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David Harsanyi blogs about our continuing economic woes. And he has a unique chart illustrating the dimensions of the Obama job fail.
…The housing market still stinks, as does do other foundations of the economy. The answer from the Democrats has been bailout after bailout, antiquated economic schemes, huge expansion of regulation, calls for higher taxes, attacks on the profit motive, roadblocks to energy production, increasing moral hazard in markets, more crony capitalism, food stamps, dependency, massive new entitlement program, sharing of the prosperity but less new prosperity, the same wars (and more!), but no budget, no spending cuts and little economic hope.
Ian Murray at The Corner explains:
“Today’s much weaker than expected employment numbers show that the president’s agenda of more regulation and increased spending has undoubtedly failed. However much money he throws at the problem, entrepreneurs are not going to start adding jobs to the economy while the burden of regulation is so high. Regulations cost the economy $1.75 trillion each year. It is regulation that is dragging us back to recession.” …
…Republicans might have the wrong answers. They usually do. But what exactly has this administration done right? What creative ideas have they offered? How many alternative realities (you know, ‘things could have been worse’?) do we have to accept? Fact is, while these condescending technocrats accuse their opponents of being nihilists, ideologues and radicals, they are the ones that refuse to deviate from dogma no matter how much evidence of failure confronts them.
Charles Krauthammer thinks the debt limit fight is a “thing of beauty.”
In this spending-cut tug of war, it is of paramount importance to frame your demands in a way that the public sees as reasonable. The side that can command public opinion will prevail — the other side will ultimately cave for fear of being blamed for whatever dislocation occurs. Republicans should not be asking for, say, repeal of Obamacare as the quid pro quo for raising the debt limit. These are bridges much too far for these negotiations.
Which is why House Speaker John Boehner’s offer of a dollar-for-dollar deal — raise the debt ceiling to match corresponding spending cuts — is a thing of beauty. It is eminently logical and easy to understand. In a country with a 47 percent to 19 percent plurality opposed to raising the debt ceiling, the Boehner offer is difficult for the president to refuse.
After all, it invites Obama to choose how much to cut. For example, $500?billion buys him a $500?billion debt-limit hike — and only a short-term extension. Not wanting to go through this process again, Obama would like a $2 trillion debt-limit hike to get him past Election Day 2012. For that, he’ll have to come up with $2 trillion in spending cuts.
It may be blackmail. But it is progress.
John Fund reports that Lech Walesa doesn’t think much of Obama.
…Lech Walesa, the former president of Poland, wasn’t exactly eager to meet President Obama during Mr. Obama’s trip to Warsaw on Saturday. He instead left for a religious festival in Italy, telling Polish reporters: “It’s difficult to tell journalists what you’d like to say to the president of a superpower. This time I won’t tell him, I won’t meet him, it doesn’t suit me.”
Mr. Walesa also made clear his disdain for Mr. Obama when he was in Washington last week, where he received the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation award for services to spreading freedom around the world. Previous recipients of the award have included Mikhail Gorbachev, Colin Powell and Margaret Thatcher.
The dinner, which was attended by about 500 people, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, featured a speech by Mr. Gates along with remarks by Mr. Walesa. The Nobel laureate and former head of the Polish trade union Solidarity recognized the lateness of the hour and kept his remarks brief, but he couldn’t resist relating current conditions in the U.S. to Reagan’s time in office. He noted that back then the U.S. represented a “good empire,” in contrast to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union that Reagan excoriated. “But now I observe you have not a very good leadership,” he told the audience through an interpreter. He said that the U.S. seemed less interested in exercising leadership in the world. …
Tony Blankley looks at the political changes that may be coming to Europe.
…Note that the voters are aroused in both the nations whose debt can no longer be locally paid and those nations that are being asked to pay the debts of foreign countries. That is to say, the European social-welfare-deficit-debt problem has outraged both the debtors and the creditors. It takes a singularly disconnected and arrogant social class to create a set of policies that satisfies neither creditor nor debtor.
Both economic and immigrant policies have been the cause of weakened European governments from Finland to Germany to Spain and beyond in the elections of 2009 and the more recent elections. Caught in the pincers of these two emerging issues seen by many middle-class European voters as existential to their culture, we should expect to see some existing governments fall by vote or, conceivably, by other means.
We are observing a rare process: Stark economic and cultural reality is neutering conventional political methods. Established European political parties and politicians may become extinct quite suddenly. So far, the primary political beneficiaries of this crisis are third, fourth and fifth parties – some of them considered disreputable by the tottering ruling class: in the Netherlands, the heroic Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party; in Hungary, the center-right Fidesz Party and the anti-immigrant, hard-right Jobbik Party; in Austria, the right-wing Freedom Party and the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZO); in Denmark, the hard-right Danish People’s Party; in Italy, the anti-immigrant Northern League; in Finland, the anti-illegal-immigrant, Euro-skeptic True Finns party; in Britain, the racist British National Party and the libertarian, anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party; and in France, Jean-Marie (and now his daughter Marine) Le Pens’ patriotic National Front. There are others in almost every European country. …
Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, comments on the Washington’s out-of-control spending. He highlights a quote from Congressman Paul Ryan.
…It is little wonder that 66 percent of Americans now worry the federal government will finally run out of their money, and Moody’s Investors Service is threatening to downgrade America’s sterling credit rating unless it gets to grips with the debt crisis. Undoubtedly, the very future of the United States’ position as the word’s only superpower is at stake in the next few years. And as Congressman Paul Ryan, the Reaganite chairman of the House Budget Committee warned in a superb speech last night to the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington:
The unsustainable trajectory of government spending is accelerating the nation toward the most predictable economic crisis in American history. Years of ignoring the real drivers of our debt have left us with a profound structural problem. In the coming years, our debt is projected to grow to more than three times the size of our entire economy.
This trajectory is catastrophic. By the end of the decade, we will be spending 20 percent of our tax revenue simply paying interest on the debt – and that’s according to optimistic projections… This course is simply unsustainable. If we continue down our current path, then a debt-fueled economic crisis is not a probability. It is a mathematical certainty. …
Thomas Sowell tells it like it is. He discusses a number of insults that the president has leveled at foreign friends.
…Whether as a radical student, a community organizer or a far left politician, Barack Obama’s ideology has been based on a vision of the Haves versus the Have Nots. However complex the ramifications of this ideology, and however clever the means by which Obama has camouflaged it, that is what it has amounted to.
No wonder he was moved to tears when the Reverend Jeremiah Wright summarized that ideology in a thundering phrase— “white folks’ greed runs a world in need.”
…at home or abroad, Obama’s ideology is an ideology of envy, resentment and payback. …
…The fate of the United States of America may depend on how savvy we the people are in seeing what he is doing— and how soon, before the situation becomes irretrievable.
In the Education Intelligence Agency, Mike Antonucci has some unbelievable statistics about education spending, and why you will never be taxed enough to satisfy the government’s appetite.
…The latest Census Bureau report provides details of the 2008-09 school year, as the nation was in the midst of the recession. That year, 48,238,962 students were enrolled in the U.S. K-12 public education system. That was a decline of 157,114 students from the previous year. They were taught by 3,231,487 teachers (full-time equivalent). That was an increase of 81,426 teachers from the previous year.
…Twenty-seven states had fewer students in 2009 than in 2008, but 16 of them hired more teachers.
…From 2004 to 2009, student enrollment increased a cumulative 0.7 percent, while the K-12 teacher workforce increased 6.5 percent. Per-pupil spending increased 26.7 percent (about 12.5% after correcting for inflation). Spending on education employee salaries and benefits increased 27.5 percent. …
More on Buying Union from David Harsanyi.
…Americans — people who can do almost anything, including, but not limited to, electing politicians who keep rotten companies buoyant for political gain — have a patriotic duty to buy poorly conceived automobiles. You have an obligation to insulate Washington’s favorite companies from responsibility. For God and for country, taxpayers must purchase cars from corporations that have not come close — despite the contention of the administration — to paying back what they already owe you.
But hey, the car was assembled in Michigan. If that’s not a sign of American exceptionalism, I don’t know what is.
Even if Wasserman Schultz’s “Buy American” rhetoric were genuine, it would be severely misguided. Every time we overpay for an American-made product (whatever it is), don’t we also spend less on an array of other services and products that create jobs at home? Real jobs. Self-sustaining jobs. If we all mechanically bought American, wouldn’t we allow manufacturers to avoid competition and rely on their locations rather than the excellence of their products? Sounds like the opposite of exceptionalism.
Companies on the dole also have incentive to please their benefactors in Washington — a place that has the power to offer more handouts or to stifle competition. …These companies, though, have less incentive to keep prices low or to innovate or to meet consumer demand. …
Scott Adams thinks paying taxes should be everyone’s responsibility.
Yesterday I went to Walmart and demanded that they give me a cartload of merchandise for free. This demand was not well-received, so I didn’t get to the second part of my plan which would have involved criticizing the job performance of the people who were giving me free stuff.
Okay, I didn’t really go to Walmart and demand free stuff. You probably knew that because it sounded ridiculous on face value. We all understand that no entity can survive for long if it gives away its resources while asking nothing in return. And this leads me to my point: In the United States, 51% of adults pay zero federal income tax, and yet they have the right to vote. That’s the very definition of a system that can’t last.
I’m not sure where the tipping point is. So far, the power of the non-tax-paying majority has been blunted by the influence of political parties and the misdirection of the media. If the majority ever figures out that they can legally confiscate the wealth of the minority, tax rates will double overnight. My best guess is that the United States will go into a death spiral at about the point that 55% of adults pay no federal income taxes. We’ll probably get to that point as baby boomers continue to retire in large numbers. …
The Palin/Trump pizza meeting brought about a great exchange in The Corner about pizza in NY and Northern NJ. First Jonah Goldberg links to Jon Stewart’s riff on Trump’s pizza knowledge and consumption style.
“Donald Trump disrespects New Yorkers by taking Sarah Palin to a pizza chain and eating his stacked slices with a fork.”
Then, Daniel Foster explains why North Jersey has better pizza than NY; especially Manhattan.
… But while we’re on the topic of New York City street cred and pizza, I think this Famiglia’s atrocity illustrates a point I’ve been making for years and years to anyone who’ll listen. Namely: If you took two blindfolded tourists and dropped one in a random location in New York and the other in a random location in North Jersey and told them to go find a slice of pizza, the one in North Jersey would, on average, find a better slice. What I mean is, when you take away the outliers — the legendary joints like Totonno’s and DiFara and Grimaldi’s, and the biggest of the lowest common denominator national chains — the median slice in Bergen, Passaic, Essex, Hudson and Union counties is better than the median slice in the five boroughs. I bet the disparity would be even greater if you pitted North Jersey against just Manhattan. I say this not just because I’m a Jersey boy from a proud family of pizza-makers (five uncles who tossed dough for beer money at Vinnie’s Pizz-a-rama and Brother Bruno’s in Wayne, NJ!), but because anyone who’s ever seen me can tell you I’ve eaten a lot of pizza in my day. …