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Mark Steyn takes us back to the speech.
The President of the United States came to Osawatomie, Kansas, last week to deliver a speech of such fascinating awfulness that archeologists of the future, sifting through the rubble of our civilization, will surely doubt whether it could really have been delivered by the chief executive of the global superpower in the year 2011.
“This isn’t about class warfare,” declared President Obama. Really? As his fellow Democrat Dale Bumpers testified at the Clinton impeachment trial, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex,’ it’s about sex.” The president understands that “Wall Street,” “banks,” “fat cats,” etc., remain the most inviting target, and he figures that he can ride the twin steeds of Resentment and Envy to re-election and four more years of even bigger Big Government. His opponents, he told us, “want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. … And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules. … It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” He blamed our present fix on “this brand of ‘you’re on your own’ economics.”
This is a deliciously perverse analysis of the situation confronting America and a fin de civilisation West. In what area of life are Americans now “on their own”? By 2008, Fannie and Freddie had a piece of over half the mortgages in this country; the “subprime” mortgage was an invention of government. America’s collective trillion dollars of college debt has been ramped up by government distortion of the student loan market. Likewise, health care, where Americans labor under the misapprehension that they have a “private” system rather than one whose inflationary pressures and byzantine bureaucracy are both driven largely by remorseless incremental government annexation. Americans are ever less “on their own” in housing, education, health, and most other areas of life – and the present moribund slough is the direct consequence.
It would be truer to say that the present situation reflects the total failure of “you’re not on your own” economics – the delusion of statists that government can insulate millions of people from the vicissitudes of life. …
More of this from Michael Barone.
Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of smart people. And over the last four years we have heard countless encomiums, and not just from Democrats, of the intellect and perceptiveness of Barack Obama. But a reading of the text of Obama’s December 6 speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, billed as one of his big speeches of the year, shows him to be something like the opposite.
Even by the standards of campaign rhetoric, this is a shockingly shoddy piece of work. …
… What we have here, it seems a president who has no serious interest in public policy. He has spent nearly half his 15 years in public office running for other public office. The only difference now is that, having run out of higher offices to run for, he is just running for reelection instead. Those who pride themselves on belonging to the party of smart people should be embarrassed.
Ed Morrissey revisits LightSquared.
The saga of LightSquared added a new chapter last night, as Bloomberg reported on the preliminary result of tests of the satellite Internet provider’s service in relation to GPS devices. The Obama administration has pushed LightSquared as a provider for its ambitious broadband expansion over the objections of the military, which warned that LightSquared’s operations would interfere with the satellite-based navigational system. The draft summary of the November testing shows that the military was right to be concerned: …
…Why is this important? Philip Falcone is a big donor to the Democratic Party, and he has billions of dollars at stake in LightSquared’s approval. Also, Obama himself was an investor in LightSquared at one point, as were or are a number of his associates. The resounding failure in this test makes it look like the White House pressured witnesses to back off of exposing LightSquared’s product as exactly the kind of dangerous problem that critics had maintained all along — with the intent to mislead Congress into moving forward with LightSquared’s government contracts. …
Andrew Ferguson tracks down the nutty origins of the nutty ideas of the administration’s nuttiest.
Is it possible that the people who run the Obama administration aren’t as smart as we’ve been led to believe?
Stay with me here, seriously. I’m thinking now of the administration’s much-publicized devotion to behavioral economics. Not long after his election, Time magazine noted that Barack Obama had surrounded himself with a “dream team” of behavioral economists, outside-the-box envelope-pushers like Peter Orszag, who became the administration’s first head of the Office of Management and Budget, and Cass Sunstein, whom the president appointed as his “regulatory czar.”
Behavioral economics is très chic. All the coolest economists are into it. It partakes of the obsession with social science that has lately gripped the country’s smart people, who exhibit a grinding need to quantify human behavior so that it will become more predictable, describable, and controllable. To meet demand, a steady flow of “studies” in human behavior passes through the sluice gates of university departments of accounting, psychology, marketing, sociology, business, and of course economics. From these the behavioral economists build vast edifices of theory and now, thanks to President Obama, public policy too.
The most salient of these policies was the Making Work Pay tax credit of 2009 and 2010. It was an essential element of the president’s famous $250 billion “middle-class tax cut,” which was slapped like a defibrillator onto the limp and supine figure of the American economy a couple years ago. The MWP was carefully designed according to the principles of behavioral economics, and now it seems not to have worked the way it was supposed to.
Behavioral economics is based on the belief that we human beings behave irrationally in measurable and predictable ways, and quite often we don’t have the slightest idea why we do what we do, though social scientists can do experiments that will tell us. This point of view contrasts with the working premise of more traditional economics, which assumes that people will pursue their economic self-interest, rationally defined.
When the Bush administration decided on a temporary tax cut to stimulate the economy, in 2001 and again in 2008, they merely sent everybody a lump-sum check, assuming that we’d all spend it and send a good jolt through the ol’ defibrillator.
The Bush administration, as we all know, was not très chic. It was full of fuddy-duddies. They didn’t understand the up-to-date social science experiments with which behavioral economists keep current. The Obama administration, by contrast, decided it would be scientific. Its economists designed what a headline in the New Yorker called “A Smarter Stimulus.” …
… In predicting they would do otherwise, the très chic economists thought they had science on their side. In fact, they didn’t have science on their side?—?they had a flimsy record of fewer than 150 undergraduates who told a handful of graduate students in a Texas classroom in early 2007 how they thought they might behave in a fanciful situation.
Who knew that 141 students in Corpus Christi would wield so vast an influence over U.S. economic policy? Who knew that the government would be run by intellectuals silly enough to let them wield it?
Andrew Malcolm lets Speaker Boehner tout the Keystone bill.
… Another bipartisan provision in this bill supports the job-creating Keystone energy project.
As you may know, the Keystone energy project would create tens of thousands of American jobs and reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East. This jobs project has bipartisan support in the House and the Senate. It’s backed by a broad-based coalition, from small businesses to organized labor.
You’ve heard President Obama say the American people ‘can’t wait’ to take action on jobs. Well, the Keystone project is the very definition of an idea the American people can’t wait for Washington to take action on.
As a matter of fact, Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, has warned that if the United States doesn’t approve this project, Canada will be forced to move forward with other customers, potentially China. We can’t stand by and allow that to happen. Those jobs are too important.
Unfortunately, the president wants to put off a decision on the Keystone project until after next year’s election. Not only that — he now says he will reject the House’s jobs bill if it includes support for the project.
This is no time for the same-old my-way-or-the-highway theatrics. …
Editors at Investor’s.com on Keystone.
The president says that extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut will create more jobs than an oil pipeline from Canada. There are at least 20,000 members of the 99% who would disagree.
You can see why the economy is in trouble. Vice President Joe Biden, the stimulus sheriff, says he turned first to MF Global’s Jon Corzine for economic advice and President Obama thinks 20,000 people getting extended unemployment benefits does more for the economy than 20,000 people getting paychecks to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada.
In the president’s view, extending the payroll tax cuts is more important than adding more people to the payrolls, unless they are making electric cars that catch fire or work for solar-panel makers that go bankrupt. …