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Regarding the “agreement” reached in Washington, the Streetwise Professor strikes the right tone.
Today would have been Milton Friedman’s 99th birthday. His son, David, said something today about the debt ceiling circus that I’m sure his father would agree with:
“Reading Google News, I am struck by the degree to which dramatic stories crowd out arguably more important material. The top of the page is dominated by the current U.S. debt limit crisis. It is an entertaining example of the game of Chicken as played by politicians but of limited importance otherwise, since both sides are focused not on how to deal with the long term debt problem but on the terms on which they will agree to postpone dealing with it.”
Exactly. The “both sides” remark is perfectly justified, although there are exceptions on one side. The problem is that too many of those who are serious about tackling the problem are tactically inept and hasty, and those who are tactically canny and patient are not all that serious about tackling the problem. …
… while doing my daily mad-dog midday walk in the St. Louis sun, I was thinking today that considerable blame for what is going on now can be attributed to one mechanical invention: air conditioning. There is no way such a tortuous process would have dragged on so long if the legislators and executive branch people had to broil in the midsummer heat of DC. That would be far more a sobering a prospect to those types than a looming default.
So, to fix our politics, break the air conditioning.
Mark Steyn columns on the Pelosi remark about “saving life on this planet.”
… The Democrat model of governance is to spend four trillion dollars while only collecting two trillion, borrowing the rest from tomorrow. Instead of “printing money,” we’re printing credit cards and preapproving our unborn grandchildren. To facilitate this proposition, Washington created its own form of fantasy accounting: “baseline budgeting,” under which growth-in-government is factored in to federal bookkeeping as a permanent feature of life. As Arthur Herman of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out this week, under present rules, if the government were to announce a spending freeze – that’s to say, no increases, no cuts, everything just stays exactly the same – the Congressional Budget Office would score it as a $9 trillion savings. In real-world terms, there are no “savings,” and there’s certainly no $9 trillion. In fact, there isn’t one thin dime. But nevertheless that’s how it would be measured at the CBO.
Around the world, most folks have to work harder than that to save $9 trillion. That’s roughly the combined GDPs of Japan and Germany. But in America it’s an accounting device. This is something to bear in mind when you’re listening to the amount of “savings” touted by whatever triumphant bipartisan deal is announced at the eleventh hour in Washington.
So I find myself less interested in “life on this planet as we know it today” than in life on this planet as we’re likely to know it tomorrow if Nancy Pelosi and her chums decline to re-acquaint themselves with reality. If you kinda dig life on this planet as you know it, ask yourself this: What’s holding the joint up? As the old gag goes, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If you owe the banks 15,000,000,000,000 dollars, the planet has a problem. …
Contentions post on the crash of Tom Freidman’s China train.
Tom Friedman’s favorite model train set suffered a tragic disaster a week ago, when a carriage from China’s high-speed rail system leapt over the side of a bridge, killing 40 people and injuring almost 200. China fetishists like Friedman view the fast and flashy Chinese infrastructure boom as a literal model for the U.S. Our trains are slow and need new paint, you see, and that means China is better positioned to excel in some presumably train-obsessed future. Or something like that. …
Nile Gardiner posts on the obnoxious tweets from the White House that caused 30,000 followers to cancel in one day.
… As the president’s approval rating slips to a dismal 40 percent in the latest Gallup poll, the spin-obsessed White House only looks further out of touch with reality in a nation where 75 percent of likely voters believe the country is moving down the wrong direction. This latest Twitter campaign merely comes across as yet another act of desperation from a presidency whose mantra is increasingly “leading from behind,” both at home and abroad.
Michael Barone writes an interesting analysis of Obama’s chances next year based on the house vote in 2010.
The popular vote for the House and the president have converged. Here’s what it means for Obama’s chances in 2012.
Since the middle 1990s, the popular vote for the House of Representatives has become a good proxy for the standing of the nation’s two major parties. This was not the case for many years, in large part because Democratic House candidates in the South stood for different issues than their party’s national nominees and tended to run far ahead of Democratic presidential candidates. But during Bill Clinton’s presidency and afterward, Democratic presidential candidates became more successful nationally than they had been in most of the 1970s and 1980s, even as Republicans started running much better than they had in House districts in the South.
In 1992, for the first time since Reconstruction, the Republican percentage of the House vote in the South, defined as the 11 Confederate states plus West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma, was (slightly) higher than in the North; in 1994, Republicans carried the House popular vote in the South, as they have ever since, in years when they carried the House popular vote in the North only twice (in 1994 and 2002).
So it is fair to say that the popular vote for the House and the president have converged. This is apparent in the following table, showing the Democratic percentage for president and for House members in presidential election years going back to the first election after World War II. …
IBD Editors report on the unraveling of junk science.
The scientist who claimed that global warming threatens polar bears is under investigation. There’s a hole in Earth’s greenhouse. A cooler era lies ahead.
That hiss is the hot air coming out of alarmists’ balloon.
The global warming fraud is coming apart faster than the alarmists can repackage and rebrand their fairy tale. Their elaborately constructed yarn can’t hold together much longer. There are just too many loose ends:
• Charles Monnett, the scientist who predicted that polar bears would drown from a lack of sea ice, “is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity” of the article in which he makes that claim, the Associated Press reported Thursday. Monnett, a federal wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has been placed on leave pending the probe’s outcome. …