The Truth According to Mark

Apple and Ethics

2012-01-31T13:45:00.001-05:00

Everyone loves the late Steve Jobs. President Obama lauded his job-creation during the State of the Union speech. Newt Gingrich gave Jobs as an example of a "good" capitalist in contrast with the evil Mitt Romney. World-wide, sales of Apple's phones, tablets, music players, and computers have made Apple the world's most profitable company.

Between its "I'm an Apple" ads and its Genius Bar, Apple cultivates a counter-culture image. Apple gear is popular among the OWS movement.

But there is a darker side to Apple. Counting suppliers, nearly a million people are employed in creating Apple's products but the vast majority of these jobs are in Asia, most in China. They work long hours for small wages. The suicide rate at the Foxcom factory where Apple's products are assembled is high. Recently a group of employees threatened to jump off of the factory roof unless they got raises.

Apple requires its suppliers to limit hours worked to 60 hours/week but it recently admitted that nearly half of its suppliers exceed this. around 5% of its suppliers use child labor.

Apple is not unique in this. HP uses the same factory and most high-tech electronics come from the same or similar plants. Is it fair to hold Apple to a higher standard? I think so for several reasons.

The first is that when their assembly facilities were in the US they made a point of how environmentally safe their factory was. That lent their products a halo effect which persists to today. Chinese factories are not held to the same standards as US factories to say nothing of the standards that Apple was held to.

Second, Apple is a rich company with some of the highest profit margins in high tech. This should be pushed all the way down the line. The workers who make Apple products should be paid more or have better working conditions than the workers who make lower-margin products. To do otherwise is to exploit the Chinese workers.

Which brings me to my next point - how unseemly this is. Here we have OWS protesting that the system is fixed so that the 1% richest can exploit the 99% but their gadgets of choice put them as part of the world's 1% exploiting Asian workers.

Supposedly the issue is not worker wages, it is the supply chain. China has all of the suppliers concentrated in a small area. They also have access to raw materials, especially rare earth metals. The US used to be a major producer of rare earth metals but the main mine was shut down by the EPA.

Around a year ago President Obama asked Steve Jobs about moving his manufacturing back to the US. Jobs said that those jobs will not be returning to the US. We need to reverse this trend. We need to figure out what is needed to entice manufacturers back to the US. Is it a lack of engineers? Have we made our environmental regulations so restrictive that we have to off-shore our pollution? If so then is this ethical. Should we keep tightening regulations here even if it means more emissions elsewhere in the world?

This is a conversation that the country needs to have, starting with Apple.

The Command Economy

2012-01-25T03:07:00.001-05:00

According to his State of the Union speech, here is what President Obama would like to accomplish. He wants to redesign the American economy:

Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that's built to last — an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.

Three years ago he was going to rebuild the economy based on education, health care, and green jobs. It's tough to rebuild an economy when you change its basis every two or three years.

It sounds great to say that manufacturing jobs are coming back to America but is it true? Steve Jobs didn't think so a year ago when he told Obama that the jobs are not coming back to America. One reason is that the supply chain has moved off-shore. Another reason can be found in the story of the iPhone production line. Apple's workers live in dormitories at the plant. Steve Jobs changed the design of the iPhone at the last minute, substituting a glass screen instead of the planned plastic one. That meant that the first glass screens started arriving around midnight. Apple's managers woke the workers, handed them a cup of tea and a biscuit and sent them to work assembling phones. Not only couldn't you find American workers who would be willing to take a job with these conditions but Obama's government would close them down if they tried.

Obama made several proposals for changing corporate tax codes. He wants to do away with the mythical tax break for moving workers overseas and establish some sort of minimum corporate tax. One ray of light - he also proposed reducing the corporate tax rate. All of this seems needlessly complicated. Just lower the tax rate and eliminate most of the deductions.

Obama wants a better-trained work force. That is a noble goal although it is at odds with his previous goal of sending everyone to college. An educated workforce needs a lot of people who have been trained in trades and specialties that colleges would never touch.

Obama suggests simplifying the current programs for retraining workers. This sounds like a good idea. We will see if he can flesh it out. Otherwise it may just add another level of bureaucracy.

When talking about classrooms, Obama hit one of the teacher union sore points - teaching to the test. He thinks that doing away with standardized testing will help teachers. The reason that most states established tests in the first place was that too many teachers were simply warehousing students and passing them on to the next grade without teaching them anything. Teaching to the test was seen as an alternative to not teaching anything.

Obama did threaten colleges to keep tuition down or face cuts in government grants. This is probably an empty threat.

Back to jobs, this time small businesses:

Tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow. Expand tax relief to small businesses that are raising wages and creating good jobs.

So much for eliminating tax loopholes. We're only part-way through the speech and he proposed some new loopholes.

Obama gives lots of credit to government funding. He mentions the computer chip in the same breath as federally funded research but Intel created this without federal funding. He also give the government credit for discovering fracking (without using that term). Strangely he fails to mention the role of federal funding in extracting oil from tar sands - possibly because he just killed a pipeline that would have brought this into the US from Canada.

On to Obama's real passion - green energy. He never quite comes out and says it but he wants to promote clean energy by imposing higher government standards on efficiency and clean air.

This part is laughable:

In the next few weeks, I will sign an Executive Order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects. But you need to fund these projects. Take the money we're no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.

Ok, we are out of Iraq. But a lot of those resources moved to Afghanistan so there isn't much savings. And we can't use the savings to pay down the debt because we still have a huge deficit. We are borrowing $0.40 out of every dollar we spend. So, is the President is proposing that we pay down the debt with borrowed money? And saying that we cut back on deficit spending in one place does not mean that we can borrow and spend elsewhere.

Obama wants to allow people to refinance at lower rates. Fine. But then he mentions a new fee on the largest financial institutions. Again, he is picking winners and losers. What will he do if this breaks Bank of America? Another bailout? He says that he isn't going to do that any more.

He also insists that banks sold people loans that they could not afford. He mentions it multiple times. There is no acknowledgement that the person taking the loan was also at fault. Instead he is going to create a new set of enforcers to hunt down the bankers.

And tonight, I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.

How about some penalties for the people who lied on their mortgage application? Don't you think that they might have contributed to the problem, just a bit?

We are well into the speech but he chose this time to announce his immediate priority - continuing to gut Social Security by continuing the Social Security tax holiday.

He also made a dig at the Bush tax cuts, but only the part that affected the rich and a push for raising the capitol gains tax which has turned into a special subsidy. The fact-checkers have examined the claims about billionaires paying cut-rates and found that it is rare. There are some people, like Governor Romney, whose income mainly comes from capitol gains but it is a very small percentage while the President would have you believe that it is the rule.

Here's another amazing statement:

Finally, none of these reforms can happen unless we also lower the temperature in this town. We need to end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction; that politics is about clinging to rigid ideologies instead of building consensus around common sense ideas.

This from the man blew off Republican concerns about the stimulus and used parliamentary slight of hand to pass health care against strong Republican opposition. Ironically, Rep. Giffords was sitting in the audience. Just a year ago Republicans were being blamed, without any proof, for her shooting, Obama has made it clear since August that he was more interested in scoring political points against the Republicans than actually governing.

An even ore amazing statement:

The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe. Our oldest alliances in Europe and Asia are stronger than ever. Our ties to the Americas are deeper. Our iron-clad commitment to Israel's security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history.

Obama has spent the last three years snubbing Great Britain. Just last week he snubbed Canada by rejecting the tar oil pipeline. His record on Israel has been the least-supportive since that country was founded.

Maybe the President hopes that we aren't paying attention or, that by saying something he can make it happen. Or maybe he really believes what his teleprompter says. He has bragged before about what a friend he is to Israel.

He closed by reminding us that he got bin Lauden.

One of my proudest possessions is the flag that the SEAL Team took with them on the mission to get bin Laden.

We are lucky that he didn't bring it along to wave.

The mission that killed bin Laden is symbolic of Obama's view of the world. He ordered it to happen and it did. There were a few disasters along the way - a top secret helicopter crashed and stripped and international law violated - and his involvement was minimal but he still sees it as his victory.

Obama sees that economy as something that can only operate with heavy government influence. He wants to decide the winners and losers. He wants to help the poor and punish the rich. And he has no conception of the limits of government or his own ability to manage the economy.

South Carolina and November

2012-01-23T13:45:00.001-05:00

Gingrich won the South Carolina primary but the big loser was President Obama. As long as the Republican nomination is in doubt, Obama cannot run a negative campaign. He has to try to be positive. He already has his anti-Romney strategy worked out. The Obama campaign and its auxiliaries in the press, will attack Romney for being a wealthy venture capitalists and for being... different (code words for Mormon). Back when it looked like Romney would would sew up the nomination with South Carolina, I started to see columnists reminding us that Romney's great-grandfather had multiple wives (for what it's worth, so did Obama's father and grandfather). I suspect that Obama's State of the Union address was going to have some veiled references to Romney. But, with the nomination still in doubt, Obama will have to wait.

Worse for Obama, Gingrich's attack on Bain Capitol will make it harder for Obama to attack Romney. Gingrich's attacks already took enormous liberties with reality such as blaming Romney for things that Bain did after leaving Bain. The general rule of thumb is that if a candidate can survive an attack in the primaries then it will be useless in the general election. Think of Clinton's infidelities or Obama's lack of experience.

The same is true if Gingrich is the nominee. By airing an interview with Newt's ex-wife just before the primary, they proved that voters don't care how despicably Gingrich treated his ex-wives. During the 1992 primary it came out that Clinton had cheated on Hillary multiple times but he survived it. Newt can, too.

Another problem for Obama - as long as the nomination is in doubt, the Republicans take center stage on the nightly news and Obama is an afterthought.

An extended primary also helps the candidates hone their message. Romney is a better candidate than he was four years ago. His earlier run helped him. This is Gingrich's first run and he entered late so an extended primary will help him, also.

Obama and the XL Pipeline

2012-01-20T00:29:00.001-05:00

The proposed XL Pipeline will bring oil from Canada's tar sands to refineries in the southern US. From there it will be sold in the US and exported at a profit to the US. Building the pipeline will be a boon to the (unionized) construction industry. Oil pipelines are nothing new or extraordinary. Most of the oil in this country is moved around via pipeline and there is nothing about the XL pipeline to make it riskier than the other pipelines. The pipeline would also ease relations between the US and Canada which have been strained since Obama became president.

There is opposition to the pipeline. Most of it is based on global-warming guru James Hansen who says that if we allow the tar sands to be refined then it will be "game over" for the planet. There are several problems with this statement. One is that it would take hundreds of years to burn all of the Canadian oil. Another is that Canada says that it will allow China to build a pipeline and refine the oil instead.

The Obama administration wants to please both the construction unions and the environmentalists so it put off the decision on the pipeline until after the election. The excuse is that time was needed for an environmental impact study on alternate routes.

Republicans in Congress are in a hurry for the pipeline to be approved so they tried to force the President's hand and demanded a decision. Obama obliged, sort of. He rejected the pipeline because the environmental impact study has not been completed but allowed that the pipeline could be resubmitted and would be judged in due time. This is a double triumph for the Obama administration. They get to tell the environmentalists that they killed the pipeline while hinting in private to the unions that the pipeline will be approved when it is resubmitted.

This is typical of the way the Obama administration has conducted itself since September. Nothing happens unless it helps the Obama reelection campaign. There is no question that the pipeline would create jobs but the Obama administration would rather score political points than help people.

Climate and Politics

2012-01-17T15:04:00.001-05:00

Michael Gerson has a column in the Washington Post on how climate change has become politicized. At the same time, Wired has an article about the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) adopting a new policy supporting the teaching of evolution and climate change.

Gerson is one of a group of right-leaning moderates who accept climate change theory as established fact. In Gerson's view, the right rejects warming theory largely because the left uses it to advance its agenda. There is some truth to this but it is incomplete. He dismisses the Climategate emails.

Climate scientists, in my experience, are generally careful, well-intentioned and confused to be at the center of a global controversy. Investigations of hacked e-mails have revealed evidence of frustration — and perhaps of fudging but not of fraud.

What the emails actually show is that climate scientists are indeed true believers but some of them have questioned why their predictions are off. More importantly, they act in concert to suppress dissenting opinions. If a peer-reviewed journal publishes a dissenting paper, they get the editor fired.

This is the hallmark of an information cascade. This happened with dietary fat. For 50 years it was accepted that dietary fat caused heart disease. Finally a major study proved otherwise. It turned out that a small minority of dedicated scientists had pushed the dietary fat/heart disease link to hard that it became the accepted view and any dissent was tamped down. This is happening to some extent with global warming.

As for the Wired article, I would like to know what would be taught in schools. Would they include Al Gore? He has admitted that he finds the IPCC's findings to be too conservative and has his own set of experts. Would they include the IPCC? Sections of their most recent report were copied from environmental group's position papers instead of from peer reviewed journals. Would they include the recent Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project which verified that the world has warmed over the last several decades and if they do include it, would they point out that this same study shows that warming stopped around the year 2000? Would they include predictions from the last 20 years of climate science that have failed to materialize (in 2000, NASA's James Hansen predicted that parts of Manhattan would be underwater by now)?

This is the problem with climate science. The field has a number of alarmists who think that the only way to get action is to exaggerate the risk. This totally discredits their cause, especially when it has been co-opted by political extremists.

The earth has warmed in the last century or two but it is still debatable how much of this was caused by humans as opposed to natural cyclical forces. Even more debatable is how much more the climate will warm. All of the warming productions are based on unproven feedback models. Finally, no debate at all has been given to the benefits of a warmer world.

Nancy and Michelle

2012-01-11T16:41:00.001-05:00

Have we been too hard on Michelle Obama's spending? Here's a comparison from 1981.

When Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved into the White House, Nancy discovered that the official china was in a bad way. The White House did not have enough matching china to serve everyone from matching plates at a state dinner. So she ordered a new set.

There was an immediate uproar over Nancy's free-spending ways. It was pointed out that the money to buy the china was donated but that didn't help. Instead, critics pointed out that the donation was tax-deductible and figured out how much the china actually cost the paying public in lost taxes. At the time the top marginal tax rate was 70% so charitable deductions were worth more as tax deductions.

If getting matching china for state functions was spending too much then what are we to make of the Obamas?

Venture Capitalism

2012-01-10T16:31:00.001-05:00

There have been a lot of attacks on Mitt Romney based on his work at Bain Capital. Here's how Bain worked. They looked for small businesses that were in trouble but had the potential to be turned around. They would buy them, lay off non-productive section and build up new ones. Some of these companies went out of business anyway but many prospered - enough to more than double Bain's investment.

The current complaints about Bain (and Romney) are because some jobs are eliminated along the way. The expectation seems to be that somehow a company can be saved without laying anyone off and that the layoffs must have been motivated by the desire for higher earnings by Bain.

So, how does a compassionate leader handle a turn-around? We have a great example - President Obama's handling of GM and Chrysler. GM is particularly instructive since it is the bigger of the two and Chrysler was sold to a foreign company.

Obama poured money into GM but he also cut out the non-productive sections. Some were put up for sale. If they could not be sold then they were closed. People were laid off - a lot of people. The resulting company was stronger and stands a good chance of surviving.

How is this different from what Bain did? Money was invested but some people still lost their jobs.

Here is an example closer to home for me. The company that my wife works for had a simple business model. They would take out a loan and use the money to buy merchandise and print catalogs. Then they would sell the merchandise, pay off the loan, and bank the profits. They did this quarterly. Then the recession came and credit dried up. So they brought in some outside investors who decided that their business model would no longer work. Instead they came up with a new model. While much of their merchandise was produced outside the company, they did have a line of cookbooks and calendars that they made in-house. The catalog sales arms was closed and a good chuck of the staff laid off. The cookbook and calendar operation was expanded and the remaining part of the company was saved.

So, which is the greater evil - laying off some workers so that a company can survive or keeping everyone employed rught up until the company goes out of business? Most people would agree that some jobs are better than none, even President Obama.

Remember this when you hear about the evils of Bain Capital.

Recess Appointments

2012-01-09T14:25:00.001-05:00

An iron-clad law of politics is that whatever dirty tricks you use today will be used against you tomorrow.

According to the Constitution, there are several offices that require Senate approval of Presidential appointees. When the Constitution was written, it was assumed that Congress would be in recess for months at a time and that it would take days or weeks to unexpectedly reassemble. That was reasonable when messages had to be carried by someone on horseback. This created a conflict between the need to fill offices and the difficulty of assembling Congress during a recess. This was bridged through recess appointments. The President can appoint someone for a year allowing plenty of time for a formal confirmation the next time Congress is in session.

For the last century presidents have used recess appointments as a way of getting controversial appointees into office without a Senate approval. A few years ago the Democrats decided to stop the Bush administration from making recess appointments. They did this by never going into recess. During periods of traditional recess, a few senators would stay behind and hold pro-forma sessions in which the only business conducted was a motion to adjourn. Note that the Democrats supported this including Senator Obama.

The Republicans followed this precedent and left the Senate in session at the end of the year. They could do this because each house has to have the assent of the other house in order to declare a recess so the Republican-controlled House could keep the Democratic-controlled Senate in session.

But, when President Obama returned from Vacation he declared that the Senate was in recess and made the appointments anyway.

The dirty tricks are piling on each other. First there was the misuse of recess appointments, then pro-forma sessions, and now a President ignoring the Constitutional definition of a recess and declaring one on his own. This last one was particularly odious because it tromps all over the separation of powers. If allowed to stand then this could mean the end of Senate approval. You know that this will come back to haunt both parties.

This is also one of the worst examples of an imperial presidency imaginable. And it came from a former professor of Constitutional law.

Social Mobility

2012-01-04T16:11:00.001-05:00

Writing in the Washington Post, Herold Meyerson complains that America is no longer the land of opertunity.

The best way to measure a nation's merit-based status is to look at its intergenerational economic mobility: Do children move up and down the economic ladder based on their own abilities, or does their economic standing simply replicate their parents'? Sadly, as the American middle class has thinned out over recent decades, the idea of America as the land of opportunity has become a farce. As a paper by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution has shown, sons' earnings approximate those of their fathers about three times more frequently in the United States than they do in Denmark, Norway and Finland, and about 1¹ / ₂ times more frequently than they do in Germany. The European social democracies — where taxes, entitlements and the rate of unionization greatly exceed America's — are demonstrably more merit-based than the United States.

It should come as no surprise that the liberal Meyerson's prescription for this is more government in the form of retraining for workers and a limit on how much anyone can make. But, is this valid? Will duplicating Scandinavian social democracies make the US a better place? Is big government responsible for Scandinavian success or is there more to it?

There are a few differences that immediately spring to mind when comparing the US and Scandinavia. The US is a massive country, straddling a continent with a highly diverse population. In contrast, Denmark, Norway, and Finland are a small part of Europe. While each of these countries is unique from the others, their populations are more homogenous than the US. Also, these countries are blessed with abundant oil resources which help to finance their governments.

A huge difference between the US and these other countries seems to have been avoided - single parent families. In the US, this is the biggest predictor of social mobility. If you are raised by two parents then you are much more likely to advance. This is far more important than union membership which is one of the factors Meyerson advocates. But, in unions, advancement is usually based on seniority rather than merit.

But these issues pale to insignificance when you look at the article Meyerson referenced. the study looks at nine countries and ranks them according to how closely a son's earnings are tied to his father's. As Meyerson points out, the US is ranked near the bottom and the three Scandinavian countries are near the top. He neglected to mention the other five countries and where they fall in the rankings. The one country worse than the US is the United Kingdom. On the other hand, Canada is almost tied with Finland as a high-mobility country. Falling in the middle rankings are France, Germany, and Sweden. Are we to believe that Canada is a social democracy but the UK and France are not?

When the entire ranking is viewed then it become much harder to prove a relationship between social mobility and social democracies. And, as been pointed out for decades, big government programs like welfare tend to institutionalize poverty. Adding more government is likely to make problems in the US worse rather than cure them.

Obama in 2012

2012-01-03T14:39:00.001-05:00

As the 4th year of President Obama's first term begins, his supporters must be asking themselves "What happened?" Obama was supposed reverse the country's swing to the right and usher in a new period of Progressive government.

At first glance, Obama's resume looked perfect for this job. He had a far-left voting record and an activist background. His keynote speech in 2004 was the high point of the Democratic national convention. People regularly fainted at his campaign rallies just from being in the same space. He was the first Democrat in a generation to win more than 50% of the vote. Children sang to him in videos and celebrities pledged themselves to his cause. He came into office with large Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. He modeled his cabinet on Lincoln's and his first 100 days on FDR.

Three years later his approval ratings are setting record lows. The country has moved to the right instead of the left. He lost his majority in the House and stands to lose the Senate in the next election.

How did this happen?

A closer look at Obama's resume shows that this was inevitable. He only had two years experience in Federal government when he began his run. He was the most junior member of the Senate. Even in Illinois he was known more for the number of times he voted "present" than for the legislation he introduced. He had no experience in the private sector and had never managed anything larger than his presidential campaign.

Obama was known as a great public speaker but that was based almost exclusively on his 2004 keynote speech. While well-received, none of his later speeches were memorable. Worse, it became obvious that he could not even give a decent speech without a teleprompter. Despite this, his response to every event seems to be to give a new speech.

With no executive experience and a highly partisan chief of staff, Obama outsourced all of his legislation to Congress.

From the beginning, Obama was sure that his path to immortality lay in passing health care reform. At the same time, he did not have the skills to make overcome the many special interest groups. Rather than tackling the main issue of the day - rising costs - he opted to push for health insurance reform. This was his major thrust for a year and it was a disaster. The expectation was that the legislation might be opposed at the beginning but once it began going into effect it would become popular. While that might be true, the biggest provisions will not take effect for two more years. In the meantime, it is, at best, divisive and, at worst, unpopular. Currently there is a 20% gap between those who want it repealed and those in favor.

The worst thing about the push for health care reform was how out of touch it made him appear. The country's top priorities were jobs and the economy but Obama only seemed to care about health care. Three years after taking office, unemployment remains high and drops in the unemployment index reflect people dropping out of the workforce rather than new jobs being created.

Obama's foreign policy has had some mild successes and many setbacks. His biggest successes have come from continuing Bush policies that he ran against.

Iraq is a success at the moment but the troops were recalled sooner than planned because the Iraqis refused to grant continued immunity to the troops. The surge in Afghanistan is not working well. Bin Laden was killed but the raid embarrassed Pakistan and accelerated the deterioration of our relationship with the Afghans.

Obama made overtures to Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. Relations with Russia continue to deteriorate. Iran is becoming increasingly belligerent. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is blaming the US for his cancer.

At a speech a few weeks ago Obama said that he had to keep from patting himself on the back over his support for Israel. Most others see him at the most hostile president to Israel since its inception.

Obama's support for the Arab Spring may bite him in the future. Currently the biggest beneficiaries have been anti-American Islamists.

Economically, the country continues an anemic recovery. If the economy should suddenly spring back to life then Obama stands a strong chance of reelection but this would need to happen in the next six months or less. Every day that passes without a strong recovery reduces Obama's chances of reelection. The Obama administration has exhausted its tools for promoting a recovery and there is still a chance that Europe will go into a recession and pull the rest of the world down with it.

With few accomplishments to run on, Obama plans on running against a do-nothing Congress. Accordingly he stopped making any attempts at running the country in favor of running for President.

During his August vacation his administration leaked that he would be proposing a new jobs bill. This was a campaign ploy. He gave a national address without naming specifics then took to the road with the call "Pass the bill!" before the bill ever reached Congress. His actual proposed legislation was never serious since it contained points that the Republicans could never pass. He poisoned the Super-Committee negotiations the same way - by threatening a veto of any resolution that did not include $1 trillion in new taxes on the rich.

The coming year will be nasty. Obama will continue to refuse to compromise with the Republicans in Congress in the hope that this will also tar the presidential nominee. His staff already admitted that their attack on Romney will be to make oblique references to his religion as "not being like the rest of us." With no popular accomplishments to run on, Obama has no choice but to run a negative campaign. No more hope and change, just mud.

Happy New Year?

2011-12-30T10:43:00.001-05:00

A week ago a bank in the building my wife works in posted a sign "We will be closed for the winter holiday". Now their sign reads, "We will be closed for New Year's Day". If naming Christmas is unacceptable in today's multicultural world then why is New Years acceptable? It is not the Chinese new year nor the Jewish new year nor the Islamic new year. They all have their own calendars and numbering systems.

Until recently we expressed the date as AD for "amno domini" which is Latin for "year of our lord" based on a calculation of when Christ was born. Dates less than zero were "BC" for Before Christ. This has been relabeled "common era" so tomorrow night we will celebrate the start of 2012 CE.

The modern calendar has a lot of the same heritage as Christmas. The date for each came from Roman holidays. It and the Catholic Church are the two main Roman institutions continuing in the modern world. The current calendar was created by Pope Gregory XIII. Because it was seen as a Catholic calendar it was not adopted for centuries by protestant countries (England adopted the Gregorian calendar in the 18th century, Russia and Greece in the 20th century).

The Gregorian calendar is the most accurate in general use which is why it is the unofficial standard for the world but it is still tied to Christianity and Europe. You would think that it would be just as culturally insensitive as Christmas which is celebrated in many non-Christian countries (China and Japan to name two).

Maybe I shouldn't be pointing this out. I could start a war on New Years.

Waiting for Reagan

2011-12-29T14:36:00.001-05:00

Republicans still seem to be waiting for the next Reagan to appear. It isn't going to happen this election. Politicians like Reagan appear rarely - once in one or two generations and it takes far more than wanting to be Reagan to actually accomplish it. Barack Obama proved this. He expected to be a transitional president like Reagan or FDR. At best he has been an LBJ, creating an expensive new entitlement while polarizing the country.

If there is a new Reagan on the horizon he is probably a first-term governor of a large state. I can think of a half-dozen likely candidates but none of them have the experience or accomplishments for a presidential run. That is 4-8 years off.

In the meantime, I'd like to point out how hard it might be to recognize the next Reagan. The original one did not have a cake-walk to the White House.

California was a bit of a national joke while Reagan was governor. The idea of an actor running a state seemed preposterous. He was not really taken seriously until he bought airtime and addressed the nation during his run in 1976. He lost. The party was not going to force a sitting president out of office, even if he was unelected (Ford became Vice-President after Agnew resigned and President after Nixon resigned. 1976 was his first time on a national ballot). The high point for Reagan came at the Republican convention when he was nominated. A few minutes were set aside for a demonstration by his supporters. It exceeded the time allotted by an hour. Reagan's supporters were dedicated even if his candidacy was doomed.

Reagan's 1976 run caused some hard feelings. Ford dying believing that he would have won the election if Reagan had supported him.

While Reagan did win the nomination in 1980, George H. W. Bush made him work for it. Many Republicans worried that Reagan was too conservative and preferred the more moderate Bush. Plus the Ford supporters were still angry about 1976.

Polls taken during the Summer showed that voters were dissatisfied with both candidates. A theoretical challenger polled higher than either Reagan or Carter. John Anderson took advantage of that and ran as an independent. Anderson was the last liberal Republican and hoped to capture the dissatisfied voters. He probably did not affect the election - even if everyone who voted for Anderson had voted for Carter, Reagan still would have won.

The final polls before the election showed Reagan and Carter tied with a large block still undecided. Voters were still dissatisfied with both candidates. Several political cartoons that ran the day of the election showed the voters flipping coins to decide who to vote for.

It turned out that most of the undecided voters broke for Reagan. This was unusual. Undecideds usually break for the incumbent. Reagan always had a large percentage of closet voters - people who would not admit to voting for him, even to a stranger taking a poll.

Reagan had deep coattails and the Republicans took the Senate. This did not last. The economy entered a double-dip recession and unemployment hit a post-depression high. In 1982 the Democrats ran against Reagan and made huge gains in Congress and in state governments. The only Republican to challenge an incumbent Democrat and win was John Kasich and he was aided by redistricting.

The reason we remember Reagan so fondly is that he was able to work with a Democrat-controlled Congress and still pass a conservative agenda. Also, unlike the current recovery, the recovery in 1983 was robust. Unemployment was still high in 1984 but it was dropping fast and people felt good about their country and its future. Reagan also realigned the electoral map. The south went from being a stronghold for conservative Democrats to one for Republicans. Reagan was not able to reverse the growth of government but he slowed it.

None of the current group of candidates is likely to be able to match Reagan's successes. Even Reagan could not. There are no tools left to use. Taxes have already been cut, interest rates lowered and the deficit run up to unsustainable levels. Massive deregulation might help but it is hard to believe that Romney or Gingrich would want to shrink government enough to help and Ron Paul has no chance of winning (or getting anything passed if he won).

That leaves that group of governors. Several are charismatic and dedicated to reshaping government. One of them might be able to take up where Reagan left off. But they need a success on the state level to run on.

In the meantime we need to settle for the most electable candidate to prevent the Obama administration from permanently messing up the economy.

Our Non-functional Congress

2011-12-27T15:45:00.001-05:00

The mess surrounding the payroll tax cut (technically a Social Security tax holiday) shows once and for all that Congress is dysfunctional. The Democrats' great triumph was to kick the can down the road - and not very far. The extension that was passes was just long enough for Congress to go on break and start bickering again. A two month extension will not stimulate the economy. Neither will a ten month extension beyond that. The amount of the cut (around $20/week) is too small to do any real stimulating.

The tax cut was originally sold as an economic stimulus but the economy continued to languish so it should have been allowed to expire. Yes, that would have raised taxes on most workers but consider the consequences of continuing it. This tax funds Social Security. Cutting it turned a small surplus into a deficit. The country cannot stop writing Social Security checks so the Treasury has to make up the difference by borrowing so this tax cut adds to the deficit.

The Democrats' solution to this was to make up the difference by taxing millionaires. That would probably be the first step in turning Social Security from a self-funded entitlement (albeit, one with a demographic time bomb) into an income transfer from the rich to the elderly.

There is the source of the deadlocks. The Democrats want to reshape tax policy to redistribute income. The Republicans simply want to raise the money needed to run government. The Democrats see the growing divide between the rich and poor as a problem that needs an immediate solution. The Republicans see government policy as an impediment to growth which will benefit everyone.

In addition to genuine disagreements about the role of government, the Democrats have decided that the path to success at the polls is to allow the Republicans to offer solutions for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Once the Republicans' plans are on the table, the Democrats can pretend that there is no problem and accuse the Republicans of trying to end these programs. The Democrats' insistence that the Republicans are trying to end Medicare was labeled the "Lie of the year" by Politifact. Politifact points out that the Democrats would be on solid ground if they said that the Republicans were trying to privatize Medicare. Instead, the Democrats use the description "end", accompanied by video of a Republican literally throwing an old woman over a cliff.

According to the book Confidence Men, the Obama administration began health care reform with the intention of controlling costs. After switching their focus to insurance reform, their plan for controlling costs evolved. It now consists of doing nothing as long as possible in the hope that the eventual imminent disaster will break the deadlock.

So, how did we end up at this point?

Congress has always been divided but for most of the 20th century both parties had liberal and conservative members.That changed in the late 1970s. Ronald Reagan established a new Republican coalition of conservatives, Christian fundamentalists (including anti-abortion activists), and libertarians. The party ejected liberals and welcomed conservative Democrats, especially ones from the south who felt that the Democratic Party had left them behind.

The Democrats controlled the House for generations. With the retirement of Speaker Tip O'Neall, the Democrats began using parliamentary tricks to stop Republicans from offering amendments. This lead to a more confrontational Republican party. Newt Gingrich won the position of Minority Whip by promising to be more aggressive. He lived up to this, going so far as to undercut President George H. W. Bush's tax compromise (to this day, Bush still thinks of Gingrich as a "bomb thrower").

In 1992 the Democrats won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. New Democratic members of the House were asked to swear that they would not work with the Republicans. Two years later the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress with Newt as Speaker.

While President Clinton took the "third way" as a moderate, the liberal wing of the Democrats fumed. Enough of them defected to Ralph Nader's 3rd party run in 2000 to elect George W. Bush.

Just as Clinton was a center-left Democrat, Bush was a center-right Republican. The Left fumed over such things as the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act. The fact that the Democrats did nothing to end these when they retook Congress in 2006 just made the Left more angry.

Just as eight years of Clinton's center-left policies revitalized the far left, eight years of Bush's center-right (plus a couple of months of Obama's far left government) revitalized the far right. Moderates from both parties have been targeted by their own party. The most prominent of these was Joe Lieberman whose lifetime voting records was 90% liberal but was pro-Iraq war.

Which brings us to today. Neither party allows moderates to chair powerful committees. Thanks to Gingrich, the Republicans are against any tax increases. The Democrats are against any changes that do not raise the tax rate paid by the rich. During the Super-committee meetings the Republicans offered a package that would have lowered the marginal tax rates while eliminating deductions with the result of raising revenue. The Democrats rejected this and anything else that did not include $1 trillion in new taxes on the rich.

Neither side has any room left for negotiation and, with an election approaching, each is afraid of making any serious proposals.

So, where does that leave us? At best, Congress will be deadlocked until the next election. Possibly one side of the other will win big enough to crush the opposition. The other possibility is that a less-polarizing Republican will win and be able to work with the Democrats. President Obama has already shown that he has no desire to work with the Republicans so a status-quo election would result in 2-4 more years of deadlock while the country's financial problems continue to grow.

The Economics of Scrooge

2011-12-23T12:38:00.001-05:00

Slate recently published an article entitled "What I like about Scrooge" by Steven E. Landsburg. It offers up various of Scrooge's pre-redemption traits as admirable and worthy of emulation. If this article is to be believed, the spirits of Christmas did Scrooge and the world a disservice by reforming Scrooge. He was a better man as a miser.

Landsburg lays out his case:

Here's what I like about Ebenezer Scrooge: His meager lodgings were dark because darkness is cheap, and barely heated because coal is not free. His dinner was gruel, which he prepared himself. Scrooge paid no man to wait on him.

Scrooge has been called ungenerous. I say that's a bum rap. What could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others to eat? Who is a more benevolent neighbor than the man who employs no servants, freeing them to wait on someone else?

We can see from this that Landsburg views the world as a zero-sum system. There is a fixed amount of everything and the only way that anyone can have more is if someone else has less. He expands on this:

Oh, it might be slightly more complicated than that. Maybe when Scrooge demands less coal for his fire, less coal ends up being mined. But that's fine, too. Instead of digging coal for Scrooge, some would-be miner is now free to perform some other service for himself or someone else.

{...} In this whole world, there is nobody more generous than the miser—the man who could deplete the world's resources but chooses not to. The only difference between miserliness and philanthropy is that the philanthropist serves a favored few while the miser spreads his largess far and wide.

All of this puts Landsburg at odds with leading economic theory. The whole idea of economic stimulus is that money, once earned, is spent again. The speed that people earn and spend money determines economic growth. When this slows then the economy contracts causing a recession or a depression. For the last four years, economic policy has been centered on encouraging people to spend more money. Economists devote their careers to calculating how to get the most benefit from spending. While they disagree on how money should be spent, they are unanimous that taking money out of circulation is the worst thing that can happen.

Landsburg even gives examples of this. His hypothetical coal miner could have made more money if Scrooge expanded the market. Instead he either has to look for alternate sources of income or just live without (which Landsburg would probably applaud). One wonders if Landsburg would appreciate the freedom of selling fewer articles?

Ironically, Scrooge's income depends on people behaving differently than Scrooge himself. Dickens never specifies what Scrooge does. He is often portrayed as a money lender but Dickens describes his business as being in a warehouse and Scrooge is familiar with the exchanges. Possibly he is a speculator, buying and selling commodities for a profit. Regardless, his income depends on demand for something - money, commodities, etc.

It should also be pointed out that Scrooge's behavior goes beyond simple miserliness. If Scrooge was solely interested in money then he would never pass up a free meal at his nephew's expense. A better explanation is that Scrooge was punishing himself for choices made in his youth. It was only after facing those choices and the eventual resolution that he comes out of his shell and becomes a friend to his nephew and employee.

So why did Landsburg write such an article? Possibly he is a devoted follower of Al Gore and sincerely wants everyone to live like Scrooge in an effort to conserve the planet's resources (a sacrifice that Gore himself is unwilling to make). More likely this was just an attempt to fit Slate's format of justifying counter-intuitive titles.

Merry Christmas

War on Christmas or on Christians?

2011-12-20T11:20:00.001-05:00

A few years ago many (most) large retailers stopped using the word "Christmas". Instead they simply suggested that you might want to buy presents for some unnamed occasion. Even Christmas trees were relabeled "holiday trees" or "family trees". A search for Christmas merchandise on Walmart's web site helpfully corrected suggested "did you mean Holiday?". This was labeled the War on Christmas and pressure was put on retailers to go back to referring to December 25th as Christmas instead of the Winter Holiday.

This year I have seen a number of people on the left insist that there never was a war on Christmas. It was all an invention by Fox News. People who avoided the word "Christmas" only did it out of sensitivity to the many non-Christians among us who might feel oppressed by hearing the name of an important Christian holiday.

In prior years some of the more honest on the left have said that they have no problem with Christians celebrating Christmas as long as they do it in their own homes.

A recent column by Linda Chavez put this in perspective. Strangely, the column had nothing to do with Christmas. It was about the reaction to football player Tim Tebow who is known for praying in public. Chavez quotes Connecticut Rabbi Joshua Hammerman who wrote in Jewish Week:

If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful, and emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants.

I had forgotten that the left thinks like this.

Here is the background on Hammerman's column. Sometime in the last few decades a group of intellectuals decided that Christianity is an intolerant and destructive religion and, if left unchecked, it will inevitably lead to another Holocaust. Accordingly, public expressions of Christianity must be suppressed. Further, politicians with strong religious beliefs are to be feared.

Once you know that the left thinks this way then the war on Christmas and the attacks on Tebow are easily understood.

The strange thing about this belief is how strongly it is rooted in the left's consciousness. It colors their views of everything else.

The TV show All American Muslims is an example. This shows on TLC and is designed to convince Americans that Muslims are just like everyone else. Since a show about normal people doing normal things is boring, the ratings for the show are dismal. Sponsors have dropped the show which has caused an uproar from the left (which does not watch the show, either).

But here's the thing - world-wide, there is much more violence being done in the name of Islam than Christ but it is ingrained into the left that only Christianity is violent. That world-view leaves them unable to see anyone else as violent or intolerant. Any attempts to point out flaws in Islam or elsewhere are taken as examples of Christian intolerance.

Which leaves us with a group that actually is trying to suppress any public mention of Christianity including Christmas. Right now they are failing so their fallback solution is to insist that this was never more than an invention by Fox News. But every now and then someone lets their real feeling slip in public.

Energy

2011-12-15T14:25:00.001-05:00

A big recent political issue has been the XP pipeline. If this is ever approved, it will bring oil from Canadian tar sands to Texas for refining. Environmentalists have made several objections to the pipeline but most of them are hollow. The most commonly heard objection is the consequences of a leak. What is not mentioned is how many pipelines already carry crude oil and refined gasoline across the country. This would be one of many and would not represent a new hazard.

The real objection comes from James Hansen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the father of global warming theory. His followers want to keep this resource untapped forever. This will not happen. Canada has made it clear that China will take the oil if we do not.

The arguments in favor of the pipeline are that it will create jobs and that it would reduce the US's reliance on oil from dictatorships. Some supporters have taken to calling the pipeline "ethical oil".

All that is needed to start work is an ok from the White House.

Rather than offend either constituency, President Obama has put the decision off until after the election. This allows him to convince both camps that he will eventually side with them.

The House of Representatives has talked about forcing the issue by tying the approval to an extension in the Social Security Payroll Tax cuts. President Obama has indicated that he would veto such a bill. This gives you a clear idea of the President's priorities.

A similar controversy has erupted around fracking (injecting water and chemicals at high pressure into a well to increase production). This has been used for decades in shallow gas and oil wells. New technology makes it possible to drill into deposits far deeper than before. When combined with fracking, this opens up huge quantities of gas and oil.

Again, the main arguments against fracking are weak, especially since it is not new. Few people admit it but the real objection is, again, to ever recovering a hydrocarbon-based fuel and is driven by fears of global warming.

The White House has stayed out of this controversy but many Democrats have jumped on board with calls for an indefinite moratorium on fracking.

During his run in 2008, Obama said that he wanted to see energy prices increase. The easiest way of doing this is to cut the US off from domestic (or near-domestic) sources of energy. Imported energy is always more expensive.

But Obama has an election to win so he can't come out and say this. But, he and the Democratic leadership cannot hide their actions. If allowed, America will resume being an exporter of gas and refined oil (but still an importer of crude oil). The Democratic leadership is trying to keep this from happening.

Pearl Harbor 70 years later

2011-12-07T13:55:00.001-05:00

Pearl Harbor changed my life. In fact, without it I would never have been born.

My father was the son of a Missouri farmer living in St. Lewis when the attack happened. He enlisted the next day and volunteered to be a fighter pilot. In the US military, you had to be an officer to be a pilot so they sent the pilot volunteers to college for an intensive degree program. My father was sent to Macalester in Minnesota. While he was there he met my mother who was also a student there.

As the war progressed, the Army (The Air Force was still the Army Air Corps) decided that it had more pilots than it needed. My father's medical status was reevaluated according to new standards and he was transferred out of pilot training and sent to California to be trained as a radio operator and waist gunner. My mother accompanied him and they were married there.

My father survived the war without injury despite a close call when his plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and had to ditch at an emergency air strip.

After the war, my father used the GI Bill to finish the degree he started in the military and to become a physician. He wanted to practice in a small city and saw an advertizement for Zanesville, Ohio in a medical journal. It was just what he was looking for and they moved there in 1952. I was born a couple of years later.

So, a chain of events that began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor led to my birth.

I am not unique in this. The entire Baby Boom generation is a result of the disruption of WWII that began with Pearl Harbor. The war and the GI Bill probably did more than any other event to change America from an agrarian nation to an urban one.

It is hard to say what the world would be like if the Japanese had not attacked 70 years ago. FDR wanted to enter the war against Hitler but most of the nation was strongly isolationist. Japan was the closer enemy but Hitler was the greater threat. If Japan had not attacked us when it did, we might have entered the war too late. We might have ended up with a Europe dominated by Germany and the USSR or even just the USSR.

Considering the alternatives, Japan might have done us a favor by forcing us into the war. Not that this excuses the attack. It was an act of incomprehensible savagery and because of Pearl Harbor, the US embraced the war instead of being dragged into it.

Obama and Social Security

2011-12-05T15:25:00.001-05:00

President Obama is trying to make incremental changes in Social Security that will eventually change it in fundamental ways. It started last year in the deal over extending the Bush tax cuts. Part of the deal included a cut in the "payroll tax". This is the term that the Obama administration uses for the tax that funds Social Security.

FDR's grand bargain worked like this - everyone who works pays into Social Security* and everyone can collect when they retire based on what they paid into the system. This gives the impression that Social Security is a retirement account which accounts for a lot of its popularity. Retirees feel that they earned their benefits by paying into the system their entire working life.

Social Security is actually a pay as you go system. For most of its existence it has run a surplus which is immediately lent to the general fund at interest and spent. Demographics say that soon, Social Security will start running a deficit and have to redeem the loans. Eventually it will run out of money and only be able to cover 70-some percent of its expenses.

By cutting the payroll tax, Obama pushed Social Security into deficit years early. It has survived the year by redeeming its loans (known as special bonds).

The payroll tax cut has not helped the economy much. Like the Making Work Pay Act, it's effect on the average paycheck is small enough to go unnoticed. Regardless, the Obama administration is making two efforts. One is to extend the tax cut and offset it with a surcharge on the rich (this time defined as people making at least $1,000,000 instead of $200,000). The other effort is the jobs bill. This would provide further cuts to Social Security and would cut the employer's share as well. This did not name any off-setting taxes but the bill calls for a tax increase on the wealthy.

If Obama is reelected and especially if he gets a Democratic majority in Congress then I expect to see this trend continue - shifting Social Security taxes from lower-wage workers to the rich. The reason for this is that many liberals consider the Social Security tax to be regressive. It is the same rate for everyone and it is only paid on the first $200,000. Anyone who makes more that that amount will pay a smaller portion of his income in Social Security taxes.

The outcome of this will be to remake Social Security into an income transfer system taking money from the rich and giving it to retirees. It will break FDR's grand bargain. The good news for conservatives is that this will make Social Security easier to reform. The current argument that "I paid into it so I earned my benefits," will be eliminated as it is turned into welfare for the elderly.

A change of this magnitude should be openly discussed instead of hidden behind the euphemism "payroll tax cuts".

* Note - under FDR's original system a lot of people including government and farm did not pay into the system. It was later expanded to include almost everyone although government workers still have their own retirement systems.

Newt? Really?

2011-11-30T14:01:00.001-05:00

I never took Gingrich's candidacy seriously. Why should I? Some of his top staff members quit because they felt that he was not taking his campaign seriously. But he suddenly vaulted to near-front-runner status as the current anti-Romney.

What are you thinking, people?

Newt's main qualification is that he was speaker of the house for a while. He wasn't particularly successful and was forced out by his fellow Republicans. While he was speaker the government shut down twice. The rumor at the time was that Newt shut down government because he wasn't given special seating on Air Force One. This was false but the fact that the Clinton administration managed to tar him with it shows how easily he can be out-maneuvered.

Newt has so much baggage that he needs a porter. Romney switched positions on abortion. Newt switched on nearly everything. He supported a federal mandate on health care while Obama was still a community organizer. He made a joint statement with Nancy Pelosi about the hazards of global warming.

Newt's personal life makes Bill Clinton look like a boy scout. Clinton strayed repeatedly but he never left his wife. If Edwards and Cain have been disqualified from running because of their affairs, how can anyone support Newt? Electing him brings back the possibility of a new presidential affair. A lot of social conservatives will stay home or vote for Obama rather than endorse Newt's infidelities.

Newt has worse baggage. He has earned millions as a lobbyist for recipients of federal bailouts.

Newt describes himself as a historian although he left academia rather than publish original research. That makes him a guy who got a history degree by reading the books published by actual historians.

Newt has a long history of shooting from the hip. This often gets him into trouble. It would be better if he was not in a position of importance.

Climategate 2

2011-11-29T12:01:00.001-05:00

A new set of emails from climatologists has been released. Like the Climategate emails from two years ago, there are no smoking guns but there is confirmation of what many skeptics believe. I admit that I have not dug through the archives so I am only going from the nuggets that others have found. From those, it is possible to make some conclusions:

1) The scientists who advocate action to stop global warming are sincere in their beliefs. They really do believe that catastrophic warming is going on.

2) They are under a lot of pressure from politicians who want simple yes-or-no answers. Politicians are trying to sell the public on drastic change that will affect the lives of everyone. They need to be able to say confidently, "The consequences of not taking action are worse than the actions needed to stop climate change."

3) The actual science is not as sure as the climatologists are claiming. Data sets that don't match expectations are dropped and figures are massaged. Some of this is because of political pressure and some of it is because they are true believers. If results come up "wrong" then there must be something wrong with the readings, not the underlying data. I remember doing the same thing in high school physics but we knew that our test equipment was unreliable.

4) The system as it currently exists prods scientists into being true believers. True believers find it easy to get grants. This makes it profitable to be a true believer. At the same time, there is some worry about what will happen if they are wrong.

5) The true believers questions the motives of skeptics. There is one email speculating on "undiscovered ties" between a noted skeptic and big oil. To the true believers, the truth is so obvious that skeptics must be ignoring it for money.

6) Because #5, climatologists are very reluctant to allow outside review of their work. Both sets of climategate emails contain discussions on how to get around Freedom of Information requests. Many climatologists refuse to let people they consider paid hit men to review their work. There is probably a large amount of defensiveness, also since they know that they have fudged some of their figures.

In summary, we have an insular group who know that they are exaggerating their findings and refuse to let their work be reviewed.

Super-committee failure - who won?

2011-11-22T14:00:00.001-05:00

As part of last Summer's debt ceiling extension bill, a super-committee was supposed to identify $1.3 trillion in deficit reductions by Thanksgiving. They didn't.

A lot of finger-pointing is going on about which side is to blame. The Democrats insist that the Republicans were trying to use the super-committee as a way to cut taxes. Republicans respond by pointing out that they made a serious offer which included $300 billion in new taxes. Democrats rejected this as too small. They also objected because it would have locked most of the Bush tax cuts in place permanently. The Democrats' best offer was for $1 trillion in tax increases accompanied by $1 trillion in spending cuts and $300 billion in new stimulus spending. The two sides started making progress a couple of weeks ago then collapsed after details were leaked.

So, who won?

Progressives are sure that they have. In fact, they are pretty unanimous in declaring victory. The reason for this was that, at times, the super-committee had talked about "going big" and fixing out of control entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid). The automatic cuts triggered by the super-committee's failure will leave those programs untouched.

President Obama also seems to be a winner. He kept the committee at arm's length. His main contribution was a sternly worded statement that they needed to produce some results and a threat to veto anything that didn't include tax increases. By keeping his distance, Obama wanted to look like the grown-up when compared with Congress's squabbling children.

The failure also helps Obama's message. He is already saying that the failure is due to too many Republicans in Congress who are unwilling to compromise. What he really means is that there are too many Republicans in Congress. We will be hearing that message for the next 11.5 months.

This is part of a larger pattern of avoidance for political gain. Everyone knows that the deficit and the entitlements are major problems but the Democrats refuse to address them. It has been a year since Paul Ryan issued the Republican suggestion for reforming Medicare. The Democrats promised a counter-proposal but never issued one. Instead they ran ads showing Paul Ryan shoving a grandmother over a cliff.

The Democrats know that no matter what reforms they suggest, a large number of people will see decreased benefits. Rather than risk losing the support of those people, the Democrats prefer to ignore the problems and criticize the Republican efforts to be responsible.

The failure of the budget deal means automatic cuts but those will not happen until after the next election. Most parts of Obamacare will not go into effect until the next election. The XP Pipeline decision has been put off until after the next election.

So, the winners are the people who want to put off tackling real problems as long as possible

So long to the Occupation

2011-11-17T02:13:00.001-05:00

OWS overstayed their welcome by a few weeks. A month ago they were getting good press. The liberal commentators loved it. "OWS is twice as popular as the Tea Party" they bragged. But the mainstream press got tired of writing about the 99%. Then came a few weeks of stories about violence and filth. Public opinion changed.

A month ago the Occupiers were new while the Tea Party was more than two and a half years old. Remember that the Tea Party was fairly popular its first year. OWS's popularity fell off much faster. A recent poll asked: Do you have a higher opinion of the Occupy Wall Street movement or the Tea Party movement?

Occupy: 37% (-3)
Tea Party: 43% (+3)

That's not a good basis for a new party to match the Tea Party.

And that assumes that a real organization could be built on the OWS. There are inherent problems with that. One is that many of them believe that having leaders is wrong because everyone's views are equally valid. That is also why they use the jazz hands (known as up-sparkles) instead of cheering or applauding. Cheers and applause might drown out someone.

Another problem is that the basis of the OWS is that the government has been hopelessly corrupted by the 1%. The 99% are powerless so forming a political party is a waste of time.

Of course, some Occupiers are trying to create a party which has started a split in the movement, weakening it further.

The various Occupiers should have broken camp when asked. That way they could have kept up their narrative. Instead they resisted and tarnished their movement.

"Somehow, we lost the high ground, we lost the narrative," said Kalle Lasn, co-founder of Adbusters which organized the OWS. "Tactically, the moment was right to declare victory, have a big global party and come back swinging next spring."

OWS overplayed it cards. Conservatives should breath a sign of relief that the movement is pulling itself down.

The End of the Occupation

2011-11-16T02:15:00.001-05:00

Earl Tuesday morning New York police broke up the OWS camp. Other camps have been broken up in the last few days. Michael Moore sees this as a coordinated action, possibly overseen by President Obama himself. I see it as the natural course of events.

Two factors converged to end the camps. The first was the increasing violence and health risk of the camps. In New York they had an ailment known as "Zuccotti cough". Drug-resistant tuberculosis is becoming associated with the camps, caught from the homeless who moved in with them. Drug use is common. The camps are becoming known for rapes and body counts. With all of this going on, it is hard for a mayor to condone the camps.

The second factor is that all of these problems made the mainstream news. Most sites began lumping all of the OWS coverage into a daily roundup that was seldom sympathetic to the movement. Without public support the camps were vulnerable.

Keep in mind that there is no free speech issue here. Someone cannot take public land and insist that the land it forfeit in the interests of free speech. The Occupiers planned on making their camps as permanent as possible. The light, nylon tents were to be replaced with heavier military tents for the winter. Possibly by spring they would be building solid structures.

Also, camping in public spaces is not a recognized part of speech. It was invented for this event. The Occupiers can still assemble in the parks, the just cannot camp.

OWS's biggest victim

2011-11-11T01:33:00.001-05:00

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been protesting for a couple of months now. Their message (the main one) is that the government is controlled by the richest 1%. They also spent a lot of time complaining about student debt and capitalism. So, who have the hurt the worst? President Barack Obama.

The damage done to Obama is on several levels. OWS has gotten a lot of press. At first it was completely favorable and the movement had a high approval rating in the polls. At that point President Obama, Vice-President Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and other Democrats gave OWS their approval. As time has gone on, the various Occupiers have had violent confrontations with the police and their approval rating has dropped. It is too late for the Democrats to disown them. The movement is still popular with the far left crowd and any politician distancing himself from OWS will offend them. But the swing voters will react the opposite way. A politician who approved of the Occupiers will be tarnished in their eyes.

Obama has been engaging in mild class warfare since his inauguration but OWS has stolen his thunder on that. Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich by 4%. OWS wants to confiscate their money. This may help Obama with the moderates but it still makes him look weak.

Currently, when Obama isn't in Europe insulting the heads of France or Israel, Obama is on the campaign trail running against the rich. He is trying desperately to get his jobs bill passed. The trouble is that the press is bored with this and quit giving it any coverage. Instead the are covering the Occupiers. The worst thing that can happen to a politician is to be ignored, especially when that politician is on the campaign trail. This is where OWS hurts Obama the most.

The one thing that could hurt Obama even more is if OWS starts protesting politicians along with the Wall Street. OWS hates the bailouts and crony capitalism that defines the Obama economic team. The OWS is convinced that the government is being run for the benefit of the 1% and Obama is the head of the government. At some point they might decide that he is a big part of the problem.

Culture Wars 2011

2011-11-10T01:25:00.001-05:00

Getting an early start on the culture wars...

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker sent out a press release about the lighting of the annual Christmas Tree. This has the easily offended in an uproar. It seems that Walker is the first governor since 1985 to call a decorated evergreen a "Christmas Tree" instead of a "holiday tree".

To put this in perspective, this week also had news reports about the National Christmas Tree starting its journey to the White House where President Obama will light it.

So, Walker is playing to an extremist theocratic base and Obama is not, even though both are lighting official Christmas Trees. Obama is the 5th US president to light a Christmas Tree since Wisconsin decided that the term was too inflammatory.

I don't know about Wisconsin, but Ohio started calling its tree a holiday tree after the KKK sued to be allowed to erect a cross on the statehouse grounds. Being the KKK, it was not a religious cross. Instead it was white with epithets on it. That should have been enough to disqualify it. Instead Ohio dropped all references to Christmas. Apparently they believe that no one will realize that it is a Christmas Tree if we call it a holiday tree. It had nothing to do with other religions.

I am sure that some religious minorities will be offended by Walker's action, not because he did anything wrong but because they have been told that they should be offended. Here is an example:

The Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation has opposed the term Christmas tree, saying it offends nonreligious people and amounts to a government endorsement of Christianity.
The president of that group, Annie Laurie Gaylor, called Walker's decision rude and insensitive to non-Christians.
"The reason that it was turned into a holiday tree was to avoid this connotation that the governor chooses one religion over another," she said. "It's essentially a discourtesy by the governor to announce that. He intends that to be a slight and a snub to non-Christians, otherwise he would not do it."

The vast majority of America celebrates Christmas. A greater number of people celebrate Christmas than are Christians. No other religion decorates a tree in December. At the same time, decorated trees are not part of Christian doctrine. For Gaylor to say that it is alright to erect a Christmas Tree as long as we call it something else and that giving it its proper name endorses Christianity is hypocritical and downright silly.

Since people seems to accept Obama using the term, I can only assume that this is faux outrage by people who suffer from Walker Derangement Syndrome.