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Mark Steyn has an excellent article on Turkey. We touch here on only a small portion of the information he imparts. It didn’t take long for the world to take the measure of our reckless feckless president.
…Some Western “experts” like to see this as merely a confident, economically buoyant Turkey’s “re-Ottomanization.” But the virulent anti-Semitism emanating from Erdogan’s fief is nothing to do with the old-time caliphate (where, unlike rebellious Arabs, the Jews were loyal or at least quiescent subjects), and all but undistinguishable from the globalized hyper-Islam successfully seeded around the world by Wahhabist money and so enthusiastically embraced by third-generation Euro-Muslims. Since 9/11, many of us have speculated about Muslim reform, in the Arab world and beyond. It’s hard to recall now but just a few years ago there was talk about whether Gen. Musharraf would be Pakistan’s Ataturk. Instead, what we’re witnessing is the most prominent example of Muslim reform being de-reformed, before our very eyes, in nothing flat.
…Is Erdogan wrong in his calculation? Or is he, in his own fashion, only reaching his own conclusions about what Israel, India, the Czech Republic and others are coming to see as “the post-American world”? Well, look at it as if you’re sitting in the presidential palace of some or other Third World basket-case. Iran is going nuclear in full view of the world, and with huge implications for everything, not least the price of oil. Meanwhile, NATO’s only Muslim member has decided it would rather be friends with Iran, Sudan and Syria. And all this in the first decade of the 21st century. So much for stability.
David Warren on the failure of appeasement. Perhaps current generations of Americans and Israelis will witness and learn from the increased violence and unrest that appeasement brings.
…The arguments above should have been made loudly and unambiguously by the U.S. State Department, not left to me. By being aloof when a crucial ally is under attack, the U.S. is actually encouraging Israel’s enemies to pile on.
This is the universal problem with an appeasement policy: why it has a 100 percent failure rate. You do not get peace by encouraging mortal enemies to attack your ally. You get peace by making your support of that ally crystal clear. You do not “win friends and influence nations” by leaving your allies to hang. By broadcasting weakness, confusion, indecision, and incompetence, the Obama administration is quickly squandering the U.S. ability to prevent wars. …
…We need a serious inquiry into the Turkish government’s instigation of this incident. The broader question ought no longer to be whether Turkey should be let into the EU, but whether she should remain in NATO.
Ed Morrissey has more on non-government statistics that reflect the true state of the economy.
…Why did the unemployment rate go down? People have begun exiting the labor force again (via Jonah Goldberg):
The unemployment rate fell to a seasonally adjusted 9.7% in May from 9.9% in April, according to a separate survey of 60,000 households. Economists were expecting the jobless rate to sink to 9.8%.
The decline wasn’t particularly good news, however, because the drop was due to 322,000 people dropping out of the labor force. While unemployment dropped by 287,000 to 15 million, employment also fell, dipping 35,000 to 139.4 million. …
Mort Zuckerman comments on the economy and jobs. More reason to cut back on government spending, and restrictive taxing and regulation that is preventing economic growth.
…Wherever you look the scene is bleak. Leading economic indicators fell in April – unusual at such an early stage in the up-cycle. Jobless claims were up by 25,000 to 471,000. And up again above expectations in the first three weeks of May – raising the four-week moving average to a level consistent with 100,000, or more, net job losses. For the past several months, claims have been nowhere near the levels of 400,000 and less that in the past were consistent with sustained job creation. We are not enjoying the normal cycle of economic improvement. If we were, employment would already have reached a new high and made up all of the jobs lost, as it did during the previous postwar recessions. This time we remain short of the old peak of employment, by an astounding 8.4m jobs. One in six Americans is either unemployed or underemployed. This is not a normal cycle when compared with a typical recession, which sees no more than 2m to 3m jobs lost.
Wages are falling; wage cuts are spreading as employers continue to curb costs and remain reluctant to hire. And the amount of excess labour continues to increase. … The headline unemployment rate is back up to slightly under 10 per cent, but this covers only people who sought a job in the previous four weeks.
What is the result of an excessive number of people seeking work, with an average of 5.6 people vying for each job opening? Wage deflation. Average hourly pay has not budged since the turn of the year, including one month in which we had a 0.1 per cent decline in average hourly earnings, something that has not happened since April 2003. …
In the WSJ, Arthur Laffer says to brace yourselves for 2011.
…On or about Jan. 1, 2011, federal, state and local tax rates are scheduled to rise quite sharply. President George W. Bush’s tax cuts expire on that date, meaning that the highest federal personal income tax rate will go 39.6% from 35%, the highest federal dividend tax rate pops up to 39.6% from 15%, the capital gains tax rate to 20% from 15%, and the estate tax rate to 55% from zero. Lots and lots of other changes will also occur as a result of the sunset provision in the Bush tax cuts.
Tax rates have been and will be raised on income earned from off-shore investments. Payroll taxes are already scheduled to rise in 2013 and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will be digging deeper and deeper into middle-income taxpayers. And there’s always the celebrated tax increase on Cadillac health care plans. State and local tax rates are also going up in 2011 as they did in 2010. Tax rate increases next year are everywhere.
Now, if people know tax rates will be higher next year than they are this year, what will those people do this year? They will shift production and income out of next year into this year to the extent possible. As a result, income this year has already been inflated above where it otherwise should be and next year, 2011, income will be lower than it otherwise should be.
Also, the prospect of rising prices, higher interest rates and more regulations next year will further entice demand and supply to be shifted from 2011 into 2010. In my view, this shift of income and demand is a major reason that the economy in 2010 has appeared as strong as it has. When we pass the tax boundary of Jan. 1, 2011, my best guess is that the train goes off the tracks and we get our worst nightmare of a severe “double dip” recession. …
George Will discusses the “emergency” aid to states for education: more pay to government workers while the rest of the economy founders.
…But before Congress is stampeded into spending yet more (borrowed) billions, it should read “The Phony Funding Crisis” in the journal Education Next by James W. Guthrie, a professor at Southern Methodist University, and Arthur Peng, a research associate. They say:
“For the past hundred years, with rare and short exceptions and after controlling for inflation, public schools have had both more money and more employees per student in each succeeding year.” Indeed, public schools have been so insulated from economic downturns that “there have been 11 periods during which GDP declined but mean total real per-pupil revenues still increased.”
…We are witnessing a familiar government dance, the Prosperity-to-Hysteria Two-Step: When revenue grows, governments put in place permanent spending streams; when revenue falls, governments exclaim that any retrenchment, even back to spending levels of a few years ago, is a “catastrophe.” …
In the Washington Examiner, Hugh Hewitt discusses upcoming topics on his radio show, including an interview with Arthur Brooks on his new book. The 70/30 concept of our nation makes a lot of sense. The sensible 70 percent of the country has allowed a takeover by the 30 percent composed of malcontents and people who think they’re superior and thus entitled to run everyone else’s lives
…Brooks’ book is a relatively short, very sharply argued explanation of how the 30 percent in this 70/30 nation of ours has come to control the federal government and many of the largest state governments, and in the process driven us to the point of a national fiscal stroke.
The 30 percent are the statists, the chattering class and their colleagues in academic and government employ, plus the government-dependent and a very large slice of the youth vote. Brooks details who they are and how they intend to grow their grip on the country.
The 70 percent are the rest of us, a mass that is coalescing into a potent political force that will be revealed fully on Nov. 2, 2010.
Brooks makes a compelling moral case for rolling back the vast creep of the 30 percent, whose regulatory and tax policies have spread like the oil slick in the Gulf, inexorably and continually for a very long time, creating enormous damage across the country, but damage that can and must be repaired. …
Pickerhead’s philosophy of running his business is this; if everything looks to be running well, you’ve obviously overlooked something. Robert Samuelson explains human response to success and how this caused BP’s disaster and our financial meltdown.
…Cost-cutting by BP, careless rig operators and lax regulators have all been fingered as plausible culprits in the blowout. President Obama has appointed a commission to investigate the causes, and the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation. There will be extensive analyses. But the stark contrast between the disaster’s magnitude and the previous safety record points to another perverse possibility: The success of deepwater drilling led to failure. It sowed overconfidence. Continuing achievements obscured the dangers.
This pattern applies to other national setbacks. Consider the financial crisis. It was not the inherent complexity of subprime mortgages or collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that caused the crisis. It was the willingness of presumably sophisticated investors to hold these securities while ignoring the complexity and underlying risks. But this behavior was understandable at the time. …
There’s a cycle to our calamities or, at any rate, some of them. Success tends to breed carelessness and complacency. People take more risks because they don’t think they’re taking risks. The regulated and the regulators often react similarly because they’ve shared similar experiences. The financial crisis didn’t occur so much because regulation was absent (many major financial institutions were regulated) but because regulators didn’t grasp the dangers. …
…It is human nature to celebrate success by relaxing. The challenge we face is how to acknowledge this urge without being duped by it.