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Robert Samuelson looks at the possibility of a trade war with China.
No one familiar with the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 should relish the prospect of a trade war with China — but that seems to be where we’re headed and probably should be where we are headed. Although the Smoot-Hawley tariff did not cause the Great Depression, it contributed to its severity by provoking widespread retaliation. Confronting China’s export subsidies risks a similar tit-for-tat cycle at a time when the global economic recovery is weak. This is a risk, unfortunately, we need to take.
In a decade, China has gone from a huge, poor nation to an economic colossus. Although its per capita income ($6,600 in 2009) is only one-seventh that of the United States ($46,400), the sheer size of its economy gives it a growing global influence. China passed Japan this year as the second-largest national economy. In 2009, it displaced Germany as the biggest exporter and also became the world’s largest energy user. …
…How much China’s currency is undervalued and how many U.S. jobs have been lost are unclear. The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research group, says a revaluation of 20 percent would create 300,000 to 700,000 U.S. jobs over two to three years. Economist Robert Scott of the liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that trade with China has cost 3.5 million jobs. This may be high, because it assumes that imports from China displace U.S. production when many may displace imports from other countries. But all estimates are large, though well short of the recession’s total employment decline of 8.4 million. …
David Warren continues his efforts to generate answers to the problems our society is currently facing. In this article, he delves into public education.
… But, in a single phrase, the notion that “education is too important to be left to chance” is so universally accepted, that the public at large is capable of overlooking universal failure. Our state schools… have degenerated into dysfunctional propaganda mills.
We easily accept the associated notion that “in a democracy, public schooling is necessary to assure minimum standards for citizenship.” That schools should provide the machinery for the indoctrination of the masses follows naturally from this. Think it through. The proposition actually reverses the first principle of democracy: that government should answer to citizens, and not citizens to government. And remember, that all “progressive” educational proposals require political compulsion.
…But schools exist for education, not vice versa. We have come to look at the basic issue in an inverted way. There are people alive today who actually think problems with education can be solved by spending more money on schools, in defiance of an easily observed, nearly inverse relation between spending and results. …
The one immediate, radical reform for which I think we should aim, after winning the battle of ideas, is the destruction of all centralized school boards and liquidation of all departments of education. Put every single public and high school in the control of a local parent association, and necessity — the most efficient instructor — will soon teach the parents what they must do. Return the universities to the elitist status quo ante, before governments took them over: for “average” people don’t belong in there. …
Michael Barone writes about two important issues addressed by the Pledge to America.
…On Sept. 23 last week, 12 Republican House members stood in a hardware store in Sterling, Va., and issued a Pledge to America.
…One is to roll back non-defense discretionary spending to 2008 levels. The other is to repeal — not revise or amend or embroider, but repeal — the health care bill signed by Barack Obama…
…But wouldn’t it hurt Republicans, if they have a House majority, to get into a budget fight as it hurt Newt Gingrich’s new majority back in 1995? Not necessarily. The benefits from those spending increases are pretty invisible to the ordinary voters (though visible to public employee union leaders who give millions to Democrats). How many ads are Democratic candidates running bragging about these spending increases?
…Moreover, the macroeconomy is in a very different place than it was during the Gingrich era. Then we were well started into an economic recovery, one aided by Republicans’ partial victories on budget and tax issues. Money didn’t seem scarce and shutting down the government seemed extreme.
Today we are in, if not an official recession, at least an agonizingly slow recovery. And if Democrats complain that it’s unfair for government and public employees to be limited to what they got in 2008, Republicans can reply that an awful lot of their constituents would be very happy to go back to the income levels and the housing equity and the 401(k) balances they had in 2008.
Everyone has been suffering. Why should government be exempt? …
Jennifer Rubin has an amazing story on voter fraud that was discovered by a grass-roots organization. We’ll leave you to read the post and to wonder what, if anything, the government does right.
…The Obama Justice Department isn’t keen on enforcing Section No. 8 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that states and localities clean up their voting rolls to prevent fraud. So ordinary citizens are doing what the Justice Department won’t — uncovering voter fraud. This report explains that 50 friends took up the effort after seeing what went on in Houston on Election Day 2008:
“What we saw shocked us,” [ Catherine Engelbrecht] said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”
Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere.
“It was a true Tea Party moment,” she remembers. …
We have an article from the WSJ that brings us some concern. Jim Towey was the Director of the White House Office on Faith-Based Initiatives, and writes how Obama has used this office to push a political agenda. This article begs the question of why the government is trying to do the work of churches, charities, and non-profits. We need to have more discussion about what duties we need government to perform, and make government focus on doing those tasks, and only those tasks, effectively and efficiently. The President would not be able to politicize an Office on Faith-Based Initiatives if the office didn’t exist.
…Yet on Tuesday President Obama and his director of faith-based initiatives convened exactly such a meeting to try to control political damage from the unpopular health-care law. “Get out there and spread the word,” Politico.com reported the president as saying on a conference call with leaders of faith-based and community groups. “I think all of you can be really important validators and trusted resources for friends and neighbors, to help explain what’s now available to them.”
…According to the White House website, the faith-based office exists “to more effectively serve Americans in need.” I guess that now means Americans in need of Democratic talking points on health care. Do we really want taxpayer-funded bureaucrats mobilizing ministers to go out to all the neighborhoods and spread the good news of universal coverage?
…Nearly 20 months later, however, the faith-based office has failed to be a voice within the administration for compassion. Poverty rates are at record highs, and the economy is producing new waves of homeless families. Meanwhile the faith-based office in the White House and those in 11 federal agencies have no record, no results, and no relevance.
This operation stands in stark contrast to the priority Mr. Bush placed on this office. Every year, he used the grand stage of the State of the Union address to launch new compassion programs. In his first six months in office, he pushed for a vote in Congress to end discrimination against religious charities. New programs to mentor the children of prisoners, expand choices for addicts seeking treatment, and combat the spread of AIDS were launched. They have since transformed countless lives. …
In Politico, Sarah Kliff has more on the administration attempt to use religious leaders.
With nothing else working, President Barack Obama is asking religious leaders to help him sell the public on health care reform.
POLITICO listened in to an Oval Office conference call Tuesday, where Obama and top administration officials, beseeched thousands of faith-based and community organizations to preach the gospel on new insurance reforms, chiefly the Patients’ Bill of Rights.
“Get out there and spread the word,” Obama told leaders from across the religious spectrum on the conference call, organized by the Health and Human Services Center for Faith-Based and Community Partnerships.
…Obama instructed faith leaders to treat the new law as settled fact and use their perches of power to convey that message to congregants and friends. …
…The call included the administration’s highest-ranking health reform officials: Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, White House Office of Health Reform director Nancy Ann-DeParle, and Assistant to the President for Special Products Stephanie Cutter.
Joshua DuBois, director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Partnerships, gave activists a rallying cry: “Get the word out there, get information out there. Make use of the resources we’ve described on this call: the website, door hangers, one pagers and so forth. We’ve got work to do.” …
Toby Harnden blogs about another Obami media campaign.
This smacks of real desperation. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s senior adviser, told liberal bloggers that he wants to “enlist” them to help Democrats in the mid-term elections. To which Susan Madrak of Crooks and Liars responded that the White House was treating the Left like “the girl you’ll take under the bleachers but you won’t be seen with in the light of day” and was guilty of “hippie punching”.
…Axelrod is also asking the mainstream media to help out Democrats. In a Washington Post oped (interesting that the White House can apparently get this for free rather than paying the going rate for what amounts to party political advertising) he calls on “the media to shine a light” on conservative groups supporting Republican candidates in the mid-terms.
The truth is that many in the mainstream media feel a tad embarrassed about how OTT they went with Obama in 2008. Since then, they have been starved of access and, according to a number of White House reporters, treated with near-contempt by administration officials. …