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Thomas Sowell looks at administration cynicism on race and immigration.
… Regardless of what immigration policy anyone believes in, the government cannot carry out that policy until after it has first gained control of the borders. Regardless of what Washington politicians may say about how many immigrants should be allowed into the country, or on what basis, none of that matters when the real decision is in the hands of innumerable other people, who can simply climb over a fence along the border and come on in whenever they feel like it.
Even if they get caught, the most that is likely to happen to them is that they get sent back to try again later. In many cases in the past, they have been issued legal documents ordering them to appear in court– and were released inside the United States. Why anyone would think that people who disregarded the border and the fence would take a piece of paper more seriously defies logic.
That doesn’t mean that Washington politicians were stupid. They were political, which is worse. The point was to win Hispanic votes, even though not all Hispanics believe in open borders.
President Obama would rather have an issue with which to win the Hispanic vote than to have a bipartisan bill that would simply take control of the borders. Such a bill would help the country but that obviously takes a back seat in an election year. Even some members of Obama’s own party are uneasy with such cynicism.
Bill Kristol has advice for Charlie Rangel. Tell Obama to shove it.
President Obama has offered this patronizing advice to Rep. Charlie Rangel:
“And he’s somebody who’s at the end of his career. Eighty years old. I’m sure that what he wants is to be able to end his career with dignity. And my hope is that it happens.”
News flash: Our president really is a self-centered elitist (and ageist!).
Here’s my advice to Charlie: Defend yourself, make your case, fight for your reputation, and if need be accept a reprimand (or even censure)–but let your constituents render the real verdict, not the D.C. mob. If you do this, you have a good chance of extending your political career…beyond Obama’s.
In any case, do not follow Obama’s prescription of political death with dignity. “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
David Goldman looks at our current economic situation and what would help.
…The Fed and the administration claim that the problem is that small businesses can’t get bank loans. The problem, they insist, is monetary policy. Big businesses are being rewarded for laying off workers, stripping down to bare bones, and earning profits on their core businesses. They are—wisely, given the fecklessness at the rudder in Washington—hoarding cash; they don’t want to borrow.
But startup small businesses shouldn’t be financed with bank loans (except for secured financing of inventories and receivables). Most small businesses fail. This is Portfolio Theory 101. If you own the stock of 100 startups, and 99 go bust but one becomes Microsoft, you get rich. But if you are a bank, and you lend money to the 100 startups, and only 1 can pay you back, then you go bust.
Thus startups are financed with equity, not debt. This is taught to first-year finance students.
It doesn’t occur to the somnolent wizards of Constitution Avenue that the way to lure capital back to entrepreneurial activity is to increase the after-tax reward to entrepreneurs, by eliminating the capital gains tax, for example, or, even better, eliminating all taxation of capital income. Monetary policy has nothing to do the case. Monetary policy best addresses currency stability. Tax incentives best address economic growth. …
Financial Times Blog with warnings about our economy.
The ISM Survey of the US manufacturing sector (published on Monday) offers the first reliable glimpse of activity in the US economy in the third quarter of the year. It is not encouraging.
Although the headline reading was rather better than widely anticipated (an out-turn of 55.5 compared to 56.2 in June), the details of the survey showed that new orders are now slowing markedly, and inventories have started to rise more rapidly than companies may be intending. Taken together with the GDP data for Q2 (discussed in an earlier blog), the ISM survey points to a significant danger that the US economy will continue to slow sharply in the months ahead.
The ISM surveys in the US are among the few items of monthly information which are capable of moulding market sentiment in a profound way. This is because they have an excellent track record of picking up changes in trend in US activity, because they are never revised, and because they are published earlier than most other data series on the economy. …
Peter Wehner has quotes and clips of Biden, and some comments on the success of the surge in Iraq.
…One would be hard pressed to think of another person who was as persistently and consistently wrong about the surge as Biden (though Barack Obama would give him a good run for his money). Biden went so far as to advocate dividing up Iraq into three parts based on ethnicity, one of the more ill-informed and dangerous ideas to emerge among war critics.
The truth is that if Joe Biden had had his way, the war would have been lost, Iraq would probably be engulfed in something close to genocide, al-Qaeda would have emerged with its most important victory ever, and America would have sustained a defeat far worse than it did in Vietnam.
As for Biden’s claim that what was lacking in the past was a “coherent political process,” let’s be generous to the vice president: he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The then-American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, was one of its outstanding diplomats. And unlike the situation in Afghanistan under the Obama administration, in Iraq the commanding general at the time (David Petraeus) and the U.S. ambassador (Crocker) worked hand-in-glove. They were an extraordinarily effective team. In order to refresh Biden’s memory of the coherent political process that was in place, he might want to review Ambassador Crocker’s Senate testimony from September 2007, before a committee Biden himself sat on. …
In Forbes, Warren Meyer has unique experience in funds allocation. In an article that was a pleasure to read, he offers his insights on how to encourage economic growth.
…For all the talk about fiscal stimulus and jobs creation at the federal and state level, almost no one in government is doing anything about reducing the roadblocks to investment. For example, millions of people are newly unemployed, and in past recessions a large number of these folks have eschewed looking for a new corporate job and have started businesses of their own. Unfortunately, such prospective entrepreneurs will face a tangle of registration, regulatory and licensing hurdles, many of which have been backed by established businesses that want to avoid just this kind of new competition. …
…No one in government, that I have heard, has even suggested any sort of regulation holiday as a potential economic stimulus program. In fact, most of the legislative moves at the national level have made private investment less attractive. Business people making investments today have to plan for higher labor, energy and borrowing costs due to a series of 2,000-page pieces of legislation that few if anyone fully understand (or have even read). Capital gains tax reductions will almost certainly expire next year, and most business people who look at looming government deficits have to assume these shortfalls will be closed the same way they always have been closed: With new taxes on the backs of the most productive.
Rather than attempting to make investment easier, almost all government stimulus efforts to date have focused on trying to better optimize how and where investment capital is deployed. The core assumption behind all of these programs is that a few people in government can invest money more productively than the private entities from whom the government took the money. …
…To every one of the supporters of these government projects who claim to have created some number of jobs, I encourage the reader to ask a simple question–who was using the money before the government diverted it, and how many jobs were they creating?
It is always heartening to watch someone awaken to the fact that big government and its attendant coercion is not the answer. David Mamet’s essay on liberalism was featured in Pickings on March 19, 2008. In Commentary, Terry Teachout discusses Mamet’s new book and his change of mind.
…Now Mamet has published a book of essays called Theatre (Faber and Faber, 157 pages) in which, among other things, he seeks to integrate his new way of thinking into his view of the art of drama. Although Theatre is not so much a political treatise as a professional apologia, it seems likely that those of his colleagues who write about it (to date, most have ignored it completely) will focus on its political aspect, in which they will doubtless find much to outrage them. Indeed, he offers a working definition of theater that is bound to fill the vast majority of his colleagues with horror:
“The theatre is a magnificent example of the workings of that particular bulwark of democracy, the free-market economy. It is the most democratic of arts, for if the play does not appeal in its immediate presentation to the imagination or understanding of a sufficient constituency, it is replaced. … It is the province not of ideologues (whether in the pay of the state and called commissars, or tax subsidized through the university system and called intellectuals) but of show folk trying to make a living.”
Conversely, Mamet dismisses state subsidy for the theatrical arts as no more than a means of propping up incompetent “champions of right thinking” whose work would otherwise be incapable of attracting an audience. Such playwrights, he says, are purveyors of politically correct “pseudodramas” that “begin with a conclusion (capitalism, America, men, and so on, are bad) and award the audience for applauding its agreement.” For Mamet, such plays are the opposite of true theater, whose power lies not in its willingness to coddle our preconceptions but its unparalleled ability to shock us into seeing the world as it really is. “In the great drama,” he writes, “we follow a supposedly understood first principle to its astounding and unexpected conclusion. We are pleased to find ourselves able to revise our understanding.”…
WSJ reviewer Mark Bauerlein looks at a book exposing the rot in higher education where the customers are ignored and the people who work there are coddled and spoiled.
Higher education may be heading for a reckoning. For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended. Perhaps they attributed their career success or that of their friends to a diploma. Or they felt moved by a particular professor or class. Or they received treatment at a university hospital or otherwise profited from university-based scientific research. Or they just loved March Madness.
Recently, though, a new public skepticism has surfaced, with galling facts to back it up. Over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition and fees has risen 250% for private schools and nearly 300% for public schools (in constant dollars). The salaries of professors have also risen much faster than those of other occupations. At Stanford, to take but one example, the salaries of full professors have leapt 58% in constant dollars since the mid-1980s. College presidents do even better. From 1992 to 2008, NYU’s presidential salary climbed to $1.27 million from $443,000. By 2008, a dozen presidents had passed the million-dollar mark.
Meanwhile, tenured and tenure-track professors spend ever less time with students. In 1975, 43% of college teachers were classified as “contingent”—that is, they were temporary instructors and graduate students; today that rate is 70%. Colleges boast of high faculty-to-student ratios, but in practice most courses have a part-timer at the podium. …