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Mark Steyn reacts to Biden’s comments on one child per Chinese family.
Peter Kirsanow suggests my new book may get the blame for the earthquake. I’m happy to take credit for the downgrade and the London riots, but to the best of my recollection there’s no ‘quake in there. However, since he brought it up, I’d like to put in a word for my book’s general line on China re Joe Biden’s disgusting remarks on Beijing’s one-child policy and its attendant industrial-scale ”gendercide”. My views on this have been well aired in this space over the years.
China is a weak power. When I point that out, people think that’s the good news. It’s not. As I say in the prologue to my new book;
“That’s actually worse news than if China was cruising to uncontested global hegemony – because it means that Beijing’s calculations on how the Sino-American relationship evolves are even less likely to align with ours. China has to maximize its power before demographic decay sets in. In other words, it has strong incentives to be bold and to push, hard and fast.”
Nevertheless, we owe ‘em a ton of money. Which means you can figure for yourself the likelihood of an American vice-president standing up in public and expressing his repugnance at the wholesale slaughter of China’s baby girls. A few lines before the passage above, I quote Jonathan Swift’s “Run Upon The Bankers”: “They have his soul, who have his bonds.” China has our bonds, and thus in a certain sense they have our soul. Or at any rate Joe Biden’s. …
Peter Wehner too.
In his remarks at China’s Sichuan University, Vice President Biden, in response to a question, said, “Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.”
This is a remarkably obtuse and morally disgraceful statement. The policy the vice president is so understanding of, after all, involves forced abortion, involuntary sterilization, and gendercide. As Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, put it, “China’s One Child Policy causes more violence to women and girls than any other official policy on earth. To merely mention the economic consequences is to turn a blind eye to the terrible human suffering caused by forced abortion. Chinese women are literally dragged out of their homes, strapped to tables and forced to abort.” …
Here’s a cheery thought. Richard Posner says we’re not in a double-dip recession. We are in a depression.
If the notion that we are merely living through the aftereffects of a mere “recession” that ended in 2009 sounds somewhat ridiculous, that’s because it is. If we were being honest with ourselves, we would call this a depression. That would certainly better convey both the severity of our problems, and the fact that those problems have no evident solutions.
The American economy currently has both a short-term problem and a long-term problem. The short-term problem is that the economy is depressed; it is growing more slowly than the population, with the result that per capita income is declining. The high rate of un- and underemployment is a factor, but is itself the product of other factors, having mainly to do with the reluctance of over-indebted consumers (over-indebted in major part because of loss of equity in their houses, the major source of household wealth) to spend, the reluctance of the impaired banking industry to make risky loans, and the reluctance of businesses to invest and to hire, which is due in part to weak consumer spending and in part to profound uncertainty about the nation’s economic future.
The roots of this catastrophic situations lie primarily, I think, in the incompetent economic management of the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve. The persistence of the depression, however, is due in part at least to surprising failures of the Obama administration—poor leadership, poor management, the sponsorship of incomprehensibly complex health care and financial regulation laws that have created widespread uncertainty that has discouraged consumption and investment, and the inability to explain the nature of the economy’s problems to the general public. These failures caused the stimulus enacted in February 2009 to be botched in both in its design and its administration, resulting in the discrediting of deficit spending as a response to depression. …
Byron York says today’s deficits are not caused by entitlements, but by spending.
… There is no line in the federal budget that says “stimulus,” but Obama’s massive $814 billion stimulus increased spending in virtually every part of the federal government. “It’s spread all through the budget,” says former Congressional Budget Office chief Douglas Holtz-Eakin. “It was essentially a down payment on the Obama domestic agenda.” Green jobs, infrastructure, health information technology, aid to states — it’s all in there, billions in increased spending.
As for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP — it has no specific line in the budget, either, but that is because it was anticipated to pay nearly all of its own cost, which it has.
Spending for Social Security and Medicare did go up in this period — $162 billion and $119 billion, respectively — but by incremental and predictable amounts that weren’t big problems in previous years. “We’re getting older one year at a time, and health care costs grow at 7 or 8 percent a year,” says Holtz-Eakin. If Social Security and Medicare were the sole source of the current deficit, it would be a lot smaller than it is.
The bottom line is that with baby boomers aging, entitlements will one day be a major budget problem. But today’s deficit crisis is not one of entitlements. It was created by out-of-control spending on everything other than entitlements. The recent debt-ceiling agreement is supposed to put the brakes on that kind of spending, but leaders have so far been maddeningly vague on how they’ll do it. …
Richard Epstein asks and answers the question, “How is Warren Buffett like the Pope?”
They are both dead wrong on economic policy.
The terrible economic news from both Europe and the United States has led to much soul-searching on both sides of the Atlantic. How did we get here, and how can we get out of this jam? In my past columns for Hoover’s Defining Ideas, I have insisted that both economies will be able to extricate themselves from their deep slumps only by promptly reversing those policies that have brought them to the brink. A successful and sustainable political order requires stable legal and economic policies that reward innovation, spur growth, and maximize the ability of rich and poor alike to enter into voluntary arrangements. Limited government, low rates of taxation, and strong property rights are the guiding principles.
Unfortunately, many spiritual and economic leaders are working overtime to push social policy in the exact opposite direction. At the top of the list are two prominent figures: Pope Benedict XVI and financier Warren Buffett.
…rather than heed the advice of the Pope and Mr. Buffett, we should take our guidance from another public figure: the late Reverend Ike. Many years ago, he said, “the best thing you could do for the poor is not be one of them.” Government should give everyone at least that opportunity.
Andrew Malcolm is following events in Libya.
The vacationing Barack Obama was walking through the woods on Martha’s Vineyard today, when he decided to give a speech to the nation on Libya.
Fortunately, a podium was growing nearby, along with the all-important presidential seal.
So, the Real Good Talker did speak. For about seven minutes. And, as usual, his full text is below.
Obama said Kadafi’s hours are numbered, though some resistance continues. …