Click on WORD or PDF for full content
James Pethokoukis of Reuters explains why the GOP should hold firm and refuse to raise taxes.
It’s up to House Speaker John Boehner now. Democrats, the media and Wall Street will be pounding him to agree to raise taxes as part of a debt ceiling deal. But now is no time for Republicans to go wobbly. Here’s why the GOP should stick to its guns until Aug. 2 – and beyond if necessary:
1. The last thing the economy needs is a tax hike. If the economy was too weak to absorb a tax hike last December – when the White House and Congress agreed to extend all the Bush tax cuts for two more years – its health is even worse today. The economy grew at just a 1.9 percent pace in the first quarter, and many economists now think it might grow just 2.0 percent in the second quarter – or even less. This should be a red flag to Washington. New research from the Federal Reserve finds that since 1947, when two-quarter annualized real GDP growth falls below 2 percent, recession follows within a year 48 percent of the time. (And when year-over-year real GDP growth falls below 2 percent, recession follows within a year 70 percent of the time.)
In other words, the economic recovery is sputtering with stall speed fast approaching. Now would be a terrible time to penalize investors and business, both big and small, with new taxes. …
Matthew Continetti, sitting in for Jennifer Rubin says Obama’s fixation on taxes in yesterday’s presser is an indication an agreement is a long way away.
… One of the reasons Obama’s arguments are unlikely to convince Americans is that there is a huge divide between elite and popular opinion streams on the economy. Since the 2008 financial crisis, elites have made promises to the public that have not been kept. Most people were never comfortable with the idea that the only way to preserve the financial system was by bailing out its worst members. The claim that the stimulus bill would keep unemployment at 8 percent or below was proven false long ago. The Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing program has not resulted in sustained recovery.
The idea that the way to solve America’s debt problem is by raising the debt ceiling is the most counterintuitive of them all. The public doesn’t buy it. In the experience of most Americans, the way to get out of debt is to cut up the credit cards and stop spending. They have not read Lord Keynes and doubt whether his prescriptions work in the real world. For them, thrift is not a “paradox” but a virtue.
This intellectual divide between the president and the public is the reason his ratings on the economy are so poor. One suspects the gap is unbridgeable.
Peter Wehner on the press conference.
During his press conference today, President Obama repeatedly invoked the theme of leadership. “Leaders lead,” he helpfully informed. “Leaders rise to the occasion,” he added. They are willing to make “tough decisions,” to “do the tough things” and to “do the responsible thing.” By the end I was reminded by the line from Emerson: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” …
More on the conference from Yuval Levin.
“Call me naïve,” President Obama told reporters during his press conference yesterday, “but my expectation is that leaders are going to lead.”
I’m not sure “naïve” is right, but terms like “frivolous” and “vain” did come to mind again and again throughout the press conference. The President came before reporters without any news to make. He seemed to want to vent a kind of unfocused rage at Congress for something—criticizing congressional leaders at various points for taking too many breaks, for failing to take up patent reforms and free trade legislation, and generally ignoring the fiscal crisis (all of which, we can only assume, were criticisms of Democratic leaders). And when he turned to Republicans, he argued that they were not making serious proposals in the debt-limit talks. They were failing to lead, he said repeatedly.
It all had the feel of a childish tantrum by a person who desperately wishes he were living in a different reality—one in which he is the heroic man of action and his opponents are irresponsible and weak. But the fact is, the president and congressional Democrats have so far utterly failed to offer any path out of our fiscal problems—problems that they have greatly exacerbated. The president proposed a budget in February that would have increased the deficit, and then he retracted it in April and proposed nothing in particular in its place. Senate Democrats have not proposed a budget in two years; …
Andrew Malcolm catches the president talking about the economy.
… He admitted that things are not good for millions of Americans and said it was going to take even more time to do what his vice president promised would be happening 14 months ago.
How could the awful economic hole from you-know-who keep getting deeper 889 days after the guy fled back to Texas?
Obama stated:
“For a lot of Americans, those numbers don’t matter much if they’re still out of work, or if they have a job that doesn’t pay enough to make the mortgage or pay the bills. So we’ve got more work to do. And that work is going to take some time. The problems that we developed didn’t happen overnight. We’re not going to solve them overnight either. But we will solve them.”
Perhaps the plea for more time has something to do with the 497 (and dwindling) days left before Americans pass their final judgment on the Obama-Biden administration’s stewardship of everything, including the new war in Libya.
Will it be Democrat Jimmy Carter redux? Or will it be the first time in nearly two centuries that Americans reelect three presidents in a row? …
David Harsanyi says people are saying crazy things about population.
For years, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups have warned us that too many babies will destroy the Earth.
“We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet’s life-forms — an estimated 8,760 species die off per year — because, simply put,” explained environmentalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, “there are too many people.” (Well, not exactly that simple when one considers that millions of species had disappeared long before humans selfishly began drinking from plastic bottles.)
In one of his recent works of speculative fiction, The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman asked: “How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?” Dunno. Maybe we value reality? Perhaps we believe in the ability of humans to adapt and to innovate. Perhaps we’ve learned that Malthusian Chicken Littles slinging stories about the impending end of water or oil or natural resources are proved wrong so often that we ignore them.
Though, admittedly, it’s difficult to ignore the charismatic pseudoscience of Al Gore. …
Here’s the promised profile of Randy Barnett.
Over three decades, law professor Randy E. Barnett’s libertarian scholarship on the Constitution’s original meaning and the proper balance between federal and state power brought him respect within academia but little notice beyond.
That began to change in 2009, as the Georgetown University scholar made the case that Congress exceeded its power to regulate interstate commerce by including a requirement in the health care overhaul that everyone have insurance. Most constitutional scholars initially ridiculed Barnett’s argument against the individual mandate — that Congress cannot regulate or punish the “inactivity” of not buying something.
Few mock it anymore, now that two courts have adopted the same reasoning in ruling against the individual mandate’s constitutionality. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit will hear an appeal to one of those rulings this week in Atlanta.
In less than two years, Barnett, 59, has accomplished what few law professors ever manage to do: make an arcane constitutional argument so compelling and clear that it becomes part of the national conversation.
But what makes Barnett unique is how his influence has extended beyond the elite circle of litigators fighting the health care law and into the grass roots. He has helped members of the tea party movement and supporters on Capitol Hill formulate a proposed constitutional amendment that would authorize the repeal of laws enacted by Congress to which two-thirds of the states object. While its chances of being adopted are slight, that effort, and his work against the health care law, has made Barnett an intellectual favorite of House Republicans.
Still, Barnett feels no compunction about taking the GOP caucus to task when he believes its members have overstepped the proper bounds of federal power. In a recent newspaper opinion piece, Barnett accused House Republicans of “fair-weather federalism” for supporting a bill that would limit damages in medical malpractice lawsuits.
Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor who doesn’t agree with Barnett’s legal arguments, says his efforts have to be seen as part of a broader push by conservatives and libertarians to change the way the public thinks about federal power.
“They want the public and the courts to rethink the assumptions of the activist state that came with the New Deal,” Balkin wrote last year on his blog, “Balkinization.” “Randy and his allies are trying to change people’s minds through op-eds, speeches, protests and litigation. They are trying to move things from ‘off the wall’ to ‘on the wall.’” …
NY Times reports on the problem of trash in the satellite belt.
One of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of space-age litter orbiting Earth zipped uncomfortably close to the International Space Station on Tuesday.
The six crew members of the space station took refuge in their “lifeboats” — two Soyuz space capsules they would use to escape a crippled station — as the unidentified object hurtled past them at a speed of 29,000 miles per hour, missing the space station by only 1,100 feet. The episode took place at 8:08 a.m. Eastern time.
“We believe the probability that it would the hit the station was about 1 in 360,” said Lark Howorth, who leads the team at NASA that tracks the space station’s trajectory. NASA rules call for precautions when the risk of impact is greater than 1 in 10,000.
In the section of the station run by the United States, astronauts closed the hatches in case the debris — commonly known as space junk — crashed through, to limit the danger of explosive decompression. To prepare for a rapid departure, the clamps holding the Soyuz capsules to the station were released. …
James Delingpole says the science is settled, U. S. liberals are the “dumbest creatures on the planet.”
Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.