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Victor Davis Hanson presents a lesson from the president’s strategy book on how to destroy an economy.
It is hard for a president to turn a recession into a long-term downturn in the United States, given the inherent resiliency of private enterprise and America’s open and free markets. But if you were to try, you might do something like the following.
First, propose all sorts of new taxes. Float trial balloons about even more on the horizon. Subordinates should whisper about a VAT/national sales tax. Other aides should revisit campaign talk about lifting the caps on income subject to payroll taxes. A centerpiece of the effort would be to insist on bringing back the Clinton income-tax rates — but this time targeting only high earners and not putting commensurate caps on federal spending. For insurance in making things worse, raise capital-gains taxes. And why not add a new health-care tax surcharge? Let inheritance taxes kick back in. … The trick is to dissuade businesses from taking risks, by making clear that any new profits are illegitimate and therefore will go to the government.
Second, business expansion is predicated on confidence in the future. Destroy that, and depression can become far easier to achieve. Often the decision to hire or to buy new equipment is psychological in nature — predicated on hope in the larger business climate. So to ruin that landscape, you might unleash a barrage of anti-business, anti-wealth rhetoric to remind job creators that they are already too rich from exploitative practices. The president himself might lead the attack against Wall Street, CEOs, doctors, and insurers. Now and then it would be wise to spice it up with a nice socialist quip such as “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money” …
Perhaps because the president is in the NYTimes magazine today with a pre-mortem, Charles Krauthammer has a pre-election post mortem with his choices of some of the more notable election facts
Rising star. Marco Rubio, soon-to-be senator from Florida. He has the ingredients of a young Obama — smart, inspirational, minority (Cuban American), great life story. Headed for a meteoric rise.
Fastest falling star. Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida. Facing disaster in the Republican primary against Rubio, he becomes an independent, flip-flops on one issue after another, and is now running about 16 points behind. Just two years ago, there was talk of him as a Republican vice presidential candidate. Today he’s nowhere man.
Most shameless attack campaign (national). President Obama suggesting that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is secretly using foreign money to fund its campaign ads. There’s not a shred of evidence that this is true. When Bob Schieffer asked David Axelrod for evidence, he responded, “Well, do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob?” That’s like some lunatic claiming that Obama secretly says Muslim prayers at night that no one can see and no one can hear. You ask: What’s your evidence? He says: What’s yours that he is not? You say: No one’s ever seen or heard him do that. He says: Aha, that’s exactly my point.
The president has done another interview. Jonah Goldberg says to get out the shovel.
Back in early 2009, President-elect Barack Obama was asked on Meet the Press how quickly he could create jobs. Oh, very fast, he said. He’d already consulted with a gaggle of governors, and “all of them have projects that are shovel-ready.” When Obama revealed the members of his energy team, he explained that they were part of his effort to get started on “shovel-ready projects all across the country.” When he unveiled his education secretary, he assured everyone that he was going to get started “helping states and local governments with shovel-ready projects.”…
Only now it turns out that the president was shoveling something all right when he was talking about shovel-ready jobs — a whole pile of steaming something.
In the current issue of The New York Times Magazine, Obama admits that there’s “no such thing as shovel-ready” when it comes to public works.
It’s not that Obama was lying when he said all that stuff. It’s just that he didn’t know what he was talking about. All it took was nearly a trillion dollars in stimulus money and 20-plus months of on-the-job training for him to discover that he was talking nonsense. …
Jonah also suggests some reading.
I know it’s already been widely discussed, but I really do think everyone should read the Peter Baker profile of Obama. It is definitive document of sorts that I suspect will be invoked for months and years to come. For Obama’s defenders — however few of them are left — it’s no doubt a sympathetic portrayal. But for everybody else, it’s a pretty astounding indictment of the insularity and arrogance of this administration. The White House view: Our greatest sin was trying too hard to get all of the policies right and failing to appreciate the evil of our opponents and the gullibility of the American people.
Nouriel Roubini has a interesting proposal for tax reform that might actually stimulate the economy. This from an article in Foreign Policy(?).
…Near double-digit unemployment is the root of the problem. Without job creation there’s a lack of consumer spending, which represents 40 percent of domestic GDP. To date, the U.S. government has responded creatively and massively to the near collapse of the financial system, using a litany of measures, from the bank bailout to stimulus spending to low interest rates. Together, these policies prevented a reprise of the Great Depression. But they also created fiscal and political dilemmas that limit the usefulness of traditional monetary and fiscal tools that policymakers can turn to in a pinch.
With interest rates near zero percent already, the Federal Reserve has few bullets left in its holster to boost growth or fend off another slump. This lack of available good options was patently on display in August when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke with a tinge of resignation about new “quantitative easing” interventions in the mortgage and bond markets — a highly technical suggestion that, until the recent crisis, amounted to heresy among Fed policymakers. It certainly hasn’t helped that the U.S. federal deficit has reached heights that make additional stimulus spending, of the kind that helped kindle the mini-recovery of early 2010, politically impossible.
…Start with the one thing that everyone loves to hate: taxes. Forget the political hot potato over the size and shape of the cuts — there’s an easy way to do this. For the next two years, Obama should reduce payroll taxes for both employers and employees. The reduction for employers will lower labor costs and allow the hiring of more workers; for employees, increased take-home pay will get people spending again. It’s not just about increasing foot traffic in the mall; households need to pay down the burden of credit cards, second mortgages, and other legacies of the years of easy credit. …
In National Review, Nathan Martin tells his experience of crashing MTV’s televised presidential town meeting.
…According to the White House record, here’s how it started:
Q Mr. President, my name is Nathan Martin. I actually help produce a conservative talk radio show, and I’m getting married in two weeks.
THE PRESIDENT: Congratulations.
I went on and asked him about the inconsistencies of his administration in enforcing immigration law vs. drug law, and why California could flaunt federal law with the legalization of marijuana, but Arizona was swiftly reprimanded for “infringing on federal jurisdiction.”…
Rachel Adams, in Bad Rachel Blog, comments on how the teachers’ unions won and the children lost in D.C.
Michelle Rhee—the tough broad who spent nearly four years as D.C. schools chancellor in a pitched battle against the corruption-plagued, incompetence-ridden Washington teachers union to reform a rotten public school system—was forced out today by mayor-elect Vincent Gray in what surely must be seen as a kind of triumph for the union and a potential tragedy for the city’s underprivileged, mostly-black schoolchildren.
…To think about the absolute indifference to this calamity of members of Congress on the left side of the aisle—to say nothing of Mr. And Mrs. Obama’s breezy unconcern—is to be no less disgusted: These people are tucking their own cute little kids safely away in private schools, many of them, but they “believe” in public education for the city’s beleaguered black children and actively deprive them of any way out.
This is a whipping, plain and simple. Miss Rhee tried to wrest away the whip and got a lashing from Mr. Gray and the union that filled his campaign coffers for her pain. I guess D.C.’s poor black children will be taking their lashing from the president of the United States, to wit, “It took time to free the slaves.”
Whale poop again. Last April we had a piece on the value of whale poo to the health of the oceans. Science Daily has a look at another study.
…Whales, they found, carry nutrients such as nitrogen from the depths where they feed back to the surface via their feces. This functions as an upward biological pump, reversing the assumption of some scientists that whales accelerate the loss of nutrients to the bottom.
It is well known that microbes, plankton, and fish recycle nutrients in ocean waters, but whales and other marine mammals have largely been ignored in this cycle. Yet this study shows that whales historically played a central role in the productivity of ocean ecosystems — and continue to do so despite diminished populations.
Despite the problems of coastal eutrophication — like the infamous “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico caused by excess nitrogen washing down the Mississippi River — many places in the ocean of the Northern Hemisphere have a limited nitrogen supply.
…”We think whales form a really important direct influence on the production of plants at the base of this food web,” says McCarthy.
“We found that whales increase primary productivity,” Roman says, allowing more phytoplankton to grow, which then “pushes up the secondary productivity,” he says, of the critters that rely on the plankton. The result: “bigger fisheries and higher abundances throughout regions where whales occur in high densities,” Roman says. …