Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Nile Gardiner on Obama’s last SOTU.
Two words hardly mentioned in Barack Obama’s 65-minute State of the Union address to Congress: freedom and liberty. President Obama’s fourth and possibly last State of the Union speech was long on big government proposals, but short on the principles that have made America the world’s greatest power. His lecturing tone exuded arrogance, and he failed to present a coherent vision for getting the United States back on its feet after three years of economic decline. It was heavy on class-war rhetoric, punitive taxation, and frequent references to the Left-wing mantra of “fairness”, hardly likely to instil confidence in a battered business community that is the lifeblood of the American economy.
Above all, he remains in denial over the levels of federal debt that threaten the country’s long-term prosperity. This was not a speech that was serious about the biggest budget deficits since World War Two. There was no sense at all that America is a superpower on a precipice, sinking in a sea of debt that threatens to undermine America’s power to project global leadership for generations to come. In fact, his interventionist proposals will only make matters worse.
From new federally funded infrastructure projects to increasing regulations on financial institutions, President Obama remains wedded to big government – an approach rejected by a clear majority of Americans, who view it as a millstone around their necks. As Gallup’s polling has found, nearly two thirds of Americans see big government as “the biggest threat” to their country. …
Yuval Levin comments on the speech for the Corner.
Toward the end of his State of the Union address, President Obama delivered a paragraph that was so blatantly absurd and self contradictory as to actually become clarifying—so incoherent that it shed a bright light on his thinking and his grave dilemma. It’s hard to believe he actually said this, but he did:
“I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States. That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work. That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.”
The examples he chose of course jump out as ludicrous: K-12 education in America is thoroughly dominated by the government, and the president has not proposed to make it less so. (And state governments, by the way, are also governments.) “Getting rid of regulations that don’t work” is certainly an unusual way to describe the regulatory agenda of this administration, which has involved a series of unprecedented delegations of authority to regulators (especially in health care and financial regulation) and which continues every day to spew forth an interminable array of costly, complex, and highly assertive rules that will give the federal government (and the executive agencies in particular) previously unimagined discretion over vast swaths of our economy. And “relies on a reformed private market, not a government program” is surely the most unabashedly dishonest and Orwellian way yet devised to describe Obamacare—a law that begins from the premise that the solution to our health care financing problems is to make the government an even greater provider and purchaser of health insurance, …
Because he was a presidential speech writer, Peter Wehner has some creds when it comes to the SOTU.
I have some sympathy for President Obama’s speechwriters. A State of the Union address is inherently challenging to write because there’s a laundry list quality to them. (That was not the case for President Bush’s early State of the Union speeches, as we were able to focus on the war on terror, which created a clear hierarchy of priorities, allowing us to reject the usual input from various federal agencies). But what made Obama’s address last night doubly challenging is he clearly understands he cannot defend his record and won’t even try. That was obvious, given the glaring omissions in his speech. For example, Obamacare barely made a cameo appearance last night while his stimulus package was kept off-stage completely.
Then there is the fact that the president has no compelling second-term agenda to offer (something I wrote about yesterday). And since a State of the Union address imposes some constraints on Obama’s favorite rhetorical device these days, which is to accuse Republicans of being unpatriotic and very nearly sadistic, what’s a presidential speechwriter to do?
One option is to have Obama say in 2012 almost exactly what he said in 2010 and 2011. The problem with that is it’s not only rhetorically uncreative, it’s downright embarrassing. …
Megan McArdle thinks the speech was filled with nostalgia.
… I think the speech made it even clearer than other speeches have that the president’s vision of the world is a lightly updated 1950s technocracy without the social conservatism, and with solar panels instead of rocket ships. Government and labor and business working in tightly controlled concert, with nice people like Obama at the reins–all the inventions coming out of massive government or corporate labs, and all the resulting products built by a heavily unionized workforce that knows no worry about the future.
There are obviously a lot of problems with this vision. The first is that this is not what the fifties and sixties were actually like–the government and corporate labs sat on a lot of inventions until upstart companies developed them, and the union goodies that we now think of as typical were actually won pretty late in the game (the contracts that eventually killed GM were written in the early 1970s).
And to the extent that the fifties and sixties were actually like this, we should remember, as Max Boot points out, that this was not actually the day of the little guy. Big institutions actually had a great deal more power than they do now; it was just distributed somewhat differently–you had to worry less about big developers slapping a high-rise next to your single-family neighborhood, and a whole lot more about Robert Moses deciding he wanted to run a freeway through the spot where your house happened to be.
The military model of society–employed by both Obama, and a whole lot of 1950s good government types–was actually a kind of creepy way to live. As Boot says, “America today is far more individualistic and far more meritocratic with far less tolerance for rank prejudice and far less willingness to blindly follow the orders of rigid bureaucracies.” If you want the 1950s except without the rigid conformity and the McCarthyism, then you fundamentally misunderstand what made the 1950s tick. …
Both Mitt and Newt made money from a Denmark drug company. Mitt made it out in the open as an honest man. Newt made his under cover of his lobbying activities. Nicole Gelinas has the story.
Whose financial activities tell us what’s wrong with America — Mitt Romney’s or Newt Gingrich’s?
Romney released some tax returns this morning. In 2010, Goldman Sachs, one of the Romneys’ investment firms, reported that a trust set up for Ann Romney booked a $17,728.21 profit on the sale of stock in Novo Nordisk, a global pharmaceutical company based in Denmark. The Romneys paid a 15 percent federal tax levy on this capital gain, or $2,659.23.
Romney’s Novo investment was unremarkable. It was a tiny part of his portfolio. It catches the eye only because Gingrich, too, made cash off Novo Nordisk in recent years — just in a different way.
As the New York Times reported last month, Novo Nordisk paid $200,000 annually to be a big part of Gingrich’s “Center for Health Transformation.” Novo paid Gingrich separately, too, for lobbying in all but name.
What did Novo want? It wanted Gingrich to wring money from the U.S. government. The Times says: …
Volokh Conspiracy provides a good example of the benefits of the government leaving the economy alone.
Interesting column by James Grant on the short but severe post-WWI Depression of 1920–21:
“Our Great Recession ended 2½ years ago, according to the official cyclical timekeepers, but you wouldn’t know it by a glance at the news. Zero percent interest rates and $1 trillion in “stimulus” notwithstanding, the U.S. economy can hardly seem to heave itself out of bed in the morning. Now compare this with the first full year of recovery from the ugly depression of 1920–21. In 1922, under the unsung stewardship of the president best remembered for his underlings’ scandals and his own early death in office, the unemployment rate fell from 15.6 percent to 9 percent (on its way to 3.2 percent in 1923), while constant-dollar output leapt by 16 percent. After which the 1920s proverbially roared.
And how did the administration of Warren G. Harding, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve, produce these astonishing results? Why, by raising interest rates, reducing the public debt and balancing the federal budget. Let 21st-century economists rub their eyes in disbelief. Eighteen months after the depression started, it ended.”
I’ve been fascinated by the contrast of Harding’s response to the 1920 depression versus Roosevelt’s seemingly-counterproductive response to the Great Depression since I read several discussions a few years back (see here, here, and here). The problem with macroeconomics, of course, is the paucity of data points and the inability to control for relevant variables. But it is nevertheless striking to me that discussion always seems to focus on what at first glance appears to be the failed Hoover-Roosevelt response to the Great Depression rather than the apparently effective Harding response to the 1920 Depression.
The only discussions I’ve seen of the 1920 Depression are those that support Harding. Has anyone written a good response to that story, because what I’ve read seems fairly compelling (at least to the extent that macroeconomics can ever tell a compelling story).
Cato has a graph that shows the growing state dependency on the federal government. The graph is defective in that it does not clearly show the devastating effect of the present administration. In 2002 the percentage was 27.2% and in 2008 it dropped to 26.3%. In 2011 it increased to 34.1% That is an increase of 23% in just three years. So it was stable for a good bit of time until Barack Obama was elected.
The president’s fiscal 2013 budget proposal is scheduled to be released on February 13th. State officials are predictably sounding the alarm on the coming “deep cuts” to federal subsidies now that stimulus funds are running out and Washington is being forced to confront its mounting red ink.
State officials have become addicted to federal subsidies because they allow them to spend money taken from taxpayers across the country instead of having to ask their voters to pony up the funds. As the following charts shows, total state spending continued to increase during the economic downturn because the federal government picked up the slack. Note that the federal share of total state spending went from 25.7 percent in 2001 to 34.1 percent in 2011.
Ever wonder why the Glock handgun is so popular? WaPo reviews a book on the gun and the man who invented it.
As you pass through airport security, graphics depict items prohibited in your carry-on luggage. While the representations of a knife and an aerosol spray can are fairly generic, the pictograph of a handgun is unequivocally the silhouette of a Glock pistol.
In 1982, an obscure Austrian engineer named Gaston Glock, who worked in a radiator plant and had a side business with his wife making curtain rods, knives and belt buckles, invented a type of pistol that changed the worlds of law enforcement and firearms and powerfully influenced politics and popular culture. Glock is now 82, and his surname has become synonymous in some circles with “handgun.”
Less than three decades ago, few had heard of Glock, the man or the gun. Just how a pistol developed by an unknown engineer with little firearms experience became the dominant, if not iconic, law enforcement handgun in the United States is the subject of Paul M. Barrett’s “Glock.” …