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The State Department appears to be another government department that selectively enforces laws and policies based on the whims of government employees’ opinions. Andy McCarthy thinks it is time for State to call a spade a spade, and name the Taliban as a terrorist organization
…Yesterday, after three months of delay, the State Department finally issued its congressionally mandated annual terrorism report. It shows that the United States has not even designated the Taliban as a terrorist organization — not in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan. Similarly, the government has also failed to designate both the Haqqani Network and HIG. (Hekmatyar himself, in his individual capacity, has been designated as a “global terrorist” since 2003.)
The full list of designated terrorist organizations is here. The designation is very important, and not just because it stands as a formal declaration by our government. Providing material support to an organization once it has been designated a serious federal crime — and prosecution for it helps us starve terror organizations of resources, making it harder for those organizations to attack our country. Yet, as you can see, the State Department does not list the Taliban organizations with which we are at war, even though it continues to list the Basques, the Tamil Tigers, Kahane Chai (an Israeli group that disbanded about 16 years ago), a renegade wing of the Irish Republican Army, and several other groups that have nothing to do with anti-American terrorism. …
…Why has our government failed to declare that the Taliban branches, the Haqqani Network, and HIG are both terrorist organizations and our enemies in the war? If they are sinister enough for us to commit our troops to fight them, shouldn’t we be taking every legal step to support that effort?
Ed Morrissey comments on what the Obami will do next in their failed attempts to mandate economic growth.
…The departure of Christine Romer puts Larry Summers and Tim Geithner in the driver’s seat for economic policy — and Kudlow says that’s bad news indeed. Geithner’s already on record saying that extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for wealthier earners will put the recovery in peril, when the evidence above shows that Obama needs investors to put their cash into the private sector instead of having the government seize it. Kudlow calls it Geithner’s war against investment, and with Romer out of the way, he expects it to escalate.
This explains James Pethokoukis’ warning about the rumored write-off at Fannie for underwater mortgages. That will either drop a bomb on Wall Street or on the national debt, which has already hit the crisis stage. Kudlow hears the same rumors (although it’s not clear whether he heard them from Pethokoukis’ column), and more. The Fed will extend its lax monetary policy even further at its meeting this month and may announce further expansion of the money supply, a move that will further depress an already sinking dollar. It’s a kitchen-sink, flailing approach to command-economy policies that clearly have failed to produce a real recovery and instead have delivered exactly what the same kind of approach delivered the last time it was tried in the 1970s: stagnation. …
Michael Barone thinks that Republicans simply being anti-Obama is just as vacuous as Obama’s rigid anti-Bush stance.
…Some young House Republicans have put out a call for voters to e-mail their ideas. And House Republican leaders say they’ll put together something in the nature of a 1994-style Contract With America over the August recess. …
…There are some obvious targets for Republicans if they win big this year. Democrats have jacked up domestic spending sharply; some reversal should be possible. The many glitches in Obamacare, some apparent now and others as yet undiscovered, could form a basis for derailment if not repeal.
Giveaways to labor unions, like the $26 billion package for the teacher unions which the House is to be summoned back from its recess to pass, presumably will be off the table.
Larger issues need to be addressed. We’re overdue for a simplifying tax reform. And there is the looming crisis in entitlements –Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. …
Along the same lines, Republicans need to come up with practical ways of dealing with problems. Peter Wehner once again voices criticism over altering the 14th amendment.
…There is plenty policymakers can do to curb illegal immigration (including securing the southern border, toughening enforcement policies, and expediting the legal process to cut the average deportation time) and improve our overall approach to immigration (including narrowing the scope of the family-reunification privilege to the nuclear family, adjusting upward our quotas for high-skilled labor, and making assimilation a central national priority). Pushing for altering the 14th amendment, though, is worse than unhelpful; it is substantively unwise and politically harmful.
Republicans are practicing the politics of symbolism in the worst way possible. They are embracing a policy that doesn’t have any realistic chance of becoming law, that will be unnecessarily divisive and inflammatory, and that, in the long term, will be politically counterproductive. …
Perhaps one issue that Republicans can address is banning government employee unions, which have dramatically increased the fiscal problems that so many local and state governments are facing. In the NY Daily News, Eileen Norcross and Todd Zywicki look at the problem. Are you willing to pay for a bail out of New York City so thousands of employees can collect their six-figure-per-year pensions?
…But loopholes and gamesmanship aren’t the only reason why public pension systems nationwide face massive funding shortfalls. They are the result of a perfect storm of flawed accounting, which fueled unrealistic employee demands that were then underfunded by politicians. In plans across the country, during booming years of the late 1990s, many workers were promised retirement payouts that were “too good to be true” and, thus, impossible to make good on.
…Professor Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University projects that even if public sector plans earn 8% on their investments, four states – Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Indiana – will run out of assets to pay retirees by the end of the decade. States and local governments will soon find themselves up against a painful tradeoff: between closing schools and libraries and cutting other essential services or paying inflated pensions to 50-year-old retirees.
No one begrudges a secure retirement for police officers, firefighters and other public servants. But unless states act now by closing insolvent plans to new hires and reducing the rate of benefit accrual for current employees, they won’t be able shore up enough to guarantee at least some of what’s been promised.
For now, unions have been unyielding to proposals that alter pension formulas for current workers. When Colorado froze the Cost of Living Adjustment in the state’s pension formula, the union sued, noting the move erodes retirees’ purchasing power.
That’s one reason why most pension reforms affect benefits only for new hires, which won’t make a real difference in the tab for many years. Unions instead seem to prefer that states go bankrupt to pay the full bill. All while workers in the private sector are confronting their own retirement losses, high unemployment, and the certainty of higher future taxes, leaving everyone who isn’t in a public sector plan with a much bleaker future to look forward to. …
The Streetwise Professor comments on the recent Russian ban on exporting wheat.
Russia is going to ban wheat exports, and is “coordinating” with the members of its “Customs Union,” Kazakhstan and Belarus, to do the same. This ban has caused a worldwide spike in wheat prices… Moreover, the cancellation is undermining Russia’s reputation (yeah, I know) as a reliable trading partner.
Cargill makes the point that Adam Smith made in the Wealth of Nations in the chapter “A Digression on the Corn Trade:”
‘Cargill, the world’s biggest trader of agricultural commodities, criticised Moscow’s move. “Such trade barriers further distort wheat markets by making it harder for supplies to move from areas of surplus to areas of deficit, and by preventing price signals from reaching wheat farmers,” it said.’
…Russian exporters argue that the precipitous announcement will make it harder for Russia to export going forward…
The Streetwise Professor explains some of the economics behind his previous comments.
…So this isn’t a Russia thing or a Putin thing. It is an economics thing. Restricting trade is a bad idea. And one of the effects of an embargo is that it harms the commercial reputation of the country imposing the embargo. Indeed, imposing embargoes at exactly the time when importing nations are most in need of the commodity is particularly damaging; fair weather suppliers, like fair weather friends, are not friends at all. Once you get that rap, people will find ways to reduce their reliance on you, which will have long term consequences.
And given Russia’s track record on trade and embargoes, it has precious little reputational capital to draw upon in such circumstances. It has even less now. It wants to build up its ag export business in a big way. It just made that a whole lot harder. More Putinist short-termism that will impose long term damage on the Russian economy. …
Jonah Goldberg says the government is forcing poor people to helping rich people buy green cars.
…Because the Volt’s sticker price might be too high for even that crowd, the government is offering a federal subsidy of up to $7,500 (Californians have a state subsidy, too), which means that working-class people will be helping to pay for playthings for upper-income people.
“Like the EV1 that GM tried to peddle in the California market,” Kenneth Green, an environmental scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, says, “the Volt is a vanity car for the well-off that will be subsidized by less well-off taxpayers at all stages, from R&D to sales and to the construction of charging stations.”
Indeed, the Volt’s price is $41,000, but the cost is much higher. “Government Motors” is already selling the car at a loss. According to the blogger Doctor Zero, if you apply the subsidies that have gone directly into the car to just the first 10,000 vehicles, the cost is more like $81,000 per car. …
…If the government weren’t taking taxpayer money and spending it on toys for upscale urban liberals (Obama’s strongest base of support outside of black voters and labor unions), there’d be no reason to care about the Volt. If rich people want to be “early adopters” and buy expensive gadgets that help them preen the plumage of their political sanctimony, that’s great. It’s not so great when the government gets involved in wealth redistribution, and it’s outrageous when it involves redistributing wealth upwards.
John Hinderaker of Power Line figures out Michelle’s excellent adventure.
… I think the Obamas’ tone-deafness, which was on exhibit long before Michelle’s Spanish vacation, more likely results from their inexperience and the fact that if you are a significant figure in Democratic Party politics, you spend a great deal of time with rich people. That can skew one’s perspective.