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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%. …