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Even with the gratuitous Bush-bashing, The Economist special report on changes coming to the Arab world is worthwhile.
…Some in the West are wary of Arab elections, fearing that Islamists would exploit the chance to seize power on the principle of “one man, one vote, one time”. Yet Islamists seem to struggle to raise their support much above 20% of the electorate. Non-Arab Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia suggest that democracy is the best way to draw the poison of extremism. Repression only makes it more dangerous.
Democracy is more than just elections. It is about education, tolerance and building independent institutions such as a judiciary and a free press. The hard question is how much ordinary Arabs want all this. There have been precious few Tehran-style protests on the streets of Cairo. Most Arabs still seem unwilling to pay the price of change. Or perhaps, observing Iraq, they prefer stagnation to the chaos that change might bring. But regimes would be unwise to count on permanent passivity. As our special report in this issue argues, behind the political stagnation of the Arab world a great social upheaval is under way, with far-reaching consequences.
In almost every Arab country, fertility is in decline, more people, especially women, are becoming educated, and businessmen want a bigger say in economies dominated by the state. Above all, a revolution in satellite television has broken the spell of the state-run media and created a public that wants the rulers to explain and justify themselves as never before. On their own, none of these changes seems big enough to prompt a revolution. But taken together they are creating a great agitation under the surface. The old pattern of Arab government—corrupt, opaque and authoritarian—has failed on every level and does not deserve to survive. At some point it will almost certainly collapse. The great unknown is when.
Mark Steyn has an appropriately bleak view of the slippery slope the US is headed down.
What’s the end game here? I suppose it’s conceivable that there are a few remaining suckers out there who still believe Barack Obama is the great post-partisan, fiscally responsible, pragmatic centrist he played so beguilingly just a year ago. The New York Times’s David Brooks stuck it out longer than most: Only a few weeks back, he was giddy with excitement over the president’s “education” “reforms” (whatever they were). But now he says we’re in “the early stages of the liberal suicide march.” For a famously moderate moderate, Mr. Brooks seems to have gone from irrational optimism over the Democrats’ victory to irrational optimism over the Democrats’ impending downfall without the intervening stage of rational pessimism.
The end game is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. By “dependent,” I don’t mean merely welfare, although that’s a good illustration of the general principle. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: You’re assuring the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the vast bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything: A vast population is receiving more from government (in the form of health care or education subventions) than it thinks it contributes while another vast population is managing the ever-expanding regulatory regime (a federal energy-efficiency code, a government health bureaucracy) and yet another vast population remains, nominally, in the private sector but, de facto, dependent on government patronage of one form or another — say, the privately owned franchisee of a government automobile company, or the designated “community assistance” organization for helping poor families understand what programs they’re eligible for. In any case, what you get from government — whether in the form of a government paycheck, a government benefit, or a government contract — is a central fact of your life. …
Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press liberal, figures out the Dems class warfare.
In explaining why it was OK to sock a new 5.4% tax on the highest earners in this country — to pay for health care reform — President Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said this:
“The president believes that the richest 1% of this country has had a pretty good run of it for many, many, many years.”
Ah. So that’s it. The old “You’ve had it good enough for long enough” policy. That’s why a family earning a million dollars a year should now cough up $54,000 of that — in addition to all the other taxes it pays — to cover health care for people who may not pay a penny of new tax themselves.
Because, after all, those rich folks have had a pretty good run of it.
Now, it is not that I don’t think we need health care reform. We do. It is not that the rich should not pay fair taxes. They should.
But to justify a grossly overweighted tax by saying “You people have had it good long enough” is to engage in the worst and most destructive form of politics: class warfare. …
WaPo liberal, Robert Samuelson, continues his run of trashing the administration’s health care “reform” fantasies.
The most misused word in the health care debate is “reform.” Everyone wants “reform,” but what constitutes “reform” is another matter. If you listen to President Obama, his “reform” will satisfy almost everyone. It will insure the uninsured, control runaway health spending, subdue future budget deficits, preserve choice for patients and improve quality of care. These claims are self-serving exaggerations and political fantasies. They have destroyed what should be a serious national discussion of health care. …
And the world is upside down as David Broder warns us about another aspect of ObamaCare.
Americans are familiar with — if not altogether comfortable about — unelected officials exercising great authority over our lives. The nine justices on the Supreme Court and hundreds of other jurists exert their power from the bench. The economy is managed by the Federal Reserve Board, though no one ever forced Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke to campaign for a vote.
If President Obama has his way, another such unelected authority will be created — a manager and monitor for the vast and expensive American health-care system. As part of his health-reform effort, he is seeking to launch the Independent Medicare Advisory Council, or IMAC, a bland title for a body that could become as much an arbiter of medicine as the Fed is of the economy or the Supreme Court of the law.
The idea has gained a warm initial reaction on Capitol Hill. But with the delay in action on the overall reform effort until fall, there will be more time for reflection on IMAC and its authority. …
Jennifer Rubin explains that Obamacare is rationed health care.
The Democrats are plainly nervous about the “R” word. As they have shown more of their health-care plan, it has become increasingly obvious that the only way to make ObamaCare fly is to squeeze costs — and that means regulating and limiting care. Yes, that is rationing.
The Democrats go to great lengths to deny this. Sen. Herb Kohl assures us that all this talk about rationing is a myth:
I want to be clear that lowering costs has nothing to do with limiting access to care, though opponents of health care reform will try to convince America otherwise. The idea of “rationing” is a myth, and anything resembling it will not be a part of health care reform. No American should ever be kept from a treatment they need. But if we can cut back on unnecessary testing and over-treatment, then our health care system — and America’s patients — will be in better shape.
Got that? It is just whatever is deemed “unnecessary” that will be eliminated. And who will decide? Why, the government. Just as they do in Canada and the U.K., where health care is, well, rationed. In their less guarded moments, supporters of government-run medicine concede that in fact care will be limited. That is what all the “comparative effectiveness” research is about. …
Jennifer Rubin also posts on more Obamacare abominations.
Obama’s stupidly uninformed comments on the arrest of his Harvard professor friend distracted us from his other ridiculous gaffe: the accusation that doctors are taking out kids’ tonsils for no good reason. As with Gates-gate, Obama got it wrong. Tonsillectomies are less common than they used to be but are still essential for certain patients. In short, Dr. Obama is in no position to judge who’s getting the right tonsillectomy treatment and who’s not.
Greg Mankiw comments that the CBO keeps bringing the Obama and the Dems back to fiscal reality, this time on a proposed cost-saving measure for Medicare.
…Damn that CBO! They keep killing all these great ideas with, like, analysis and numbers and all that stuff. Everything would work out just fine if only they would close their eyes, click their heels together three times, and say, “There is no policy like reform…there is no policy like reform….”
Ed Morrissey has interesting details on the OMB’s treatment of the CBO.
The White House went to war with the Congressional Budget Office after Friday’s announcement that the proposed changes to Barack Obama’s health-care plan to realize big cost savings would only recover $2 billion over 10 years, at best — about 0.2% of ObamaCare’s lowest projected cost. Budget director Peter Orszag published a statement yesterday that accused the CBO of essentially lying in its analysis:
…White House Budget Director Peter Orszag said the CBO’s analysis — which it relayed to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Saturday — could feed a perception of the office’s bias toward “exaggerating costs and underestimating savings.”
Obama called Elmendorf to the White House after the CBO director testified that the present House bill would add $239 billion to the deficit over the next ten years, creating a rift between moderate and liberal Democrats in the House and abruptly halting the effort in the Senate. Obama denied that he intended to intimidate Elmendorf into providing more sympathetic numbers in subsequent analyses, but the White House got roundly criticized for inappropriately interfering with Congress’ independence in fiscal analysis. …
…In a Hot Air exclusive, I contacted Chuck Blahous of the Hudson Institute, formerly the deputy director of George Bush’s National Economic Council about the open and aggressive attack on the CBO from Orszag and the White House. Blahous finds it unseemly:
“It’s routine for OMB and CBO to have scoring differences. It’s also routine for the two agencies to separately acknowledge, explain and quantify them. What’s not routine is for each to overtly criticize the other. This is a bad road to go down in any case, but even more so because OMB probably has the glass house here. Institutionally, they’re just different; CBO is purely a referee, while OMB is part referee, part player because they’re part of the President’s policy development team. Moreover, OMB’s February budget presentation attracted a lot of justified criticism for its economic assumptions and for moving various deficit-expanding policies into the budget baseline. Furthermore, most of the claims about long-term cost savings from health care reform have been purely speculative, with no data from the actuaries to back them up. …”
Andrew Stuttaford posts on amusing new allegations in the Berlusconi scandal.