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Ross Douthat takes a look at how some red states and blue states are weathering the recession.
…Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area. And it isn’t the only dark blue basket case. Eight states had unemployment over 11 percent in June; seven went for Barack Obama last November. Fourteen states are facing 2010 budget gaps that exceed 20 percent of their G.D.P.; only two went for John McCain. (Strikingly, they’re McCain’s own Arizona and Sarah Palin’s Alaska.) Of the nine states that have raised taxes this year, closing deficits at the expense of growth, almost all are liberal bastions.
The urban scholar Joel Kotkin has called this recession a blue-state “meltdown.” That overstates the case: The Deep South has been hit hard by unemployment, and some liberal regions are weathering the storm reasonably well. And clearly part of the blame for the current crisis rests with decisions made in George W. Bush’s Washington.
But in state capital after state capital, the downturn has highlighted the weaknesses of liberal governance — the zeal for unsustainable social spending, the preference for regulation over job creation, the heavy reliance for tax revenue on the volatile incomes of the upper upper class. …
Robert J. Samuelson draws parallels between California’s economic troubles, and where the nation is headed.
California’s budget debacle holds a lesson for America, but one we will probably ignore. It’s easy to attribute the state’s protracted budget stalemate, now temporarily resolved with about $26 billion of spending cuts and accounting gimmicks, to the deep recession and California’s peculiar politics. Up to a point, that’s true. Representing an eighth of the U.S. economy, California has been harder hit than most states. Unemployment, now 11.6 percent (national average: 9.5 percent), could top 13 percent in 2010, says economist Eduardo Martinez of Moody’s Economy.com. Meanwhile, the requirement that any tax increase muster a two-thirds vote in the legislature promotes paralysis. Democrats prefer tax hikes to spending cuts, and Republicans can block higher taxes.
All this produced the recent drama: plunging tax revenue and the state’s resulting huge budget deficits; endless negotiations between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders; the deadlock that led the state to issue scrip (in effect, IOUs) to pay bills; and a final agreement on a 2009-10 budget. But there is also a bigger story with national implications. California has reached a tipping point. Its government made more promises than its economy can easily support. For years, state leaders papered over the contradiction with loans and modest changes. By overwhelming these expedients, the recession triggered an inevitable reckoning.
Here’s the national lesson. There’s a collision between high and rising demands for government services and the capacity of the economy to produce the income and tax revenue to pay for those demands. That’s true of California, where poor immigrants and their children have increased pressures for more government services. It’s also true of the nation, where an aging population raises Social Security and Medicare spending. California is leading the transformation of politics into a form of collective torture: pay more (higher taxes), get less (lower services). …
Steve Chapman takes a hard look at states’ lack of fiscal discipline.
…The crisis in state budgets is not an accident, and it wasn’t unforeseeable. For years, most states have spent like there’s no tomorrow, and now tomorrow is here. They bring to mind the lament of Mickey Mantle, who said, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”
If they had known the revenue flood wasn’t a permanent fact of life, governors and legislators might have prepared for drought. Instead, like overstretched homeowners, they took on obligations they could meet only in the best-case scenario—which is not what has come to pass.
Over the last decade, state budgets have expanded rapidly. We have had good times and bad times, including a recession in 2001, but according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, this will be the first year since 1983 that total state outlays have not increased.
The days of wine and roses have been affordable due to a cascade of tax revenue. In state after state, the government’s take has ballooned. Overall, the average person’s state tax burden has risen by 42 percent since 1999—nearly 50 percent beyond what the state would have needed just to keep spending constant, with allowances for inflation. …
Fascinating blog post by Spengler as he illuminates the combined efforts of China and Russia to control assertive Islam in Asia and parts of Europe.
… The world looks radically different than Washington thinks — or thought under the Bush administration. The encounter of Central Asian Turkic Muslims with modernity via China is tragic, and the Chinese will take whatever steps are required to ensure that the tragedy is not theirs. The human rights organizations who squeaked and gibbered over Israel’s incursion into Gaza are about to learn the meaning of the word “crackdown.” Iran is not the pillar of stability for the region that the Obamoids hallucinated, but a dying society flailing out as it falls.
Large tracts of the world are becoming unmanageable. Looming above all these other issues as truly frightening threat is Pakistan, which cannot be stabilized by any measures Washington might undertake. Look for a quiet conversation between India and China as to how to dry this problem out.
Obama’s obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian issue has made him slightly worse than irrelevant. If you betray your friends (as Obama surely did by ignoring agreements with Israel on “organic growth” of settlements) and propitiate your enemies (as Obama attempted to do with Iran and Syria) you merely make yourself an object of ridicule and contempt. The rest of the world is taking measures to address real problems in the absence of American help, and in the fear of American maliciousness.
Never in history has a great power cast away so much influence in so short a period of time.
What are kids being taught at school? Lots of Green gloom and doom, says David Harsanyi.
…In 2006, a poll by the Horatio Alger Association, a nonprofit education group, found that only 53 percent of students age 13 to 19 were optimistic about the future of the country — a 22-percentage-point drop from 2003.
It is depressing to see children — whose cellphones utilize technology that eclipses the collective advances of entire cultures — down on their futures. …
…Today, my 7-year-old can’t take a bath without re-living the plot of “Crime and Punishment,” because she believes her modest water consumption is knocking off Mother Earth.
Maybe children are confused about what “better” is supposed to mean, as well? We can forgive them, though, as they’ve been fed a steady diet of model-projection Armageddon their whole lives. One poll claims that one out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that the Earth will be destroyed by the time they grow up. …
Kenneth Anderson has a fantastic post in Volokh. Hoover Institute Senior Fellow, Dr. Scott Atlas listed 10 advantages of American healthcare. Here are three:
1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.
6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long—sometimes more than a year—to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In Britain, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.
7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”
Richard Cohen of WaPo noticed he’s the only guy who hasn’t had an exclusive interview with the One.
… For me, health-care reform is Missiles Redux — specifically the Reagan-era disputes over SS-20s and such, not to mention throw-weight, which is measured in kilograms or metric tons, whatever they are. I was expected to know something about such matters, being a Washington columnist and all, but I could never keep the damn terms and numbers straight. I would bone up, talk to the experts, read the stupefying reports, write the requisite column — and promptly forget it all. The Soviet Union collapsed anyway.
Now it is health care. As a single (actually, divorced) payer, I cannot for the life of me figure out why Obama did not simply expand Medicare, lowering the eligible age until everyone was covered. This would take one House committee and one Senate committee and one news conference. It would both provide your average patriotic American with health insurance and keep Obama off TV. This is known as a win-win.
Lucky for me, this has not been done, and so I have been ducking that call from the White House, inviting me to exclusively spend the day with the president, exclusively interview the president or — this would be really hard to turn down — exclusively sneak a smoke with him in the Situation Room. My Pulitzer is coming because I alone have not interviewed the president. It turns out, that’s an exclusive.
The Economist reports on exciting advances in X-ray technology.
…Most electronic devices have moved into the era of silicon chips and other solid-state technology. Not X-rays. The machines used to generate them still rely resolutely on vacuum tubes. But that will change shortly if Otto Zhou of the University of North Carolina has his way. Dr Zhou and his colleagues are bringing X-radiography into the world of modern electronics. In doing so they hope to create X-ray machines that are smaller, simpler and able to produce more detailed pictures. These could be used to enhance security screening at airports, to allow engineers to check the structure of materials more easily and, especially, to enhance medical images in a way that would improve cancer therapy. …
…Dr Zhou’s method, by contrast, employs a process called electron-field emission. This dispenses with the heat. Also, instead of having a single metal filament release the electrons, it relies on myriad carbon nanotubes to do the same thing. The result is a compact source of X-rays that can be controlled with great precision.
Such sources can then be built into an array, each element of which is programmed to fire whenever required. That will allow for more accurate CT scans. Existing scanners usually have but a single X-ray tube. This is rotated around the patient, taking pictures as it goes. Though the rotation takes only a few seconds, the overall image will be blurred if the patient moves. An array of field-emission devices, however, will take their exposures simultaneously, so the resulting image should always be pin sharp. …
…Conventional CT scans are used to work out the shape of the place where a dose of radiation needs to be concentrated in order to attack a tumour without damaging nearby healthy tissue. But the scan and the treatment cannot usually be done at the same time, because they interfere with each other. There are, however, no interference problems with field-emission X-ray sources, so these can be used to take high-resolution pictures while treatment is proceeding. This means those administering the treatment will know with precision when to continue and when to stop. …