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Looking at the markets’ reaction, Jennifer Rubin suggests Obama reconsider the direction he has taken.
… At some level Obama understood during the campaign Americans’ aversion to liberal economic policies. Until Joe the Plumber caught him in an unguarded moment, he had done his best to appear the model of moderation on economic matters. He was going to go line-by-line through the budget and give 95% of Americans tax relief. He took issue with then rival Hillary Clinton’s idea for a health care mandate and he objected to her idea for a suspension of mortgage foreclosures. He did his best to give the appearance that he might govern less in the mold of 1970s liberal Democrats and more in the style of Bill Clinton. At least before the election he knew better than to jettison basic tenets of free market capitalism.
Now Obama is only a month into his presidency. It may be that he adjusts course, puts the brakes on the bailouts, and provides some relief for beleaguered investors and businesses. He would of course need to backtrack on some nasty rhetoric about the Republicans pushing “failed theories.” And he would have to finally cross the Democrats in Congress. But the alternative is a risky one, a high stakes gamble.
If he pursues this course of action — a government-centric recovery plan that in fact does little to spur private sector recovery — he puts his presidency and his vision of a new Democratic “permanent” majority at risk. The public did not vote for a European-style social welfare state. They did not vote for an acceleration of the failed economic policies of the last year of the Bush administration. And they certainly did not expect a trillion dollar spending bill with only double digit unemployment and inflation to show for it.
There is time for a course correction, but the window of opportunity is closing. Both the markets and the public have limited patience. If he was listening, the president this week would have heard the message: turn back while there is still time.
Even Michael Kinsley, a liberal’s liberal, has seen enough of these foolish policies.
… But even if the stimulus is a magnificent success, the money still has to be paid back. The plan of record apparently is that we keep borrowing, spending and stimulating, faster and faster, until suddenly, on some signal from heaven or Timothy Geithner, we all stop spending and start saving in recordbreaking amounts. Oh sure, that will work.
There is another way. If it’s not the actual, secret plan, it will be an overwhelming temptation: Don’t pay the money back. So far, even as one piggy bank after another astounds us with its emptiness, there have been only the faintest whispers about the possibility of an actual default by the U.S. government. Somewhat louder whispers can be heard, though, about the gradual default known as inflation. Just three or four years of currency erosion at, say, 10 percent a year would slice the real value of our debt — public and private, U.S. bonds and jumbo mortgages — in half.
Anyone who regards the prospect of double-digit inflation with insouciance is either too young to have lived through it the last time (the late 1970s) or too old to remember. Among other problems, inflation works only as a surprise or betrayal. It can never be part of any public, official plan. Plan for 10 percent inflation, and you’ll get 20. Plan for 20 and you’ll need a wheelbarrow to pay for your morning Starbucks. But if that’s not the plan, what is?
IBD Editors say of course the market is sinking.
… But it still looks, as we said four months ago, “like the U.S., which built the mightiest, most prosperous economy the world has ever known, is about to turn its back on the free-enterprise system that made it all possible.”
How else would you explain all that’s happened in a few short weeks? How else would you expect the stock market, where millions cast daily votes and which is still the best indicator of what the future holds, to act when:
Newsweek, a prominent national newsweekly, blares from its cover “We Are All Socialists Now,” without a hint of recognition that socialism in its various forms has been repudiated by history — as communism’s collapse in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China attest.
Even so, a $787 billion “stimulus,” along with a $700 billion bank bailout, $75 billion to refinance bad mortgages, $50 billion for the automakers, and as much as $2 trillion in loans from the Fed and the Treasury are hardly confidence-builders for our free-enterprise system.
Talk of “nationalizing” U.S.’ troubled major banks comes not just from tarnished Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but also from Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former Fed chief Alan Greenspan. …
And Maureen Dowd is fed up. Obama is such a whiz, that took only a month.
… In The Times, Eric Dash reported that Wall Street is losing confidence in Washington’s vague and shifting plans, sending shares of bank companies plunging to new lows on Friday.
President Obama disdains sound bites, and he does not have Bill Clinton’s talent for reducing the abstruse to aperçus. We wanted someone smart to gather a bunch of smart people around him to get us out of this fix. But Mr. Obama’s egghead manner has failed to soothe a nation with the jits. Maybe he has been so intent on avoiding the stereotype of the Angry Black Man, as he wrote in his memoir, that it’s hard for him to connect with and articulate public anger about our diminishment.
Though he demonstrated in the campaign that he has a rare gift for inspiring the country with new belief in itself, Mr. Obama has not yet captured either the grit the moment requires or the fury it provokes. He has not explained in a compelling way why Americans who followed the rules need to sacrifice more to help those who flouted the rules.
That is why the CNBC reporter Rick Santelli struck a populist nerve with his screed about the unfairness of responsible homeowners picking up the tab for irresponsible homeowners — following the unfairness of taxpayers who are losing jobs, homes and savings propping up the exact same bankers and carmakers whose greed and myopia caused the economy to crash. …
They are getting old very quickly and we have 47 months left of this noise. Eric Holder’s claim that Americans are “cowards” when it comes to race, gets the Jonah Goldberg treatment.
Hey, black folks, do you know any white folks? Good. O.K., I want you to go up to them right now and, as politely as you can, start sharing your most deeply held racial views. Hey, white folks, you’re not off the hook. I want you to go and do likewise with any black people you know.
Don’t want to do that? Really? Well, then, you’re a coward.
That’s the short version of Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech this week celebrating Black History Month.
Holder says we are “a nation of cowards” because we’re unwilling to discuss race to his satisfaction. Some might say that’s an ironic diagnosis given that Holder is the first black attorney general, appointed by the first black president of the United States. …
Heather Mac Donald says, “Hey Eric, you want a conversation about race? Converse with this.”
Attorney General Eric Holder, a Clinton administration retread, wants to revive Bill Clinton’s National Conversation on Race. (What’s next? Hillarycare?) Holder recently told his Justice Department employees that the United States was a “nation of cowards” for not talking more about race. “It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation’s history, this is in some ways understandable,” Holder said. “If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”
Is he nuts? Leave aside for a moment Holder’s purely decorative call for a “frank” conversation about race. The Clinton-era Conversation also purported to be frank, and we know what that meant: a one-sided litany of white injustices. Please raise your hand if you haven’t heard the following bromides about “the racial matters that continue to divide us” more times than you can count: Police stop and arrest blacks at disproportionate rates because of racism; blacks are disproportionately in prison because of racism; blacks are failing in school because of racist inequities in school funding; the black poverty rate is the highest in the country because of racism; blacks were given mortgages that they couldn’t afford because of racism. I will stop there.
Not only do colleges, law schools, almost all of the nation’s elite public and private high schools, and the mainstream media, among others, have “conversations about . . . racial matters”; they never stop talking about them. Any student who graduates from a moderately selective college without hearing that its black students are victims of institutional racism—notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of black students there will have been deliberately admitted with radically lower SAT scores than their white and Asian comrades—has been in a coma throughout his time there.
Education bureaucrats maintain an incessant harangue on white racism because they see the writing on the wall: most students are indifferent to race and just want to get along. If left to themselves, they would go about their business perfectly happily and color-blindly, and the race industry would wither on the vine. Thus the institutional imperative to remind black students constantly about their victimization and the white students about their guilt. Last month, the elite Phillips Academy at Andover proudly announced a student presentation on White Privilege: A History and Its Role in Education. Would the student have come up with such a topic on her own without the school’s educators deliberately immersing her in such trivial matters? Of course not.
But if Attorney General Holder is really sincere about wanting a “frank” conversation about race, he should put the following items on the agenda: …
The Corner covers Rick Santelli’s rant on CNBC.
Posts from The Corner and Contentions cover new revelations of Bill Moyers’ use of Hoover and the FBI to investigate possible gays in Johnson and Goldwater camps.
There are few things more insufferable than Bill Moyers on PBS every week holding forth on how intolerant conservatives are. This is because given his history of political activities in LBJ’s administration, he has no standing to do so. Moyers and J. Edgar Hoover worked together to illegally bug Martin Luther King jr. as well as leak unflattering information about political enemies to the press. Andy Ferguson wrote the definitive Bill Moyers takedown years ago, but sadly it’s not online (it is collected in one of Ferguson’s books). Anyway, in lieu of the main course, as an appetizer here’s a very damning excerpt on Moyers from Morley Safer’s autobiography.
Well, as it turns out things are even worse than that. The Washington Post has unearthed FBI files showing that Moyers might have been a party to investigating whether Jack Valenti and any White House staff members were in the closet: …
This will give you confidence in the science studying the “warming” of the earth. Estimates of Antarctic sea ice were off by a California sized error (193,000 square miles). Story from Bloomberg News.
According to Scrappleface, Dems are complaining Obama’s new budget is unfair to the poor.
Of course we have the NY Post cartoon that has everyone in a lather.
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