February 4, 2015

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Good Power Line short on President Imperious.

No one has ever accused President Obama of knowing much about American history. He demonstrated his ignorance again during a pre-Super Bowl interview with Savannah Guthrie. Sharing a brew with Guthrie, Obama told her, “We make beer. First president since George Washington to make some booze in the White House.”

George Washington never occupied the White House. John Adams was the first president to do so.

Obama’s ignorance extends beyond the history of White House occupancy. He also, I think, misunderstands George Washington. Even if our first president had lived in the White House, it’s hard to imagine him setting up a brewery there at the public’s expense.

As president, Washington lived in a pre-existing mansion in Philadelphia. He is said to have insisted on paying rent.

The costs of Obama’s White House brewery are, of course, “small beer,” especially compared to the $50 million or so Obama has spent on travel. This reportedly includes more than $7 million in flight expenses for his family vacations to Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard, and a trip to California to appear on the Jay Leno show.

The imperial presidency, which George Washington famously eschewed, has reached its apotheosis with Barack Obama.

 

 

Seth Mandel posts on the budget.

… So it might be more accurate to say that the era of pretending to search for a “grand bargain” is officially over. And that, in its own way, is the one honest aspect of the budget. The rest is theater. And theater is, increasingly, what national politics has become.

There’s the State of the Union itself, which is clear pageantry made all the more intolerable by the orchestrated applause and non-applause, standing and sitting, laughing and scowling from the congressional audience. There are the presidential nominating conventions, which are devoid of drama of any kind. (Though the Democrats’ 2012 convention did have that one hectic unscripted moment when the party’s delegates angrily voted down adding pro-Israel language to the party’s platform.)

And now we have Potemkin budgets, constructed to look pretty but act as a façade to cover the ideological ruins behind it. Except by year seven the press gets tired of playing along, even for Obama.

 

 

Michael Barone has budget thoughts too.

Word comes that Barack Obama’s budget will, not surprisingly, call for ending the sequester spending limits now in effect. That’s not surprising. White House aides proposed the sequester, but Obama thought it wouldn’t go into effect because Republicans couldn’t accept its sharp limits on defense spending. But with voters recoiling against foreign military involvement, they could and did.

At the time, Keynesian economists predicted that the sequester — “austerity” — would squelch economic growth. And they predicted that Republicans’ failure to continue extending unemployment benefits beyond 26 weeks would result in mass misery.

The Keynesian predictions have proven unfounded. The 2009 stimulus, much of it devoted to preserving public employee union jobs, didn’t seem to stimulate much. Growth after the tough early 2014 winter, though still not dazzling, has been stronger than in pre-sequester years. Unemployment fell sharply as an end of benefits prompted workers to find jobs and employers to hire them. 

Obama will argue for more spending on the grounds that the federal budget deficit is now sharply down. It is: The Congressional Budget Office says it declined from 10 percent of gross domestic product in his first year in office — blame George W. Bush and the financial crisis is you like — to around the 50-year average of 2.7 percent.

The sequester contributed to that by holding down spending. But credit also goes to the fact that our tax system is much more progressive than you’d gather from Obama’s rhetoric. CBO reports that the top 20 percent of earners pay 70 percent of all federal taxes, and the top 1 percent pay 24 percent. …

 

 

The Editors of USA Today are not impressed with the budget either.

Much of the controversy over the $4 trillion budget President Obama released Monday has focused on what it would do: hike taxes on corporations and the wealthy, cut taxes for the middle class and spend more on infrastructure.

But more important is what the spending plan would not do. It wouldn’t deal with the government’s long-term financial woes, driven largely by the soaring costs of benefit programs.

Sure, the president’s projected deficits for the next few years would dip below $500 billion, after topping $1 trillion during his first four years. But with 10,000 Baby Boomers turning 65 each day, it’s delusional to view deficit control as mission accomplished. The Congressional Budget Office, which projects further out than the White House, predicts annual deficits back over $1 trillion in 10 years. …

  

 

Bjørn Lomborg, has a WSJ OpEd on climate alarmism. 

It is an indisputable fact that carbon emissions are rising—and faster than most scientists predicted. But many climate-change alarmists seem to claim that all climate change is worse than expected. This ignores that much of the data are actually encouraging. The latest study from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that in the previous 15 years temperatures had risen 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit. The average of all models expected 0.8 degrees. So we’re seeing about 90% less temperature rise than expected.

Facts like this are important because a one-sided focus on worst-case stories is a poor foundation for sound policies. Yes, Arctic sea ice is melting faster than the models expected. But models also predicted that Antarctic sea ice would decrease, yet it is increasing. Yes, sea levels are rising, but the rise is not accelerating—if anything, two recent papers, one by Chinese scientists published in the January 2014 issue of Global and Planetary Change, and the other by U.S. scientists published in the May 2013 issue of Coastal Engineering, have shown a small decline in the rate of sea-level increase.

We are often being told that we’re seeing more and more droughts, but a study published last March in the journal Nature actually shows a decrease in the world’s surface that has been afflicted by droughts since 1982.

Hurricanes are likewise used as an example of the “ever worse” trope. If we look at the U.S., where we have the best statistics, damage costs from hurricanes are increasing—but only because there are more people, with more-expensive property, living near coastlines. If we adjust for population and wealth, hurricane damage during the period 1900-2013 decreased slightly. …

  

 

And Jeff Jacoby says only jerks think 2014 was the hottest year on record. 

Unless you’ve spent the last few weeks in solitary meditation on a remote island, you couldn’t miss the wave of media stories breathlessly proclaiming that 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history. As usual, the coverage was laced with alarm about the menace posed by climate change, and with disapproval of skeptics who decline to join in the general panic.

Among those seizing on the news to make a political point was President Obama, who used his State of the Union address to voice disdain for those who don’t share his view. “I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists,” he scoffed. “Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But. . . I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities.”

Well, I’m also not a scientist. But I do know that what NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and NOAA’s NationalClimaticDataCenter actually reported was rather less categorical than what the news accounts — or the White House — might lead you to believe. As both government agencies made clear in their briefing materials, the likelihood that 2014 was the planet’s warmest year is far from a slam-dunk. Indeed, the probability that 2014 set a record is not 99 percent or 95 percent, but less than 50 percent. NOAA’s number-crunchers put the probability at 48 percent; NASA’s analysis came in at 38 percent. The agencies rationalize their attention-getting headline on the grounds that the probabilities were even lower for other candidates for the label of “hottest year in history.” …

 

 

Scott Adams in Dilbert’s Blog posts on science’s biggest fail.

What’s is science’s biggest fail of all time?

I nominate everything about diet and fitness.

Maybe science has the diet and fitness stuff mostly right by now. I hope so. But I thought the same thing twenty years ago and I was wrong. 

I used to think fatty food made you fat. Now it seems the opposite is true. Eating lots of peanuts, avocados, and cheese, for example, probably decreases your appetite and keeps you thin. 

I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-offs. They haven’t. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is marketing, not science. …

… Science is an amazing thing. But it has a credibility issue that it earned. Should we fix the credibility situation by brainwashing skeptical citizens to believe in science despite its spotty track record, or is society’s current level of skepticism healthier than it looks? Maybe science is what needs to improve, not the citizens.

I’m on the side that says climate change, for example, is pretty much what science says it is because the scientific consensus is high. But I realize half of my fellow-citizens disagree, based on pattern recognition. On one hand, the views of my fellow citizens might lead humanity to inaction on climate change and result in the extinction of humans. On the other hand, would I want to live in a world in which people stopped using pattern recognition to make decisions?

Those are two bad choices.