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David Harsanyi discusses government’s addiction to spending your money.
…Hasn’t the president heard? His own administration doesn’t have the nerve to refer to the trillion-dollar government/union boondoggle as a “stimulus” anymore. Today, the preferred White House parlance is “emergency” bill.
Yet, the audacity of hope dictates that the president turn the tables on his critics and start kicking some serious Tea Party ass. That’s why, “next year, when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country, I hope people who are hollering about deficits and debt start stepping up, because I’m calling their bluff . . . .”
Now, by “difficult choices,” rest assured we’re talking about a bundle of tax increases — because no one in Washington right now will significantly cut spending. …
There may be trouble brewing for Elena Kagan. In the Corner, Yuval Levin fills us in.
If you haven’t read Shannen Coffin’s piece on Elena Kagan and the partial-birth-abortion debate today, you really should. What he describes, based on newly released Clinton White House memos, is absolutely astonishing.
It seems that the most important statement in the famous position paper of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists—a 1996 document that was central to the case of partial-birth-abortion defenders for the subsequent decade and played a major role in a number of court cases and political battles—was drafted not by an impartial committee of physicians, as both ACOG and the pro-abortion lobby claimed for years, but by Elena Kagan, who was then the deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. …
…What’s described in these memos is easily the most serious and flagrant violation of the boundary between scientific expertise and politics I have ever encountered. …
In Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler doesn’t think that this is unusual for politics.
…Assuming the allegations are true and do not omit key details, is this really a scandal? I think it is, but not necessarily for Kagan. Kagan was a White House staffer, so we would expect her to encourage outside groups to adopt positions that were amenable to Administration policy. That’s not a scandal. Encouraging a reputed professional organization to alter its factual claim in an official statement (e.g. whether the relevant procedure was ever the “most appropriate procedure available”) is a closer call, but probably not scandalous when done by a policy staffer for political purposes. So this could be embarrassing for Kagan, and make abortion a larger issue in her confirmation, but it’s not the sort of thing that will stop her from being confirmed.
ACOG, on the other hand, comes out looking much worse. If it actually let a White House rewrite an official statement of the organization on the necessity of a given medical procedure, its credibility will take a hit. If ACOG categorically opposed any and all legislative impositions, that’s fine. If it issued a specific statement based upon a White House staffer’s judgment of what was politically expedient, as opposed to what was true about the necessity or advisability of a given procedure, then it perpetrated a fraud and let itself be used for political purposes. …
Lawrence Solomon, in the Financial Post, reviews the irony and tragedy of the US government’s response to the oil spill. Pass this article on to the environmentalists you know.
Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.
The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.
To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn’t capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana’s marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks. …
Economist Friedrich Hayek is making a comeback. Russ Roberts, in the WSJ, explains his relevance.
…When Glenn Beck recently explored Hayek’s classic, “The Road to Serfdom,” on his TV show, the book went to No. 1 on Amazon and remains in the top 10. Hayek’s persona co-starred with his old sparring partner John Maynard Keynes in a rap video “Fear the Boom and Bust” that has been viewed over 1.4 million times on YouTube and subtitled in 10 languages. …
…Even when the state tries to steer only part of the economy in the name of the “public good,” the power of the state corrupts those who wield that power. Hayek pointed out that powerful bureaucracies don’t attract angels—they attract people who enjoy running the lives of others. They tend to take care of their friends before taking care of others. And they find increasing that power attractive. Crony capitalism shouldn’t be confused with the real thing. …
In Bloomberg News, Richard Posner reviews the finance reform bill, and tells it like it is.
The most sensible legislative response to the financial collapse of September 2008 would have been to do nothing until the causes of the collapse were fully understood.
There is no urgency about legislating financial regulatory reform. The existing regulatory agencies have virtually total authority over the financial industry. And because they were asleep at the switch when disaster struck, they are now hyper- alert to prevent a repetition of it. Indeed, bank examiners have become so fearful of condoning risky practices that they are making it difficult for banks to lend to small businesses and consumers and thus are retarding the economic recovery. …
…Barack Obama’s main economic officials — Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and National Economic Council Chairman Lawrence Summers — were implicated in the regulatory oversights that precipitated the crisis, as were key legislative officials, such as Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank. None of them wants to shoulder blame for the crisis. Instead, they blame the banking industry. …
Christopher Hitchens has some arresting thoughts on the foundations on ethnic violence.
Reviewing the sudden spasm of violence between the Uzbek minority and the Kyrgyz majority in Kyrgyzstan recently, many commentators were at a loss to explain why the two peoples should so abruptly have turned upon one another. Explanations range from official pandering to Kyrgyz nationalism, to sheer police and army brutality, to provocations from Taliban-style militias hoping to create another Afghanistan, but none go very far in analyzing why intercommunal relations became so vicious so fast. As if to make the question still more opaque, several reports stressed the essential similarity—ethnic, linguistic, cultural—between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek populations.
But that in itself could well be the explanation. In numerous cases of apparently ethno-nationalist conflict, the deepest hatreds are manifested between people who—to most outward appearances—exhibit very few significant distinctions. It is one of the great contradictions of civilization and one of the great sources of its discontents, and Sigmund Freud even found a term for it: “the narcissism of the small difference.” As he wrote, “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of hostility between them.” …
The humor section tonight is filled with unintended consequences. John Fund starts us off with a short on the poor prospects for the dems in a number of house districts because of gerrymandering. Pickings has often commented on the grotesque people who get elected to districts that are maneuvered into large black majorities. Rather than electing people who have to appeal to blacks and whites, the most obnoxious demagogues get the nod. Well now it is going to bite the dems.
… Mr. Obama’s approval numbers may mask the real peril Democrats face because his job rating among blacks is an overwhelmingly positive 91%. As Michael Barone of “The Almanac of American Politics” points out, those readings imply that his job approval rating among whites is likely only about 39%.
That’s especially significant because most of the 70 competitive House races polled by NPR (as well as most of the states with the closest Senate races) have below-average populations of black voters. Racial gerrymandering justified by dubious interpretations of the Voting Rights Act has concentrated blacks into mostly safe Democratic districts, meaning now that most competitive seats are more white than average. These districts are more likely to be hostile to President Obama’s agenda, and thus more likely to be treacherous political terrain for Democrats. No wonder party strategists are so worried about this fall. …
And we get a Corner post from Stephen Spruiell about the disaster caused by the home buyer’s tax credit.
… But that’s not all. Yesterday, the Treasury Department’s inspector general issued its second report on homebuyer credit fraud. And the scams are worthy of a Carl Hiasson novel. Among the lowlights: 1,295 prisoners received $9.1 million in credits for houses they claimed to buy while incarcerated. Two hundred forty-one were serving life sentences at the time. Hiasson—the bard of two-bit Florida hustlers— will be pleased to learn that almost two-thirds of these frauds occurred in his home state, where ripping off federal taxpayers appears to be about as common as shuffleboard.
And it wasn’t just cons running the hustle. Sixty-seven different people claimed the tax break for one house. More than 2,500 got almost $18 million for homes they bought before the credit was effective. In all, the IG unearthed 14,132 people who received erroneous credits of $17.6 million. …
WSJ editors point out the hypocrisy of Obama administration picks.
… In other words, the White House is happy to subsidize “green jobs” at a company that hasn’t proven it can compete commercially. But it refuses to subsidize the export-related jobs at a globally competitive U.S. company like Bucyrus because they involve coal, which despite Washington’s distaste will remain the workhorse of U.S. and world energy supply for decades to come.
The Bucyrus travesty is a preview of the consequences of the cap-and-tax program that Democrats are still trying to ram through Congress, and the peculiar income redistribution that it entails: taking from the middle class that depends on coal for jobs and power and giving to politically connected investors and the affluent who can afford to pay $40,000 for a car. Maybe Mr. Obama will explain to Bucyrus workers today why they are less deserving than Fisker Auto’s.