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In USA Today, Michael Gartner gives us a gift that will warm your heart as he tells us about his parents.
…As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?” “I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.
“No left turns,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”
“What?” I said again. “No left turns,” he said. “Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”
“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support. “No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.”
But then she added: “Except when your father loses count.”
I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. “Loses count?” I asked. “Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”…
Amity Shlaes, in Bloomberg News, reports on how government spending stifles private-sector job growth.
…Yet what if additional federal spending for roads, bridges, schools, and work programs in states doesn’t redeem itself in jobs? Perhaps such spending actually impedes employment in the private sector. Maybe President George W. Bush killed jobs by signing off on stimulus spending. And maybe President Obama is doing more of the same.
…For the past few years Price Fishback, a University of Arizona economist, and Valentina Kachanovskaya, a graduate student at the school, have been studying the effects of federal domestic spending from the point of view of individual states during the 1930s, a period of dramatic unemployment.
…The two Arizona economists see a more modest benefit. They find that each dollar of public works spending and funding jobs for the poor did increase the average amount of personal income, or cash an individual had on hand to purchase goods and services, by $1.67. When government spending under Hoover and Roosevelt involved grants and loans, the figure was $1.39. …
…After that, the news about multipliers gets worse. According to Fishback and Kachanovskaya, a dollar spent by Washington didn’t jump-start job creation. The money may have had no effect or even suffocated nonfarm private-sector employment. The investment did not spill over to most other sectors of the economy in a positive way. A double dip, the depression within the depression, followed record federal investment in the economy in 1936. …
Tony Blankley has a plan of action on how we can get out from under government’s regulatory reign.
…Regarding the vastly damaging economic and deeply annoying personal effect of excessive regulation, we need to take advantage of this momentary diversion of the administration toward at least rhetorical common sense. At the congressional level, as has been promised by new GOP committee chairmen such as Fred Upton at the key House Energy and Commerce Committee, we must identify, publicize and repeal as many oppressive regulations as possible.
This will require the Appropriations Committee to explicitly defund the enforcement of such regulations. And yes, unless the president genuinely follows through with his asserted intentions to rein in regulations, this will mean confrontation between the Republican House and the administration. But the GOP Congress must stand firm.
To help, the conservative media and think tanks need to bring much more focus on abusive regulations. The administration and liberals generally are delighted to let the re-regulation of America continue under the radar. …
In the Washington Examiner, Timothy Carney discusses two political entrepreneurs joining Obama’s team. Liberals worry about the unrestrained greed of big business and conservatives worry about the totalitarian drive of big government. These alliances should cause everyone concern, because they profit politicians and the big businesses they collude with at taxpayers’ expense.
…But the anti-business charge against Obama was always off target. “Anti-free market” was — and is still — more accurate.
Immelt and Daley don’t represent a new side of Barack Obama — they represent the unhealthy collusion of Big Business and Big Government that has always been the essence of Obamanomics.
Check out Daley’s resume. In the 1990s, he ran Amalgamated Bank, owned by a union and described by the Chicago Sun-Times as “one of the city’s most politically connected financial institutions.” Bill’s brother, Mayor Richard Daley, kept the city’s money on deposit at Amalgamated. Later, Bill held a seat on Fannie Mae’s board, pocketing six-figure compensation from the government-sponsored enterprise that used a housing bubble and an implicit government guarantee to fill a slush fund for well-connected Democrats — until taxpayers bailed it out in 2008.
…And Obama’s kind of corporation: GE, which marches in sync with government, pocketing subsidies, profiting from regulation, and lobbying for more of both. …
In Baseball Crank, Dan McLaughlin says that 2012 will not look like 1996, much to liberals’ chagrin.
…Undoubtedly, Obama will have the opportunity to take advantage of many of the same dynamics that favored Clinton’s re-election, and he may succeed for those and other reasons. But history never repeats itself precisely. It is worthwhile to reflect on the many things that worked to Clinton’s benefit that Obama can’t count on:
1) The Democrats Still Hold The Senate: Clinton lost both Houses of Congress in the midterms, the third president of the past century to do so, the others being Truman in 1946 and Eisenhower in 1954. Both were re-elected; Truman used the GOP as a foil to confront, Eisenhower showed he could cooperate with the Democrats, and Clinton did some of both. Each was able in one sense or another to run on the same divided-government rationale that had helped them lose Congress in the first place.
Obama won’t have the same crisp contrast with Congress; the unpopular Harry Reid is still running the Senate, and sooner or later it will become impossible to conceal that fact. History suggests that this can matter: Obama’s the third President in the past century to lose only the House and keep the Senate in the midterms, and the other two – Taft and Hoover – both got slaughtered (Hoover carried just six states and drew 39.7% of the popular vote, Taft carried just two states, finished third in a three-way race and drew just 23.4% of the popular vote).
…3) Obamacare passed; Hillarycare didn’t: As unpopular as the Clinton Administration’s health care plan was, it wasn’t a major issue in the 1996 campaign because it had failed and, with Republicans controlling both Houses of Congress, it wasn’t coming back. (Ditto Clinton’s destructive BTU tax). Not so Obamacare, which remains very much a live issue. There’s clearly a decisive majority supporting repeal right now in the House, and possibly a majority could be mustered in the Senate (certainly if the GOP gains more seats in 2012), but obviously not enough votes to override Obama’s veto. Unless Mitt Romney wins the nomination, the GOP will almost certainly run a presidential candidate who can and will mount a full-throated campaign in favor of repealing the bill. The same will be broadly true of a number of Obama’s big-spending, big-regulating initiatives. …
Pajamas Media has news that makes us admire Texas even more.
The not at all slow death of the Texas Democratic Party continues. I’ve just gotten word via press release that nine local Democrats up in northeast Texas just switched parties to become Republicans. From the release
In what is believed to be one of the largest number of officeholders to change party affiliation in Texas, Lamar County GOP Chairman John Kruntorad and State Representative Erwin Cain announced today that 9 local elected Democrats have joined the Republican Party. This announcement follows unprecedented election gains by the GOP in 2008 and 2010 as Northeast Texans increasingly identify with the conservative platform of the Republican Party. …
They join a few dozen who switched from D to R in Texas leading up to the 2010 elections, and the two state Reps. who switched parties after the elections (bringing the total of state Reps. switching from D to R, to three). And today’s group of switchers is jumping ship in an area that has been considered yellow dog Democrat for generations.
The Economist reviews a new book about India by Patrick French.
ONE of the startling features of India’s economic progress is how much opposition it stirs at home. Across the political divide, many people are still sceptical of the two-decade-old reform programme that underpins the boom, including leading lights of the ruling Congress party. Their gripes are often rhetorical—even India’s communist parties have grudgingly embraced capitalism in the three states where they rule. But critics still need to be reminded how badly India was served by its former mixed economy.
…While presenting few new ideas, Mr French has a sometimes surprising tendency to lay claim to established ones. That Western power will be diminished in relative terms by Asia’s rise, that Indian politics is becoming ever more dynastic and that the country’s Hindu nationalists need to freshen up their manifesto are all commonplace. Mr French suggests them as insights. Meanwhile he decries lazy journalists who “make a living by reporting ceaseless tales of woe” from India; but these are a dying lot. In recent years, foreign reporting of the country has often gone too far the other way, lauding India’s economic growth with only occasional easy-to-spot regard to the country’s manifold problems.
Mr French is a fine reporter, with an appealing fascination for all things Indian, as his book makes clear. Despite its flaws, it is an accomplished portrait of momentous times in a remarkable country.
Schumpeter’s Notebook Blog in the Economist blogs that India is a work in progress.
MANAGEMENT theorists have fallen in love with India in much the same way that they fell in love with re-engineering fifteen years ago. India is synonymous with rapid growth, frugal innovation and exciting new business models.
I agree with all that (and have promoted it myself). But it is important to remember that India is also a mess.
…The local newspapers are certainly full of stories of India’s economic boom. As usual the advertisements are more interesting than the business pages. There are endless ads for MBAs (not all of them entirely plausible), English courses, computer classes: all signs of a country that is pulling itself up by its boot-straps. But the news pages are full of darker stories—about the Naxalite rebellion, about institutional incompetence and corruption and about the general mess that is Indian politics. …