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John Miller posts on Mark Steyn’s visit to HillsdaleCollege last week.
Steyn gave his annual public lecture at HillsdaleCollege last night, drawing a crowd of hundreds who braved the bad-weather forecast to hear a worse forecast about America’s future, which of course Steyn made side-splittingly hilarious. I’ve never laughed so hard about doomsday. Here’s how campus reporter Shaun Lichti described it: “Referencing Beyonce, Rutherford B. Hayes, and pole dancers, Steyn weaved a lurid intermixture of humor and political analysis.” That’s about right. Steyn was a bit rough on the poor fellow who wore a red-plaid lumberjack shirt to the event. If you ever go to a Steyn talk, wear something else. Trust me on this. At least the guy got his book signed at the reception afterward.
Best line of the night: “We have looted the future to bribe the present, and at the bottom of the cliff the future is waiting for what we owe it.”
And Mark Steyn is here with more on hapless feckless Hagel.
You don’t have to be that good to fend off a committee of showboating senatorial blowhards. Hillary Clinton demonstrated that a week or so back when she unleashed what’s apparently the last word in withering putdowns: What difference does it make?
Quite a bit of difference, it seems. This week, an oversedated Elmer Fudd showed up at the Senate claiming to be the president’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, and even the kindliest interrogators on the committee couldn’t prevent the poor chap shooting himself in the foot.
Twenty minutes in, Chuck Hagel was all out of appendages.
He warmed up with a little light “misspeaking” on Iran. “I support the president’s strong position on containment,” he declared. Breaking news!
Obama comes clean on Iran! According to Hagel, the administration favors “containment.” I could barely “contain” my excitement! Despite official denials, many of us had long suspected that, lacking any stomach for preventing a nuclear Tehran, Washington would settle for “containing” them. Hagel has been a containment man for years: It worked with the Soviets, so why not with apocalyptic ayatollahs? As he said in a 2007 speech, “The core tenets of George Kennan’s ‘The Long Telegram’ and the strategy of containment remain relevant today.” Recent history of pre-nuclear Iran – authorizing successful mob hits on Salman Rushdie’s publishers and translators, bombing Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, seeding client regimes in Lebanon and Gaza – suggests that these are fellows disinclined to be “contained” even at the best of times. But, even if Iran can be “contained” from nuking Tel Aviv, how do you “contain” Iran’s exercise of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, or “contain” the mullahs’ generosity to states and non-state actors less squeamish about using the technology? How do you “contain” a nuclear Iran from de facto control of Persian Gulf oil, including setting the price and determining the customers?
All fascinating questions, and now that Hagel has announced “containment” as the official administration position, we can all discuss them.
Unfortunately, as Hillary said the other day, “our policy is prevention, not containment”. So five minutes later the handlers discreetly swung into action to “contain” Hagel. “I was just handed a note that I misspoke,” he announced, “that I said I supported the President’s position on containment. If I said that, I meant to say that we don’t have a position on containment.” Hagel’s revised position is that there is no position on containment for him to have a position on.
Carl Levin, the Democrat chair, stepped in to contain further damage. “We do have a position on containment, and that is we do not favor containment,” he clarified. “I just wanted to clarify the clarify.”
Containment? Prevention? What difference does it make? …
… There are over 300 million Americans, and another 20 million Undocumented-Americans about to be fast-tracked down the soi-disant “path to citizenship.” Surely, from this vast talent pool, it should be possible to find someone who’s sufficiently interested in running the planet’s biggest military not to present himself on the world stage as a woozy, unfocused stumblebum. In an exquisite touch, responding to reports that Hagel was “ill-prepared,” someone in the White House leaked that he had been thoroughly “coached.” In other words, don’t blame us: We put him through the federally mandated Confirmation Hearing For Dummies course. He doesn’t have to be a competent Defense Secretary; he just has to play one on TV for a couple of hours. But even that’s too much to ask of an increasingly dysfunctional political system: The Senate disdains to pass a budget, 70 percent of U.S. Treasury debt is bought by the Federal Reserve, month-long negotiations to cut spending turn out in the final deal to increase spending … and the president’s choice of Defense Secretary tells the world he has no idea what our policy on Iran is. …
John Fund on cities with a death wish.
Some major American cities are dying, and the worst part is that these grievously ill patients often are refusing to take even the mildest medicine that would make things better.
Take Detroit, a city that has become a synonym for urban failure. The murder rate of one per 1,719 people last year was more than eleven times the rate in New York City. One contributing factor may be that two-thirds of Detroit’s streetlights are broken.
Once the fourth-largest city in the country, Detroit’s population has dropped by almost 30 percent since 2000 to below 700,000. Its vacant lots cover more land than the entire city of Paris. Despite enormous subsidies from the state government, Detroit is likely to finish the next fiscal year in June a full $50 million in the red. An audit could result in a state takeover of Detroit’s finances, and that could in turn lead to the nation’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy.
With conditions so dire, you’d think the city would grab any life preserver tossed to it. Last year, the state of Michigan offered to take over management of Belle Isle, the 1.5-square-mile island park that sits in the DetroitRiver, just inside the U.S. border with Canada. Now sadly neglected and crumbling, Belle Isle was once an urban jewel designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the creators of New York’s Central Park.
The state offered to manage it as part of a ten-year lease that could be renewed only if both parties agreed. Access to the park, which is connected to Detroit by a bridge, would be controlled by charging $11 for an annual vehicle pass that would also cover admission to every other state-operated park. The state would pump in dollars to repair and upgrade the island’s facilities, saving the city at least $6 million a year in upkeep.
Sounds like a win-win idea, but Detroit’s city council nixed it at a tumultuous meeting on Tuesday night.
The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan Last was in the WSJ with an piece on the decline in US births – sort of a companion piece to the item yesterday on student debt forcing couples to forgo children.
For more than three decades, Chinese women have been subjected to their country’s brutal one-child policy. Those who try to have more children have been subjected to fines and forced abortions. Their houses have been razed and their husbands fired from their jobs. As a result, Chinese women have a fertility rate of 1.54. Here in America, white, college-educated women—a good proxy for the middle class—have a fertility rate of 1.6. America has its very own one-child policy. And we have chosen it for ourselves.
Forget the debt ceiling. Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the entitlement cliff. Those are all just symptoms. What America really faces is a demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate.
The fertility rate is the number of children an average woman bears over the course of her life. The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America’s total fertility rate is 1.93, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; it hasn’t been above the replacement rate in a sustained way since the early 1970s.
The nation’s falling fertility rate underlies many of our most difficult problems. Once a country’s fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. You get more old people than young people. And eventually, as the bloated cohort of old people dies off, population begins to contract. This dual problem—a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall—has enormous economic, political and cultural consequences.
For two generations we’ve been lectured about the dangers of overpopulation. But the conventional wisdom on this issue is wrong, twice. First, global population growth is slowing to a halt and will begin to shrink within 60 years. Second, as the work of economists Esther Boserups and Julian Simon demonstrated, growing populations lead to increased innovation and conservation. Think about it: Since 1970, commodity prices have continued to fall and America’s environment has become much cleaner and more sustainable—even though our population has increased by more than 50%. Human ingenuity, it turns out, is the most precious resource.
Low-fertility societies don’t innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don’t invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don’t have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.
There has been a great deal of political talk in recent years about whether America, once regarded as the shining city on a hill, is in decline. But decline isn’t about whether Democrats or Republicans hold power; it isn’t about political ideology at all. At its most basic, it’s about the sustainability of human capital. Whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney took the oath of office last month, we would still be declining in the most important sense—demographically. It is what drives everything else.
If our fertility rate were higher—say 2.5, or even 2.2—many of our problems would be a lot more manageable. But our fertility rate isn’t going up any time soon. In fact, it’s probably heading lower. Much lower. …