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Who’s as stupid as Barack Obama, Thomas Friedman, and Paul Krugman? China’s ruling thugs, that’s who. WSJ OpEd on the coming real estate crash in China.
American enthusiasts of more stimulus have been urging this country to look to China for guidance on how to beat a recession. As they see it, while our politicians debated and dithered and fell short, China’s wise autocrats moved quickly to inject a massive stimulus and restore robust growth.
Despite the global downturn, China’s economic growth rate remains above 10%. But there is mounting evidence that Beijing has misallocated vast amounts of capital, touching off a real-estate crisis that could yet drag the world’s second-largest economy down to earth.
When the global marketplace went into meltdown mode two years ago and Chinese exports dropped off, Beijing mounted a stimulus several times bigger relative to the size of its economy than in this country. It announced a four trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus for infrastructure projects and housing developments. Some of the stimulus was used to encourage local governments to lend money to state-owned companies to develop housing complexes, roads and bridges, on the theory that these are big employment generators because they boost heavy manufacturing—steel, cement—and other sectors of the economy.
Beijing also lowered capital reserve requirements for its state-owned banks ordering them to dole out loans to “support growth.” Though official data are unreliable, in 2009 Beijing apparently handed out somewhere close to 10 trillion yuan in new loans—more than twice the year before—and expanded the country’s total loan portfolio and money supply by one-third, according to Patrick Chovanec, associate professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management in Beijing.
Prominent progressives in this country hailed the moves. Paul Krugman wrote: …
Charles Krauthammer weighs in on the Ground Zero mosque.
It’s hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speech roundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you’re moved to declare this President Obama’s finest hour, his act of greatest courage.
Alas, the next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom — upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.
You’re left looking like a fool because now Obama has said exactly nothing: …
…It takes no courage whatsoever to bask in the applause of a Muslim audience as you promise to stand stoutly for their right to build a mosque, giving the unmistakable impression that you endorse the idea. What takes courage is to then respectfully ask that audience to reflect upon the wisdom of the project and to consider whether the imam’s alleged goal of interfaith understanding might not be better achieved by accepting the New York governor’s offer to help find another site. …
…Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is not just insensitive but provocative.
Just as the people of Japan today would not think of planting their flag at Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that no Japanese under the age of 85 has any possible responsibility for that infamy, representatives of contemporary Islam — the overwhelming majority of whose adherents are equally innocent of the infamy committed on 9/11 in their name — should exercise comparable respect for what even Obama calls hallowed ground and take up the governor’s offer.
Victor Davis Hanson comments on what Obama’s teachable moments have taught us about the president.
…We have learned that President Obama has a bad habit of impugning the motives of those with whom he disagrees. In the Gates case, he rushed to condemn Crowley and the police. Arizonans were not to be seen as desperate citizens trying to enforce federal law, but instead derided as bigots who harass minorities when they go out to get ice cream. And in the mosque case, the president disingenuously implied that opponents of a Ground Zero mosque wanted to deny the legal right of Muslims to build religious centers. …
…as an Ivy League–trained lawyer and former Chicago community organizer, Obama embraces an overarching race/class/gender critique of the United States; the story of America is not so much about an exceptionally independent and prosperous people, a unique Constitution or a vibrant national past in promoting global freedom, but about how the majority oppressed various groups. Clearly, these local instances of purported grievances have excited the president — and almost automatically prompt his customary but unproven declarations that the majority or establishment in each case is biased or unfair. …
Bill Kristol says Obama is not a Muslim, he is a progressive.
…So progressivism seeks to bring big changes to our backward country. Progressives like to dream about passing “the most progressive legislative agenda .??.??. not just in one generation, maybe two, maybe three.” But when progressivism has to give up its grand transformational claims, then we’re back in the world of reality and results, of the practical consequences of policy choices. A political debate over consequences rather than intentions, and over the real world rather than an imagined one, is one that is, as it has been for a long time, good for conservatives and bad for progressives. …
…Progressivism is in retreat. Obama’s problem isn’t that people falsely think he’s a Muslim. It’s that the public is correctly concluding he’s a garden-variety multiculturalist progressive. So November’s election won’t just be a repudiation of one non-Muslim president. It will be a repudiation of a multiculturalist progressive worldview—and of the bitter elites who cling desperately to that worldview and are consumed by antipathy to most Americans, who don’t.
Obama is now blaming the lack of jobs on congress. In the LA Times Blogs, Andrew Malcolm has the story.
Just a few minor things to catch up on for the weekend now that the Fundraiser-in-Chief has gone on another vacation (Don’t worry though. White House chef Sam Kass went along, so the first family need not eat ordinary human food.)
– The Congressional Budget Office says the 2010 federal deficit will be in excess of $1.3 trillion, as in $1,000,000,000,000+. (BTW, the next level we’ll be talking about out of Washington is quadrillion, which has fifteen 0′s.) …
…According to the president, he’s been “adamant” with Congress for months now about a new jobs bill to help small businesses. Obama says this really good bill is stalled in the Senate, where so much administration legislation has been crammed through so effectively by Majority Leader Harry Reid. …
In regards to the troubles of Roger Clemens, the NY Post editors comment on a Congress that doesn’t tolerate lying.
…This is the same Congress that:
* Seems ready to merely reprimand Charlie Rangel — before his trial has even begun — for what in the real world is considered cheating on taxes, violating real-estate laws and abusing one’s office for personal gain.
* Turned a blind eye to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd’s getting a sweetheart deal from the subprime-mortgage giant Countrywide.
* Tolerates Rep. Gregory Meeks of Queens, who claims he “forgot” to list personal loans totaling $55,000 on his financial-disclosure forms.
* Includes at least a half-dozen members who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal contributions from lobbyist Paul Magliocchetti, the ex-aide to the late John Murtha (D-Pa.) who was indicted by the feds two weeks ago. …
You may want to hold off purchasing the hybrid cars. The Economist reports on troubles with batteries.
THE whole point of paying an extra $5,000 or so for a hybrid car was supposed to be that it would deliver more miles to the gallon, possibly a bit of extra pep, and a warm feeling of superiority over the majority of carbon-emitting motorists. For these luxuries, customers were assured that their vehicles’ rechargeable battery pack—two-thirds of a hybrid’s extra cost—would last at least as long as the rest of the car. Try telling that to those who bought Honda Civic hybrids between 2006 and 2008.
Since spring, irate owners of hybrid Civics have been venting their frustration on the web. Some describe how their cars’ batteries can suddenly die while trying to overtake or labour up a hill. Others talk of leaving a car with the battery fully charged, only to return an hour or two later to find it flat. Being barely three or four years old, the Civics in question are unlikely to have done more than 75,000 miles (120,000km) at the very most—about half their expected life. …