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Mark Steyn on the contemptible ones and their budget tricks.
Have you been following this so-called Supercommittee? They’re the new superhero group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss. There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt. The Supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.
I had cynically assumed that the Superfriends would address America’s imminent debt catastrophe with some radical reform – such as, say, slowing the increase in spending by raising the age for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 47 to 49 by the year 2137, after which triumph we could all go back to sleep until total societal collapse.
But I underestimated the genius of the Superfriends’ Supercommittee. It turns out that a committee created to reduce the deficit is, instead, going to increase it. As The Hill reported:
“Democrats on the supercommittee have proposed that the savings from the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be used to pay for a new stimulus package, according to a summary of the $2.3 trillion plan obtained by The Hill.”
Do you follow that? Let the Congressional Budget Office explain it to you:
“The budget savings from ending the wars are estimated to total around $1 trillion over a decade, according to an estimate in July from the Congressional Budget Office.”
Let us note in passing that, according to the official CBO estimates, a whole decade’s worth of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan adds up to little more than Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. But, aside from that, in what sense are these “savings”? The Iraq war is ended – or, at any rate, “ended,” at least as far as U.S. participation in it is concerned. How then can congressional accountants claim to be able to measure “savings” in 2021 from a war that ended a decade earlier? And why stop there? Why not estimate around $2 trillion in savings by 2031? After all, that would free up even more money for a bigger stimulus package. wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t cost us anything because it would all be “savings.”
Come to think of it, didn’t the Second World War end in 1945? Could we have the CBO score the estimated two-thirds of a century of “budget savings” we’ve saved since ending that war? We could use the money to fund free Master’s degrees in Complacency and Self-Esteem Studies for everyone, and that would totally stimulate the economy. The Spanish-American War ended 103 years ago, so imagine how much cash has already piled up! Like they say at Publishers’ Clearing House, you may already have won! …
Think Mark Steyn is over-wrought? Here’s historian Niall Ferguson;
… So why should Americans care about any of this? The first reason is that, with American consumers still in the doldrums of deleveraging, the United States badly needs buoyant exports if its economy is to grow at anything other than a miserably low rate. And despite all the hype about trade with the Chinese, U.S. exports to the European Union are nearly three times larger than to China.
Until March, it seemed as if exports to Europe were on an upward trajectory. But the eurozone crisis has stopped that. Governments that ran up excessive debts have seen their borrowing costs explode. Unable to devalue their currencies, they’ve been forced to adopt austerity measures—cutting spending or hiking taxes—in a vain effort to reduce their deficits. The result has been Depression economics: shrinking economies and unemployment rates approaching 20 percent.
As a result, according to the new president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, a “double dip” recession in Europe is now all but inevitable. And that’s lousy news for U.S. exporters targeting the EU market.
But there’s more. Europe’s problem is not just that governments are overborrowed. There are an unknown number of European banks that are effectively insolvent if their holdings of government bonds are “marked to market”—in other words, valued at their current rock-bottom market prices. …
Joe Nocera on the real scandal at Penn State.
… Big-time college football requires grown men to avert their eyes from the essential hypocrisy of the enterprise. Coaches take home multimillion-dollar salaries, while the players who make them rich don’t even get “scholarships” that cover the full cost of attending college. They push their “student-athletes” to take silly courses that won’t get in the way of football. When players are seriously injured and can no longer play, their coaches often yank their scholarships, forcing them to drop out of school.
“College football and men’s basketball has drifted so far away from the educational purpose of the university,” James Duderstadt, a former president of the University of Michigan, told me recently. “They exploit young people and prevent them from getting a legitimate college education. They place the athlete’s health at enormous risk, which becomes apparent later in life. We are supposed to be developing human potential, not making money on their backs. Football strikes at the core values of a university.”
It is true that Joe Paterno ran a better program than most, and that no university outside of Notre Dame has benefited more from having a football team than Penn State. Its football renown helped turn a small-time state school into an important research university. But it is also true that, in 2009, Penn State football generated a staggering $50 million in profit on $70 million in revenue, according to figures compiled by the Department of Education. Protecting those profits is the real core value of college football — at Penn State and everywhere else.
What goes on in the typical big-time college football program constitutes abuse of the athletes who play the game. It’s not sexual abuse, to be sure, but it’s wrong just the same. For 46 years, Joe Paterno averted his eyes to the daily injustices, large and small, that his players suffered — just like Nick Saban does at Alabama and Steve Spurrier at South Carolina, and all the rest of them. When Paterno averted his eyes from Jerry Sandusky, he was just doing what came naturally as a college football coach.
A Corner Post on an outrage.
If you’re a parent who accepts Medicaid payments from the State of Michigan to help support your mentally-disabled adult children, you qualify as a state employee for the purposes of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). They can now claim and receive a portion of your Medicaid in the form of union dues.
Robert and Patricia Haynes live in Michigan with their two adult children, who have cerebral palsy. The state government provides the family with insurance through Medicaid, but also treats them as caregivers. For the SEIU, this makes them public employees and thus members of the union, which receives $30 out of the family’s monthly Medicaid subsidy. The Michigan Quality Community Care Council (MQC3) deducts union dues on behalf of SEIU…
Mr. and Mrs. Haynes, of course, are both the parents (the employer) and the health care providers for their children, but they still lose money to the SEIU every month, despite having no interest in joining the union. They have been arbitrarily classified as state employees so that the union can take money from them.
A student at Clemson on the waste involved in ethanol.
… Negative consequences of ethanol abound.
Ethanol production increases the price of corn used for food. The price of corn is skyrocketing, which raises the price of all corn-based products. 24% of the U.S. corn crop is now mandated to go to ethanol, which is causing shocks to global markets as third-world nations must pay more for this food staple. Ethanol production competes with land space for other food products, using an estimated 11 acres worth of land per vehicle fueled by ethanol per year.
Ethanol appears to be “environmentally friendly,” but it is not.
Ethanol releases 19% more carbon dioxide than gasoline. For those who believe that human-produced carbon dioxide plays a role in global climate change, this is not a good statistic.
Ethanol production requires enormous water resources. According to the Water Education Foundation, a pound of corn requires 118 gallons of water to grow. Given the 21 pounds of corn required to produce one gallon of ethanol, that’s almost 2500 gallons of water used, not including water in the distillation stage. So when filling their gas tanks, most Americans now indirectly consume over 2500 gallons of water. …
Shorts from National Review
On Halloween, according to the U.N., the world’s population hit an estimated 7 billion. All the predictable hand-wringing ensued from all the predictable quarters, though by this point the anguished response has a ritualistic quality, since it was the fourth time the odometer has turned over since Paul Ehrlich’s hysterical 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb ignited a wave of neo-Malthusianism. Malthus’s and Ehrlich’s argument was simple: Fixed amount of arable land, ever-increasing population, result starvation. Yet while the world’s capacity to feed people may not be infinite, there is no reason to believe that 6 or 7 or 10 billion is anywhere near the limit. It is now clear that science can expand agricultural production greatly; that starvation is almost always the result of bad government, not finite resources; and that prosperity and modernity, especially the education of women, will lead to a natural decrease in birth rates. So we greet Baby 7B by saying the more the merrier, and hoping his or her generation will realize that the best fix for the purported ills of overpopulation is not planned economies, forced wealth transfers, or draconian limits on family size, but technology, democracy, and free markets.
An enduring problem for liberal presidents is that the people they govern just cannot seem to rise to the chief executive’s high standards of idealism and self-sacrifice. The canonical expression of liberal presidential disappointment in us, the citizenry, was Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “malaise” speech: “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” etc. Now we are hearing similar complaints from Barack Obama. Back in September, he told an interviewer that we have “gotten a little soft.” Then here he was the other day at a fundraiser in San Francisco saying that “we have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.” Well, Mr. President, our willingness to do those things sprang from the desire to improve our lives and those of our fellow citizens through honest individual enterprise — the motive force for all our nation’s progress. Since that desire is presumably a human universal, we should ask what is currently stifling it. The answers are not hard to find: excessive regulation, taxation, and litigation. Is there any prospect of this triple burden’s being lightened? Not under Barack Obama’s administration. …