food supply; to prevent mass starvation, he suggested, “we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction,’’ such as encouraging the spread of disease among the poor. In the 20th century, Paul Ehrlich wrote bestsellers with titles like “The Population Bomb,’’ in which he described the surging number of humans in the world as a “cancer’’ that would have to be excised through “brutal and heartless decisions.’’ (His list included sterilization, abortion, and steep tax rates on families with children.)

Just last month, Thomas Friedman avowed in his New York Times column that “The Earth Is Full,’’ and that “we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished.’’

For more than 200 years the population alarmists have been predicting the worst, and for more than 200 years their predictions have failed to come true. As the number of men, women, and children in the world has skyrocketed – from fewer than 1 billion when Malthus lived to nearly 7 billion today – so has the average standard of living. Poverty, disease, and hunger have not been eradicated, of course, and there are many people in dire need of help. But on the whole human beings are living longer, healthier, cleaner, richer, better-educated, more productive, and more comfortable lives than ever before. …

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Fred Barnes notes Obama’s reneges in the trade deals.

The path to ratification by Congress was greased after President Obama renegotiated trade treaties with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. Obama would supply Democratic votes.  Republicans were already on board, President Bush having put together the treaties in the first place. It had the look of a done deal.

It wasn’t. In May, the White House suddenly insisted the treaties be accompanied by roughly $1 billion in Trade Adjustment Assistance, or TAA as it’s known in Washington. Organized labor was demanding TAA funds be set aside for workers whose jobs might be lost as a result of the treaties. Obama took up the cause. 

That wasn’t the last of labor’s demands. A month ago, labor officials said TAA had to be part of the trade agreements themselves. Again, Obama went along. This was unprecedented. Spending legislation had never been included in trade bills. Republican support instantly collapsed. It took the intervention of Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and a few other Republicans to get things back on track by stripping TAA from the treaties. Separate votes on the three pacts and TAA are likely in September. But don’t hold your breath.

There’s a pattern here that’s become emblematic of the Obama presidency. …

David Harsanyi brings us back to the debt limit thingy.

When a reporter recently asked President Barack Obama about the House Republican efforts to pass the Cut, Cap and Balance Act of 2011, Obama explained that politicians “don’t need a constitutional amendment to do our jobs. The Constitution already tells us to do our jobs — and to make sure that the government is living within its means and making responsible choices.”

Dear God, we’re doomed.

Remember that the president’s last tangible stab at a “responsible choice” was a budget that would have added $9 trillion of debt over the next 10 years. This was months before he realized the debt ceiling debate and “economic Armageddon” could bring about political opportunity. The White House went on to call the bill, which trades a debt ceiling increase for a constitutional balanced-budget amendment and caps on spending, “extreme, radical and unprecedented.”

Considering nearly every state works with similar restrictions, it’s not exactly unprecedented. And if it’s “extreme, radical and unprecedented” to the administration, it undoubtedly makes plenty of fiscal sense. …

And Mark Steyn writes on the president’s plan.

… The only “plan” Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt.

How about Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader? Has he got a plan? No. The Democratic Senate has shown no interest in producing a budget for two-and-a-half years. Unlike the president, Sen. Reid can’t even be bothered pretending he’s interested in spending reductions. But he is interested in spending, and, if that’s your bag, boring things like budgets only get in the way.

It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They’re passing austerity budgets so austere they’ve spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street – and yet they’re still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more – and nobody’s downgrading them.

Well, don’t worry. It’s coming. The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional. …

Charles Krauthammer retails his favorite debt limit plan.

… What to do now? The House should immediately pass the Half-Trillion Plan, thereby putting something eminently reasonable on the table that the president will have to address with a serious counterproposal using actual numbers. If the counterproposal is the G6, Republicans should accept Part One with its half-trillion dollars in cuts, consumer price index change and repeal of the CLASS Act, i.e., the part of the G6 that is enacted immediately and that is real. Accompany this with a dollar-for-dollar hike in the debt ceiling, yielding almost exactly the time envisioned in the G6 to work out grander spending and revenue changes — and defer any action on Part Two until precisely that time.

The Half-Trillion with or without the G6 Part One: ceiling raised, crisis deferred, cuts enacted and time granted to work out any Grand Compromise. You can’t get more reasonable than that.

Do it. And dare the president to veto it.

George Will gets in on the debate too.

Obama vaguely promises to “look at” savings from entitlements because “we need to find trillions in savings over the next decade.” But when McConnell learned that negotiations chaired by Vice President Biden had identified a risible $2 billion in 2012 discretionary spending cuts — a sum equal to a rounding error on the GM bailout — McConnell concluded that Obama’s frugality pantomime required a response that will define the 2012 election choice.

Obama’s rhetorical floundering is the sound of a bewildered politician trying to be heard over the long, withdrawing roar of ebbing faith in a failing model of governance. From Greece to California, with manifestations in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Illinois and elsewhere, this model is collapsing. Entangled economic and demographic forces are refuting the practice of ever-bigger government financed by an ever-smaller tax base and by imposing huge costs on voiceless future generations.

Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: “Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev.” Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats’ dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.

Events are validating the Tea Partyers’ arguments. Time is on their side — but not on America’s, unless the impediment to reform is removed in 16 months.

Jennifer Rubin thinks the adults in Congress (Who knew we’d ever write those words?) are going to find a way to make a deal. Then we’ll see what the petulant president will do.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) was forced to take matters into his own hands. The White House meeting with President Obama on Saturday morning was brief and unproductive. The name of the game then became for congressional Democratic and Republican leaders to make a deal that would be ready to announce today.

The image of the president’s angry press conference on Friday made for a stark contrast with the bipartisan congressional efforts throughout Saturday afternoon. Even Obama’s most fawning admirers had to admit that he hadn’t improved his stature in the episode. (David Brooks observed, “I’ve never seen a presidential press conference with the president so angry in public. . . . But the president’s tone of being the only adult in Washington, everyone else is a child, that he’s going to summon people to the White House as if they are kindergartners, even if you agree on the substance, it’s kind of hard to go along with someone who is insulting you all the time.”)

So much for the White House. Now it’s time to make a deal. The Post reports: …

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We start today with Thomas Sowell addressing the “tax the rich” theories of the left. Sowell starts by writing about actual events in the 1920′s and then shows how the same ideas moved President Kennedy to call for, not new and higher taxes, but tax cuts. The point of these efforts is to recall a time when the country was not treated to such a large contingent of diehard Democrat doctrinaire demagogues.

… high tax rates that many people avoid paying do not necessarily bring in as much revenue to the government as lower tax rates that more people are in fact paying, when these lower rates make it safe to invest their money where they can get a higher rate of return in the economy than where they can get a higher rate of return in the economy than they get from tax-exempt securities.

The facts are plain: There were 206 people who reported annual taxable incomes of one million dollars or more in 1916. But as tax rates rose, that number fell to 21 by 1921. After a series of tax-rate cuts in the 1920s, the number of individuals reporting taxable incomes of a million dollars or more rose again, to 207 by 1925.

It should not be surprising that the government collected more tax revenue under these conditions. Nor is it surprising that, with increased economic activity resulting from more investment in the private economy, the annual unemployment rate from 1925 through 1928 ranged from a high of 4.2% to a low of 1.8%.

The point here is not simply that the weight of evidence is one side of the argument rather than the other but, more fundamentally, that there was no serious engagement with the arguments actually advanced but instead an evasion of those arguments by depicting them as simply a way of transferring tax burdens from the rich to other taxpayers. …

… President Kennedy, like Andrew Mellon decades earlier, pointed out that “efforts to avoid tax liabilities” make “certain types of less-productive activity more profitable than other more valuable undertakings” and “this inhibits our growth and efficiency.” Therefore the “purpose of cutting taxes” is “to achieve a more prosperous, expanding economy.”

“Total output and economic growth” were italicized words in the text of Kennedy’s address to Congress in January 1963, urging cuts in tax rates. Much the same theme was repeated yet again in President Reagan’s February 1981 address to a joint session of Congress, pointing out that “this is not merely a shift of wealth between different sets of taxpayers.”

Instead, basing himself on a “solid body of economic experts,” he expected that “real production in goods and services will grow.”

Even when empirical evidence substantiates the arguments made for cuts in tax rates, such facts are not treated as evidence relevant to testing a disputed hypothesis, but as isolated curiosities. Thus, when tax revenues rose in the wake of the tax-rate cuts made during the George W. Bush administration, the New York Times reported:

“An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year.”

Expectations, of course, are in the eye of the beholder. However surprising these facts may have been to the New York Times, they are exactly what proponents of reducing high tax rates have been expecting, not only from these particular tax rate cuts, but from similar reductions in high tax rates at various times going back more than three-quarters of a century.

John Taylor, econ prof at Stanford shows in WSJ how the left’s governance has given us stagnation and high unemployment.

… In my view, the best way to understand the problems confronting the American economy is to go back to the basic principles upon which the country was founded—economic freedom and political freedom. With lessons learned from the century’s tougher decades, including the Great Depression of the ’30s and the Great Inflation of the ’70s, America entered a period of unprecedented economic stability and growth in the ’80s and ’90s. Not only was job growth amazingly strong—44 million jobs were created during those expansions—it was a more stable and sustained growth period than ever before in American history.

Economic policy in the ’80s and ’90s was decidedly noninterventionist, especially in comparison with the damaging wage and price controls of the ’70s. Attention was paid to the principles of economic and political liberty: limited government, incentives, private markets, and a predictable rule of law. Monetary policy focused on price stability. Tax reform led to lower marginal tax rates. Regulatory reform encouraged competition and innovation. Welfare reform devolved decisions to the states. And with strong economic growth and spending restraint, the federal budget moved into balance.

As the 21st century began, many hoped that applying these same limited-government and market-based policy principles to Social Security, education and health care would create greater opportunities and better lives for all Americans.

But policy veered in a different direction. Public officials from both parties apparently found the limited government approach to be a disadvantage, some simply because they wanted to do more—whether to tame the business cycle, increase homeownership, or provide the elderly with better drug coverage.

And so policy swung back in a more interventionist direction, with the federal government assuming greater powers. The result was not the intended improvement, but rather an epidemic of unintended consequences—a financial crisis, a great recession, ballooning debt and today’s nonexistent recovery. …

Tony Blankley has a proposal for the debt limit negotiations.

… Now, as summer 2011 reaches its steamy zenith, it falls to the only group of Washington politicians still trying to actually fix the debt problem – the House Republicans – to deny those political nihilists in both parties and in both branches the realization of their truly abhorrent plans.

This is a moment for both principle and cool realism on the part of the House Republicans. The principled part still requires them to use the debt ceiling requirement to make real cuts in the deficit in the current fiscal year.

Here is the realism part: 1) Is Aug. 2 the real date? Truth is, the American system is so big and complex that no one knows when and whether the borrowing runs out on any given day; 2) could the president use the actual tax revenues to pay interest, Social Security, Medicare and armed services salaries? He doubtlessly could, but Congress probably cannot compel him to do so without a Supreme Court decision, which would take many months to obtain; 3) would fully rational international bond and equity markets react dangerously to Aug. 2 without the debt ceiling being raised? No, but we do not have fully rational markets currently. Misleading headlines, unsupported rumors about unnamed bankers in Europe have driven world equity and bond markets careening all over the place in the past two years.

The reality that House Republicans have to deal with is that between the words coming out of the executive branch and the mainstream media and given the general nervousness of the markets, we cannot rely on rationality to win the day on Aug. 2.

So here is my proposal for principle and realism. The House should pass a debt ceiling rising for 190 days that raises the ceiling by about $1 trillion. The president said he would not sign a short-term bill less than 180 days. Give him something he can sign without contradicting himself.

Attach to it about $1 trillion in discretionary spending cuts as identified by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s negotiations. That gets real cuts and doesn’t let Washington kick the can past the next election. …

Commentary at Market Watch says we’ll see 10% unemployment soon in the Obama Depression.

After the nationwide unemployment rate peaked above 10% in late 2009, we saw a fairly rapid decline in jobless rolls during the next 12 months. By March of this year, the headline jobless number had crept back under 9% and renewed optimism in the economic recovery and equity markets.

Well, we’ve been reading a much different story in the last month or two, with disappointing job creation and a rise in the overall unemployment rate as the meager number of new positions can’t keep up with the sheer volume of folks looking for work.

To make matters worse, we are now seeing a disturbing new spate of layoff announcements — not just a dozen or so workers here and there, but pink slips issued by the thousands at some of the biggest blue chips on Wall Street. Read about 6,500 jobs cut at Cisco.

In short, there aren’t enough jobs to go around now and there will be even fewer jobs a few months down the road. All this points to significantly higher unemployment in the near future, possibly over the 10% mark.

So where will the biggest damage be done? I think these three sectors top the list: …

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us there was a time when our country could get something done.

… For the way things used to be, consider the Big Creek hydroelectric project, begun here in the central Sierra Nevada mountains of California 100 years ago. It was the nation’s first large effort to generate electricity from falling water — spurred by the need to provide electric power for a growing Los Angeles nearly 250 miles away.

Industrialist and entrepreneur Henry Huntington conceived the gargantuan effort, begun in 1911. In just 157 days, a supply railroad up the mountains was built by thousands of workers struggling at over 6,000 feet in elevation with picks, shovels, and horse-drawn scrapers. In just two years, electricity was flowing southward from a new powerhouse at Big Creek that harnessed San Joaquin River water released from the new Huntington Lake reservoir. …

… Quite simply, Big Creek could not be built today in the United States. Environmentalists would claim that the pristine nature of the San Joaquin River would be unnecessarily altered, citing a newly discovered colony of spotted newts or dappled dragonflies in the way of the proposed penstocks. Unions would demand blanket representation without elections — and every imaginable compensation for such hazardous duty. Workers would apply for stress-related disability benefits given the dizzying heights and the dank subterranean digging. Government regulators and inspectors would outnumber project engineers. Private entrepreneurs world never risk such a chancy investment without ironclad government guarantees of profits despite enormous cost overruns. And the public would be as skeptical of the risky project’s success as they would be eager to enjoy its dividends when completed.

The Big Creek project, like the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate bridges, and the interstate highway system, was the work of a less wealthy but confident bygone generation. They understood man’s ceaseless elemental struggle against nature to survive one more day, and they did not have the luxury of second- and third-guessing the work of others before them. ..

Our cartoons today come from an International Liberty blog post that sums up all of today’s Pickings with a modern day version of Aesop’s “Ant and the Grasshopper.”

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Steve Wynn, Dem businessman from Vegas has strong words for the administration.

… And I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration.And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.

You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change. .. 

Editors at Investor’s Business Daily say Wynn is not alone.

… In such a climate, it’s no surprise that executive outbursts are erupting like lava from scorched earth. Wynn’s remarks echo those on a lengthening list of CEOs including:

• 3M’s George Buckley, who blasted Obama last February as anti-business. “We know what his instincts are,” Buckley said. “We’ve got a real choice between manufacturing in Canada or Mexico — which tends to be more pro-business — and America,” he told the Financial Times.

• Boeing’s Jim McNerney, who in the Wall Street Journal last May called Obama’s handpicked National Labor Relations Board’s suit against his company a “fundamental assault on the capitalist principles that have sustained America’s competitiveness since it became the world’s largest economy nearly 140 years ago.”

• Intel’s Paul Otellini, who told CNET last August that the U.S. legal environment has become so hostile to business that there is likely to be “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe — this is the bitter truth.”

• Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who observed to radio host Hugh Hewitt last month that Obama “never had to make payroll,” that “nobody has ever created a job in this administration” and that the president is “surrounded by college professors.” …

John Tamny says there is a real cost to our economy when there are fewer start-ups.

… First up is the loss of innovation that results from reduced startups. Though Reaganomics is 30 years old, Bartlett made a point that likely remains true today that “the largest proportion of important new inventions are still the result of individuals working virtually alone, rather than by big corporate laboratories.”

At first glance we can see that a reduction in the formation of companies formed in the proverbial garage means less exciting inventions down the line. Reduced startups mean less innovation. Simple as that.

Sarbanes-Oxley also comes to mind here in that an ill-conceived law that turned public company CEOs into accountants has surely poured gasoline on the above fire. To put it very simply, Sarbanes-Oxley has made going public far less attractive to smaller, innovative companies lacking the infrastructure to comply with the law.

As a result, some have chosen to be purchased by larger companies over floating their shares to investors. Given a first pass we can see that what we’ve all lost here is the ability to put our savings into exciting companies, only to watch them hopefully grow.

Secondly, big companies, by virtue of being large, are more bureaucratic, and they’re understandably more careful given how much they stand to lose if they fund egregious errors. So in swallowing existing startups that are less eager to navigate the jungle of being public, we as individuals lose for the larger acquirers to varying degrees snuffing out the risky dynamism that characterizes startups, along with startups that eventually go public. …

Harvard econ prof says Boeing is right to take flight from high cost locales. His article was in Bloomberg.

Americans, and their companies, have long benefited from their freedom to move throughout our country.

In the 19th century, we moved in search of natural resources, exchanging the stony soil of New England for the rich soil of Iowa. In the 20th century, Americans were more likely to migrate in search of better political environments, like the blacks who fled the Jim Crow states of the South.

The profound role that mobility has played in our country, enabling repeated reinvention, causes me to be deeply worried about the possibility that a National Labor Relations Board complaint will prevent Boeing Co. (BA) from moving plane production from Washington state to South Carolina.

I am an economist, not a lawyer, and I have nothing to say about the legal issues surrounding the NLRB’s complaint. I am sure the NLRB is doing what it understands to be its legal duty, preventing retaliation against union activity.

Yet I also dearly hope that the judicial process will affirm the right of companies, and people, to freely choose their locations. The U.S. economy — especially our challenged manufacturing sector — needs more, not less, freedom to adapt and innovate.

The story of America is one of constant geographic movement. In 1816, before DeWitt Clinton had dug his ditch, it cost as much to move goods 30 miles over land as it did to ship them across the Atlantic, and Americans remained tethered to the Eastern Seaboard. …

John Podhoretz says relax on the polls.

The big news Wednesday in Washington was a Washington Post-NBC News poll that shows both a pox on all your houses attitude toward the president and Democrats and Republicans on the handling of the debt issue, but a particular shadow over Republicans because while 58 percent of respondents said Obama was being inflexible in negotiations, 77 percent of them said Republicans were. Also startling is the fact that those who identify themselves as Republicans say Republican lawmakers are being too intransigent–and that 46 percent of Republicans say they believe a mix of tax cuts and spending cuts is the way to go, basically in a statistical tie with the 50 percent who say spending cuts only.

Such a poll is a dagger in the heart of the rejectionist stance of the Tea Partiers in Congress, no? No, actually. Why? Because this is a poll of adults. Not registered voters. Not likely voters. Adults. As a practical matter, a politician judges the danger to himself from a political stand based on how actual voters will respond. In this case, the poll offers no guide to that. Turnout in the 2010 midterm election that brought 63 new Republicans to the House was 41 percent of registered voters. Registered voters make up 61 percent of all adults. Therefore, the actual constituents to whom Republican House members must respond constitute something like 20 percent of the universe of adults who make up the respondents of this poll.

There are two reasons to do a poll of adults only on a complex matter involving Congress in a non-election year. One is cost; it is more expensive to do a rigorous poll of registered or even likely voters. The other is to skew the debate. I report. You decide.

Washington Post reviews a biography of Barack Obama, Sr. 

… When Obama (Sr.) flew to Hawaii in August 1959, he left behind a young Kenyan wife already pregnant with their second child. At the university, he pursued a demanding course load and a highly active social life. In the fall of his second year, hardly six weeks elapsed before one new female classmate, 17-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham, became pregnant with their child. The university’s foreign student adviser told U.S. immigration agents, who took an active interest in foreign students whose visas required annual renewal, that she already had cautioned the married Kenyan about his dating habits. When Obama informed her in April 1961 that he and Dunham had married two months earlier, Obama also asserted that he had divorced his Kenyan wife. The adviser told the immigration agency she was dubious of that claim, but that Obama had told her that “although they were married they do not live together and Miss Dunham is making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away.” That sentence is redacted in the copy of Obama’s immigration file viewable on the Web, but Jacobs, working from a differently processed version, is unable to fully capture the emotional impact of the memos’ tale of ongoing official enmity.

Given Obama’s seeming lack of interest in parenting his offspring, adoption may have appealed to him, but no other evidence suggests that Ann Dunham actually considered giving her firstborn child away. Within weeks of Barack Jr.’s birth, Dunham and the baby left Honolulu for her previous home town of Seattle, leaving behind the husband with whom she had never lived. When Obama prepared a resume just before leaving Hawaii for graduate school at Harvard in 1962, he listed “a wife and two children in Kenya,” Jacobs reports. “He made no mention of Dunham or Barack Jr.”  …

Another book on Obama’s parents has received a lot of interest because it turns out one of the president’s constant refrains during the campaign, and the health care debate was false. His mother was not denied coverage “for a pre-existing condition” as Obama claimed time and again. Makes one wish he followed in his father’s footsteps and made women the destination of his serial lies, rather than voters. Of course, if we had a press in this country we might have had these facts when the country had a chance to avoid 2008′s mistake. Byron York has the story.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama often discussed his mother’s struggle with cancer. Ann Dunham spent the months before her death in 1995, Obama said, fighting with insurance companies that sought to deny her the coverage she needed to pay for treatment.

“I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn’t thinking about how to get well, she wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence,” Obama said in September 2007.

“She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn’t have to reimburse her for her medical bills,” Obama added in January 2008.

“The insurance companies were saying, ‘Maybe there’s a pre-existing condition and we don’t have to pay your medical bills,’ ” Obama said in a debate with Republican opponent Sen. John McCain in October 2008.

It was a simple and powerful story, one Obama would tell many more times as president during the national health care debate. But now we’re learning the real story of Ann Dunham’s health coverage is not quite what her son made it out to be.

So, how is wind power working in Denmark? American.com has some answers.

… Not surprisingly, Denmark, like other early adopters of renewable power, is finding it unsustainable, and is backing away from the technology. As Andrew Gilligan reports in The Telegraph, the Danish state-owned power industry will no longer build onshore wind turbines, and consumers are complaining about high energy rates and environmental despoliation:

“Earlier this year, a new national anti-wind body, Neighbours of Large Wind Turbines, was created. More than 40 civic groups have become members. “People are fed up with having their property devalued and sleep ruined by noise from large wind turbines,” says the association’s president, Boye Jensen Odsherred. “We receive constant calls from civic groups that want to join.”

Danish GDP is approximately $270 million lower than it would have been if the wind-sector workforce was employed elsewhere.” …

John Tierney looks at playground design.

When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.

“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.

“Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground,” said Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway. “I think monkey bars and tall slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are some of the few features that still can give children thrilling experiences with heights and high speed.” …

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Steve Wynn, Dem businessman from Vegas has strong words for the administration.

… And I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration.And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.

You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change. .. 

Editors at Investor’s Business Daily say Wynn is not alone.

… In such a climate, it’s no surprise that executive outbursts are erupting like lava from scorched earth. Wynn’s remarks echo those on a lengthening list of CEOs including:

• 3M’s George Buckley, who blasted Obama last February as anti-business. “We know what his instincts are,” Buckley said. “We’ve got a real choice between manufacturing in Canada or Mexico — which tends to be more pro-business — and America,” he told the Financial Times.

• Boeing’s Jim McNerney, who in the Wall Street Journal last May called Obama’s handpicked National Labor Relations Board’s suit against his company a “fundamental assault on the capitalist principles that have sustained America’s competitiveness since it became the world’s largest economy nearly 140 years ago.”

• Intel’s Paul Otellini, who told CNET last August that the U.S. legal environment has become so hostile to business that there is likely to be “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe — this is the bitter truth.”

• Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who observed to radio host Hugh Hewitt last month that Obama “never had to make payroll,” that “nobody has ever created a job in this administration” and that the president is “surrounded by college professors.” …

John Tamny says there is a real cost to our economy when there are fewer start-ups.

… First up is the loss of innovation that results from reduced startups. Though Reaganomics is 30 years old, Bartlett made a point that likely remains true today that “the largest proportion of important new inventions are still the result of individuals working virtually alone, rather than by big corporate laboratories.”

At first glance we can see that a reduction in the formation of companies formed in the proverbial garage means less exciting inventions down the line. Reduced startups mean less innovation. Simple as that.

Sarbanes-Oxley also comes to mind here in that an ill-conceived law that turned public company CEOs into accountants has surely poured gasoline on the above fire. To put it very simply, Sarbanes-Oxley has made going public far less attractive to smaller, innovative companies lacking the infrastructure to comply with the law.

As a result, some have chosen to be purchased by larger companies over floating their shares to investors. Given a first pass we can see that what we’ve all lost here is the ability to put our savings into exciting companies, only to watch them hopefully grow.

Secondly, big companies, by virtue of being large, are more bureaucratic, and they’re understandably more careful given how much they stand to lose if they fund egregious errors. So in swallowing existing startups that are less eager to navigate the jungle of being public, we as individuals lose for the larger acquirers to varying degrees snuffing out the risky dynamism that characterizes startups, along with startups that eventually go public. …

Harvard econ prof says Boeing is right to take flight from high cost locales. His article was in Bloomberg.

Americans, and their companies, have long benefited from their freedom to move throughout our country.

In the 19th century, we moved in search of natural resources, exchanging the stony soil of New England for the rich soil of Iowa. In the 20th century, Americans were more likely to migrate in search of better political environments, like the blacks who fled the Jim Crow states of the South.

The profound role that mobility has played in our country, enabling repeated reinvention, causes me to be deeply worried about the possibility that a National Labor Relations Board complaint will prevent Boeing Co. (BA) from moving plane production from Washington state to South Carolina.

I am an economist, not a lawyer, and I have nothing to say about the legal issues surrounding the NLRB’s complaint. I am sure the NLRB is doing what it understands to be its legal duty, preventing retaliation against union activity.

Yet I also dearly hope that the judicial process will affirm the right of companies, and people, to freely choose their locations. The U.S. economy — especially our challenged manufacturing sector — needs more, not less, freedom to adapt and innovate.

The story of America is one of constant geographic movement. In 1816, before DeWitt Clinton had dug his ditch, it cost as much to move goods 30 miles over land as it did to ship them across the Atlantic, and Americans remained tethered to the Eastern Seaboard. …

John Podhoretz says relax on the polls.

The big news Wednesday in Washington was a Washington Post-NBC News poll that shows both a pox on all your houses attitude toward the president and Democrats and Republicans on the handling of the debt issue, but a particular shadow over Republicans because while 58 percent of respondents said Obama was being inflexible in negotiations, 77 percent of them said Republicans were. Also startling is the fact that those who identify themselves as Republicans say Republican lawmakers are being too intransigent–and that 46 percent of Republicans say they believe a mix of tax cuts and spending cuts is the way to go, basically in a statistical tie with the 50 percent who say spending cuts only.

Such a poll is a dagger in the heart of the rejectionist stance of the Tea Partiers in Congress, no? No, actually. Why? Because this is a poll of adults. Not registered voters. Not likely voters. Adults. As a practical matter, a politician judges the danger to himself from a political stand based on how actual voters will respond. In this case, the poll offers no guide to that. Turnout in the 2010 midterm election that brought 63 new Republicans to the House was 41 percent of registered voters. Registered voters make up 61 percent of all adults. Therefore, the actual constituents to whom Republican House members must respond constitute something like 20 percent of the universe of adults who make up the respondents of this poll.

There are two reasons to do a poll of adults only on a complex matter involving Congress in a non-election year. One is cost; it is more expensive to do a rigorous poll of registered or even likely voters. The other is to skew the debate. I report. You decide.

Washington Post reviews a biography of Barack Obama, Sr. 

… When Obama (Sr.) flew to Hawaii in August 1959, he left behind a young Kenyan wife already pregnant with their second child. At the university, he pursued a demanding course load and a highly active social life. In the fall of his second year, hardly six weeks elapsed before one new female classmate, 17-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham, became pregnant with their child. The university’s foreign student adviser told U.S. immigration agents, who took an active interest in foreign students whose visas required annual renewal, that she already had cautioned the married Kenyan about his dating habits. When Obama informed her in April 1961 that he and Dunham had married two months earlier, Obama also asserted that he had divorced his Kenyan wife. The adviser told the immigration agency she was dubious of that claim, but that Obama had told her that “although they were married they do not live together and Miss Dunham is making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away.” That sentence is redacted in the copy of Obama’s immigration file viewable on the Web, but Jacobs, working from a differently processed version, is unable to fully capture the emotional impact of the memos’ tale of ongoing official enmity.

Given Obama’s seeming lack of interest in parenting his offspring, adoption may have appealed to him, but no other evidence suggests that Ann Dunham actually considered giving her firstborn child away. Within weeks of Barack Jr.’s birth, Dunham and the baby left Honolulu for her previous home town of Seattle, leaving behind the husband with whom she had never lived. When Obama prepared a resume just before leaving Hawaii for graduate school at Harvard in 1962, he listed “a wife and two children in Kenya,” Jacobs reports. “He made no mention of Dunham or Barack Jr.”  …

Another book on Obama’s parents has received a lot of interest because it turns out one of the president’s constant refrains during the campaign, and the health care debate was false. His mother was not denied coverage “for a pre-existing condition” as Obama claimed time and again. Makes one wish he followed in his father’s footsteps and made women the destination of his serial lies, rather than voters. Of course, if we had a press in this country we might have had these facts when the country had a chance to avoid 2008′s mistake. Byron York has the story.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama often discussed his mother’s struggle with cancer. Ann Dunham spent the months before her death in 1995, Obama said, fighting with insurance companies that sought to deny her the coverage she needed to pay for treatment.

“I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn’t thinking about how to get well, she wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence,” Obama said in September 2007.

“She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn’t have to reimburse her for her medical bills,” Obama added in January 2008.

“The insurance companies were saying, ‘Maybe there’s a pre-existing condition and we don’t have to pay your medical bills,’ ” Obama said in a debate with Republican opponent Sen. John McCain in October 2008.

It was a simple and powerful story, one Obama would tell many more times as president during the national health care debate. But now we’re learning the real story of Ann Dunham’s health coverage is not quite what her son made it out to be.

So, how is wind power working in Denmark? American.com has some answers.

… Not surprisingly, Denmark, like other early adopters of renewable power, is finding it unsustainable, and is backing away from the technology. As Andrew Gilligan reports in The Telegraph, the Danish state-owned power industry will no longer build onshore wind turbines, and consumers are complaining about high energy rates and environmental despoliation:

“Earlier this year, a new national anti-wind body, Neighbours of Large Wind Turbines, was created. More than 40 civic groups have become members. “People are fed up with having their property devalued and sleep ruined by noise from large wind turbines,” says the association’s president, Boye Jensen Odsherred. “We receive constant calls from civic groups that want to join.”

Danish GDP is approximately $270 million lower than it would have been if the wind-sector workforce was employed elsewhere.” …

John Tierney looks at playground design.

When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.

“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.

“Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground,” said Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway. “I think monkey bars and tall slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are some of the few features that still can give children thrilling experiences with heights and high speed.” …

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David Leonhardt reviews the consumer strike for the NY Times.

… The auto industry is on pace to sell 28 percent fewer new vehicles this year than it did 10 years ago — and 10 years ago was 2001, when the country was in recession. Sales of ovens and stoves are on pace to be at their lowest level since 1992. Home sales over the past year have fallen back to their lowest point since the crisis began. And big-ticket items are hardly the only problem. … 

… If you’re looking for one overarching explanation for the still-terrible job market, it is this great consumer bust. Business executives are only rational to hold back on hiring if they do not know when their customers will fully return. Consumers, for their part, are coping with a sharp loss of wealth and an uncertain future (and many have discovered that they don’t need to buy a new car or stove every few years). Both consumers and executives are easily frightened by the latest economic problem, be it rising gas prices or the debt-ceiling impasse.

Earlier this year, Charles M. Holley Jr., the chief financial officer of Wal-Mart, said that his company had noticed consumers were often buying smaller packages toward the end of the month, just before many households receive their next paychecks. “You see customers that are running out of money at the end of the month,” Mr. Holley said.

In past years, many of those customers could have relied on debt, often a home-equity line of credit or a credit card, to tide them over. …

Michael Barone liked Leonhardt’s piece, but begs to differ in one important place.

Even good journalists can make mistakes, based on commonly held assumptions which are simply wrong. Take the New York Times’s economics reporter David Leonhardt. In an insightful and well written article about the huge drop in consumer spending, Leonhardt writes,” If governments stop spending at the same time that consumers do, the economy can enter a vicious cycle, as it did in Hoover’s day.”

The only problem is that, as Megan McArdle pointed out in a July 8 blogpost on The Atlantic website, “the evidence is not ambiguous: Hoover did not tighten up on spending.” She goes on to provide the facts: …

Weekly Standard explores some of the contradictions in the president’s speeches.  

‘I’m the president of the United States, and I want to make sure that I am not engaging in scare tactics. And I’ve tried to be responsible and somewhat restrained so that folks don’t get spooked.” So said President Obama at his June 29 debt ceiling press conference. Two weeks later, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley asked Obama whether he can “tell the folks at home that, no matter what happens, the Social Security checks are gonna go out on August 3?” President Obama replied that whether it was Social Security checks, veterans’ checks, or disability checks, “I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3 if we haven’t resolved this issue, because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”

These statements are representative of Obama’s contradictions, in word and deed, over the course of the entire deficit debate. Gelatinous is an apt description (to paraphrase Speaker John Boehner) of the president’s rhetoric, for Obama has been slippery and irresolute—the opposite of the responsibility and restraint he touts.

To be responsible, a leader should express ideas to the American people in clear and informative language. Yet the deficit debate has been marked by Obama’s fondness for referring to “revenues” (taxes), “investments” (spending), the need to “reduce spending in the tax code” (increase taxes), and the importance of “further improving Medicare” (cutting Medicare) by further empowering the Independent Payment Advisory Board, whose cuts—at least under current law—would go to fund Obamacare, not cut the deficit. …

Mark Tapscott says there is one place the president excels.

Here’s an interesting couple of numbers that emerged during this past week: According to Jim Messina, his campaign manager, through the second quarter of 2011, President Obama now has 552,000 contributors to his 2012 re-election campaign.

And the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that during the same two quarters, the U.S. economy generated 260,000 jobs.

In other words, Obama attracted twice as many campaign donors as his economic policies created new jobs. That probably explains a great deal about yet a third number that received a great deal of attention this week: Gallup’s finding that a “generic Republican” leads Obama by eight points in voter preference for 2012.

Jonah Goldberg wants to know who’s the ideologue?

… The president, we are told, is a pragmatist for wanting a “fair and balanced” budget deal. What that means is tax increases must accompany spending cuts. Any significant spending cuts would be way in the future. The tax increases would begin right after Obama is reelected.

Now keep in mind that tax hikes (or what the administration calls “revenue increases”) are Obama’s idee fixe. He campaigned on raising taxes for millionaires and billionaires (defined in the small print as people making more than $200,000 a year or couples making $250,000).

During a primary debate, he was asked by ABC’s Charles Gibson if he would raise the capital gains tax even if he knew that cutting it would generate more revenue for the government. The non-ideologue responded that raising the tax, even if doing so would lower revenue, might be warranted out of “fairness.” As he said to Joe the Plumber, things are better when you “spread the wealth around.” …

Todd Zywicki, George Mason law prof outlines the disasters of the auto-bailouts.

Last month, President Obama barnstormed through Ohio, unveiling his surprising decision to claim credit for the success of the multi-billion dollar government bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler.

Why surprising?

Because despite the efforts of the administration and its willing accomplices in the media, the belief that the auto bailouts were a success is simply a myth. Leave aside the obvious point that the government still stands to lose billions of dollars on its investment as well as many billions more from the preferential tax treatment of the reorganizations. Not only was the bailout unnecessary to save the American automotive industry but the politicized bankruptcy process left both General Motors and Chrysler in a weaker competitive position than if they had simply reorganized in a standard chapter 11 process.

First, the belief that the bailouts were a success rests on a central misunderstanding: the belief that GM and Chrysler would have collapsed had the government not intervened. Yet large corporations reorganize in bankruptcy routinely in the United States and GM in particular is the prototype of the type of firm for which chapter 11 was designed: a firm with strong going-concern value, specialized labor and capital investments, but plagued with decades of bad management decisions and a need to fix crushing labor agreements, eliminate underperforming lines, and streamline an overgrown dealership network. Given the obvious viability of a leaner, more-efficient GM there is little doubt that it would have successfully reorganized. …

Thomas Sowell points out how anti-business actions and rhetoric hurt the very people the administration should want to help.

… Blithely piling onto American businesses both known costs like more taxes and unknowable costs — such as the massive ObamaCare mandates that are still evolving — provides more incentives for investors to send their money elsewhere to escape the hassles.

Hardly a month goes by without this administration coming up with a new anti-business policy — whether directed against Boeing, banks or other private enterprises. Neither investors nor employers can know when the next one is coming or what it will be. These are unknown unknowns.

Such anti-business policies would just be business’ problem, except that it is businesses that create jobs.

The biggest losers from creating an adverse business climate may not be businesses themselves — especially not big businesses, which can readily invest more of their money overseas. The biggest losers are likely to be working people in America, who cannot just relocate to Europe or Asia to take the jobs created there by American multinational corporations.

Andrew Malcolm with the best of late-night.

Leno: Obama’s latest economic recovery plan: He told Treasury Secretary Geithner to take the little money we have left and buy lottery tickets.

Leno: Democrats warned today that if the debt limit is not raised by Aug. 2, the federal government will cease to function. How do you tell?

Letterman: So CNN has canceled the TV show of ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer. And you have to wonder how will the poor guy spend an hour now.

Leno: CNN has canceled Eliot Spitzer’s show, “In the Arena.” Apparently network executives made the decision after realizing it was still on.

Fallon: Illinois schools are dropping the written parts of their standardized school tests. Asked why, a spokesman said, “We simple does not needs them.

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Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor says the only game that counts is 2012. As far as trying to get a deal with Obama now – fuhgeddaboudit.

… Obama operates under the ratchet theory of government.  Once ratcheted up, spending cannot ratchet down.  Spending that was not missed yesterday is imperative tomorrow, once it has been adopted today.  Which means that doing any deal based on Ratchet Man’s promises that he will cut future spending is a mug’s game.

Addressing the nation’s long term–and not really that long term, actually–danger of government insolvency cannot be done in the context of annual budgeting.  The crux of the problem is entitlements, and attacking that problem requires fundamental restructuring of the programs, where this restructuring will likely require features (e.g., supermajority requirements) that make it difficult for future Congresses and administrations to renege on the commitments inherent in the legislation mandating the restructuring.

That will not happen while Obama is in office.  Period.  Which is exactly why 2012 is the only thing that matters, and that doing a deal today or forcing a triggering of the debt ceiling that will have extremely unpredictable economic and political consequences is foolhardy.   Unfortunately, those who desire most ardently to cut back on government and its growth are those who most ardently press for a deal or a showdown that could lead to a shutdown.  Although the frustration is understandable, this is short sighted and counterproductive.  It is vital to keep the big things in mind, and to avoid battles that risk the war.

Roger Simon posts on America The Broken.

… Our country is being led by an individual seemingly incapable of thinking beyond his own interest or beyond an ideology as shopworn as a 1962 television set with a blown tube. Is there anybody left who still believes in Keynesian economics? I mean really believes in it with our now prodigiously escalating debt spiraling off into an unknowable future.

Well, our president appears to with his endless references to “fairness” — a fairness that most hurts the very people it pretends to help. Obama has trapped himself in a ideological oxymoron. He wants us to believe, wants himself to believe, that government is the solution when we all know that government is the problem. The more government tries to create jobs the worse the economy gets. The history of the twentieth century has demonstrated that for us from the Great Depression to the sorrow of the Soviet Union.

Someone finally has to cut this Gordian knot. We are living at a time when we need a man or woman in the presidency of true courage and what we have is a smug coward — the worst possible combination. …

David Brooks has been at the NY Times long enough to have gone native. At least, that is what we can surmise from this post by Jennifer Rubin.

David Brooks of the New York Times likes to fancy himself as a truth-seeker, bringing social and hard sciences to the masses. But in his Friday column on health care and death, he makes some shocking and inaccurate assertions. Given his coziness with the Obama administration one has to wonder if he is test-driving some Obama administration rationalizations for rationing.

Brooks is enamored of Dudley Clendinen’s “splendid” essay, as he describes, “The Good Short Life.” Brooks thrills to this definition of a life worth living:

‘ Instead of choosing that long, dehumanizing, expensive course, Clendinen has decided to face death as one of life’s “most absorbing thrills and challenges.” He concludes: “When the music stops — when I can’t tie my bow tie, tell a funny story, walk my dog, talk with Whitney, kiss someone special, or tap out lines like this — I’ll know that Life is over. It’s time to be gone.” ‘

Well that “dehumanizing, expensive course” allows millions of Americans who would have died in past years to “kiss someone special.” But is someone confined to a wheelchair (no dog walking) or who needs help dressing not living a life of value? Clendinen, and in turn Brooks, begin down a slippery slope as they decide that, really, is it worth it to keep grandpa around for years if he can’t tie his tie?

Brooks then embarks on a flight of misinformation to suggest we’re wasting much of that money. He finds other useful sources: …

Noemie Emery says we have had our fling with the welfare state.

The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,” quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should” do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can” part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good” with a “right.”

Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt linked “freedom from want” to “freedom of speech” and “freedom of worship,” the left has been talking of everything that it thinks would be nice to have in terms of an utter and absolute right: a right to a job and a right to an income, a right to retire in comfort in Florida, a right to the most advanced health care without paying much for it, and a right to have your children taken care of while you work all day at your job. The problem is that these are all goods and services, though of varying importance, and goods and rights are not the same things. …

… In the United States, the states patterned most on the Old Europe model—those with high taxes, high spending, and strong public unions—suffered the same plight as Europe, while those with free-market models did not. “The eight states with no state income tax grew 18 percent in the past decade,” Michael Barone tells us. “The other states grew just 8 percent.” The 22 states with right-to-work laws grew 15 percent in the past decade, the 28 others grew 6 percent. The 16 states that don’t require collective bargaining with state employees grew 15 percent, the others grew 7 percent. The most rapid growth—21 percent—was in the Rocky Mountain states and Texas, which have low taxes, weak unions, and light regulation. 

Among the states with high taxes, strong unions, and heavy public employee pension burdens are those in the Rust Belt around the Great Lakes. As Matt Continetti writes in the Washington Post, “Five of the eight states that border the Great Lakes now have Republican governors working to limit union power,” while one Democrat, New York’s Andrew Cuomo, son of a much revered liberal icon, has been praised by New Jersey’s Chris Christie as his cost-cutting twin. And to everyone’s shock, the Democratic legislature in Massachusetts has voted to rein in unions, too. …

Jeff Jacoby shines some light on another of government’s overreaches.

… Washington oversteps its legitimate bounds all the time and usually gets away with it. But every now and then a federal encroachment is so egregious that the public rebels against it. Outlawing the light bulbs that illuminate 85 percent of American homes strikes me as such an encroachment – one that even Democrats should be embarrassed to defend.

The use of efficiency mandates to snuff out the standard light bulb was an exercise of unadulterated crony capitalism. It came about after big bulb manufacturers, frustrated by their customers’ refusal to switch from cheap throwaway incandescents to the far more profitable compact fluorescents touted by greens, decided to play hardball.

“So some years ago,’’ The New York Times Magazine noted last month, “Philips [Electronics] formed a coalition with environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, to push for higher standards. ‘We felt that we needed to . . . show that the best-known lighting technology, the incandescent light bulb, is at the end of its lifetime,’ says Harry Verhaar, the company’s head of strategic sustainability initiatives.’’

Other corporations joined the plot, lobbying Congress to croak a product Americans overwhelmingly like and compel them to buy the more expensive substitute the industry was eager to sell them. The entire scheme, a lobbyist for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association testified candidly in 2007, was “at the industry’s initiative.’’ Unable to convince consumers to voluntarily abandon Edison’s light bulb, Big Business got the government to force the issue. “Of such deals,’’ remarks Bloomberg columnist Virginia Postrel, “are Tea Parties born.’’ …