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Craig Pirrong has some thoughts about the president’s trip to Oklahoma.
… Talk about chutzpah. Unbelievable. It is worse than the rooster claiming credit for the sun rising, because the cock doesn’t know any better, but Obama should.
Fact: the US government generally, and Obama and his administration particularly, have nothing to do with the construction of this pipeline. It is an eminently rational commercial response to price signals. It is the market in action. It is what happens when the market is allowed to operate.
If Obama were a thoughtful, fair minded man, rather than a somewhat dim political hack and complete economic ignoramus bent on re-election, instead of conscripting Keystone into his demented narrative about his cockamamie energy policy, he would learn a lesson. That lesson would be: market participants responding to price signals will undertake the investments necessary to produce and transform energy. Maybe I should get out of the way and let the market work.
But Obama will never acknowledge any such thing. The only thing he is invested in is a delusional energy policy that is determined to ride roughshod over price signals. A policy that is predicated on a worldview that distrusts-and arguably hates-markets. A policy that is hell-bent on subsidizing losers (the losses being a flashing red-light price signal) and stymieing winners.
And the hits keep on coming. He wants to tax Chinese solar panels because the Chinese subsidize their production. Look, solar is one of the biggest losers, but if the Chinese are going to be so generous as to make them less loser-like by selling panels below cost, we should thank them. It means that the Chinese are bearing some of the cost of our stupidity.
But I forgot. The solar manufacturing sector is teeming with Obama supporters and donors. Go figure.
Taking heat on his energy policy, such as it is, Obama had the loathsome and aptly named Jay Carney (who makes me pine for Robert Gibbs!, which is a staggering thought) lecture the world on the subject. Apparently anyone who disagrees with Obama’s policy has “severely diminished capacity.” …
Snarky comments by Jay Carney get more play in the Examiner.
If the tone of the rhetoric coming from the White House is a reflection of how President Obama feels about House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s new Path to Prosperity plan, then the Wisconsin Republican has scared Obama silly.
Yesterday, from a podium in front of the White House seal, Press Secretary Jay Carney said of the clean energy subsidy cuts in Ryan’s budget, “You have to be aggressively and deliberately ignorant of the world economy not to know and understand that clean energy technologies are going to play a huge role in the 21st century. You have to have severely diminished capacity to understand what drives economic growth in industrialized countries in this century.”
Which is an interesting statement considering an anecdote liberal author Noam Scheiber revealed in his new book The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery:
“Energy was a particular obsession of [Obama]’s, and therefore a particular source of frustration. Week after week, [economic adviser Christina] Romer would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?” But the numbers rarely budged.” …
Even Dems are piling on. This from Roll Call.
… Rep. Dennis Cardoza said the president’s move wouldn’t satisfy anybody and would merely keep the issue alive.
“I think it’s the most idiotic political move I’ve ever seen,” said Cardoza, who supports the pipeline. The California Democrat said the president needs to make a decision one way or another and stick to it.
If he’s going to build it, “do it, take your lumps, be done with it,” he added.
Cardoza said the latest maneuver amounts to “highlighting a waffle.”
“They don’t build statues to wafflers,” he said. …
Etch A Sketch comments by one of his advisors raise issues about Romney’s hold on firm principles. In that light, American.com calls attention to the fact that Mitt has been the only GOP candidate who has not panicked in his Afghanistan comments.
… How have the GOP contenders responded to this rising call for retreat? Newt Gingrich has led the rush to the exits, declaring that America’s mission in Afghanistan is “not doable” and our presence in the country “is probably counterproductive.” Perhaps this is a desperate bid to win over some Ron Paul voters, but it pretty much disqualifies him as commander in chief. Rick Santorum has not gone as far as Gingrich, but the once hawkish candidate has softened his support for the mission in the wake of recent events, declaring: “We have to either make the decision to make a full commitment, which this president has not done, or we have to decide to get out, and probably get out sooner.” Not exactly channeling Winston Churchill.
So among the three leading contenders, that leaves Romney as the only one who has refused to pander to the rising sentiment for retreat. Speaking on CNN after the shootings, Romney said “You don’t make an abrupt shift in policy because of the actions of one crazed, deranged person” adding “to say we’re going to throw in the towel without getting the input of General Allen or actually making trips to Afghanistan and meeting with leaders there and meeting with our commanders there and troops there, that wouldn’t make a lot of sense. I’m more deliberate when it comes to the lives of our sons and daughters and the mission of the United States of America.” …
… It is not fatal that Mr. Romney has been tagged as Etch A Sketchy. Almost all of 2012 will come down to plans and policy, to which path seems likely to get us out of the muck. The American people are in a post-heroic presidential period. They just want to hire somebody to come in and fix some essential problems.
Mr. Romney should feel optimistic.
If the issue is our national economic life, the GOP will very likely win. If the subset of that issue is freedom and personal liberty, the GOP will win with meaning.
The Obama campaign knows this. That’s why they’ll do anything to throw Republicans off those subjects. Two weeks ago it was contraception, next week it will be another social question. They used to scorn Republicans for using wedge issues, but now their entire strategy is a tribute to the political hacks they hated. And if any Republicans were sad that contraception actually came up as the subject of public debate, they were not as sad as Democratic strategists, who were hoping to save it for September.
If the economy significantly rebounds between now and November, will that leave Mr. Romney without an issue? No. First of all, magic is not about to occur. But more important, if unemployment plummeted to 6%, the American people would think, “Nothing personal, but this didn’t happen because of Obama, it happened in spite of him.”
No one thinks he’s got a good hand on the economy. No one, not even his supporters.
Charles Krauthammer says ObamaCare is back in our faces.
Obamacare dominated the 2010 midterms, driving its Democratic authors to a historic electoral shellacking. But since then, the issue has slipped quietly underground.
Now it’s back, summoned to the national stage by the confluence of three disparate events: the release of new Congressional Budget Office cost estimates, the approach of Supreme Court hearings on the law’s constitutionality and the issuance of a compulsory contraception mandate.
Cost: Obamacare was carefully constructed to manipulate the standard 10-year cost projections of the CBO. Because benefits would not fully kick in for four years, President Obama could trumpet 10-year gross costs of less than $1 trillion — $938 billion to be exact.
But now that the near-costless years 2010 and 2011 have elapsed, the true 10-year price tag comes into focus. From 2013 through 2022, the CBO reports, the costs of Obamacare come to $1.76 trillion — almost twice the phony original number.
It gets worse. Annual gross costs after 2021 are more than a quarter of $1 trillion every year — until the end of time. That, for a new entitlement in a country already drowning in $16 trillion of debt.
Constitutionality: Beginning March 26, the Supreme Court will hear challenges to the law. …
Joe Queenan doubts the media’s economic news.
… It is always dangerous to base assumptions about the state of the economy on anecdotal information, but in my experience, anecdotal information trumps government statistics any day of the week. I live in a typical small town, with the typical mix of businesses and a typical citizenry. My town is still reeling.
The large store that used to be a bike shop is empty. The space that used to be an optometrist’s shop is empty. The ice cream parlor down the street, the one that used to be a Carvel’s and then became a Brainfreeze, is gone. The gelato place at the foot of the hill has closed its doors. The massive gourmet shop that used to occupy the center of town has been shuttered for two years, vastly reducing traffic for other merchants. We’ve got plenty of nail salons and bars and pizza parlors, but that doesn’t really suggest a booming economy. And no, the barber shops and hair salons are not turning away customers, either.
There’s more. The commercial building where I work has five suites. Over the years, they have been occupied by psychologists and tour promoters and expert numismatists and accountants and software engineers and import-export companies and even a local newspaper. Four of them are now empty. Three of them have been empty for more than two years. The rents are not excessive; one two-room unit lists for $500 a month. Offer $450 and it’s yours! There are no takers in sight. The last thriving business in this building was a massage parlor that the cops finally padlocked. Now I’m the only one here. This is one spooky building. This is one spooky economy.
As for jobs, forget it. Lots of my friends’ kids are going to law school, because there’s no work out there. Others are going to grad school to get an even more useless degree than the one they already have. Everyone is waiting tables, or parking cars, or pinch-hitting as a substitute teacher, or on the prowl for a nonpaying internship. When you hear that a kid with a college degree actually got a job earning more than the minimum wage, it feels like someone just won the Stanley Cup or the Nobel Prize. …
A Blast from the past from a blog named Thepastisablast. They have a menu from the restaurant counter of a 1957 Woolworth’s.