Archive for June, 2009
Understanding Obamaworld
Victor Davis Hanson’s June 18th post in Real Clear Politics presents a clarifying lexicon for today’s Obamaworld. Everything is made simple and easy for we the unwashed masses to understand. “Words Baby, they’re my game!”
Are you confused by all that has changed since President Barack Obama took office in January? If so, you’re not alone. Perhaps, though, this handy guide to Age of Obama “logic” might be of some assistance.
1. The Budget. Wanting to cut $17 billion from the budget, as President Obama has promised, is proof of financial responsibility. Borrowing $1.84 trillion this year for new programs is “stimulus.” The old phrase “out-of-control spending” is inoperative.
2. Unemployment. The number of jobs theoretically saved, or created, by new government policies – not the actual percentage of Americans out of work, or the total number of jobs lost – is now the far better indicator of unemployment.
3. The Private Sector. Nationalizing much of the auto and financial industries, while regulating executive compensation, is an indication of our new government’s repeatedly stated reluctance to interfere in the private sector.
4. Race and Gender. Not what is said but who says it and about whom reveals racism and sexism. For example, an Hispanic female judge isn’t being offensive if she states that Latinas are inherently better judges than white males.
5. Random violence. Some assassinations represent larger American pathologies, but others do not. When a crazed lone gunman murders someone outside the Holocaust Museum or shoots an abortion doctor, we should worry about growing right-wing and Christian extremism. But when an African-American Muslim convert brags about his murder of a military recruitment officer or an Islamic group plots to kill Jews and blow up a military jet, these are largely isolated incidents without larger relevance.
6. Terrorism. Acts of terror disappeared about six months ago. Thankfully, we live now in an age where there will be – in the new vocabulary of the Obama administration – only occasional “overseas contingency operations” in which we may be forced to hold a few “detainees.” At the same time, ongoing military tribunals, renditions, wiretaps, phone intercepts and predator-drone assassinations are no longer threats to the Constitution. And just saying you’re going to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay is proof that it is almost closed.
7. Iraq. The once-despised Iraq war thankfully ended around Jan. 20, 2009, and has now transformed into a noble experiment that is fanning winds of change throughout the Middle East. There will be no need for any more Hollywood cinema exposés of American wartime crimes in Iraq with titles like “Rendition,” “Redacted,” “Lions for Lambs” and “Stop-Loss.”
8. The West. Western values and history aren’t apparently that special or unique. As President Obama told the world during his recent speech in Cairo, the Renaissance and Enlightenment were, in fact, fueled by a brilliant Islamic culture, responsible for landmark discoveries in mathematics, science and medicine. Slavery in America ended without violence. Mistreatment of women and religious intolerance in the Middle East have comparable parallels in America.
9. Media. The media are disinterested and professional observers of the present administration. When television anchormen and senior magazine editors bow to the president, proclaim him a god or feel tingling in the legs when he speaks, it is quite normal.
10. George W. Bush. Former President Bush did all sorts of bad things to the United States that only now we are learning will take at least eight years to sort out. “Bush did it” for the next decade will continue to explain the growing unemployment rate, the most recent deficit, the new round of tensions with Iran and North Korea, and the growing global unrest from the Middle East to South America.
Once we remember and accept the logic of the above, then almost everything about this Age of Obama begins to make perfect sense.
Healthcare Crux: “Who Decides?” – Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute
Posted by Tom in Nationalized Health Care on June 17, 2009
Michael Tanner’s June 16th video conference at our monthly dinner was an excellent statement of the status, issues, bad ideas and needs for health care reform in America today. He characterized our current system as the best, the most innovative, flexible and costly in the world; like other areas of our consumption we have great choice but overspend and as a result have the highest quality available. When foreign leaders, magnates and celebrities have important health issues, they come to the US.
That said, there are problems: Our costs are double the average of the industrialized nations and a third higher than the next more expensive. Arguably we get what we pay for but that’s overly simplistic. Then there are the estimated 47 million uninsured; but numbers are fuzzy as there are questions of eligibility on 14 million and 10 million are non citizens. While 40% of the total is only temporarily uninsured only 15% is without insurance for two or more years. Finally, the quality of medical service is uneven; this is true regardless of insurance. Still even the uninsured receive 2/3 of the normal medical services.
So the goal is to solve or ameliorate the problems without losing the good aspects of our system. As you would guess bad solutions abound: Mandates either employer or individual either ignore economics, lock in an archaic tax based system, or are unenforceable. The so called public option really becomes and is perhaps intended to wind up as a single payer system.
But there are ideas or principals which will help, the “do no harm” concept preserving the best aspects of our superior system. Strive to switch to personal portable insurance by getting off the current employer provided tax free compensation. This is accomplished by taxing the insurance benefit and providing a deduction to the employee with the net result that the employee is the consumer with a portable policy. Insurance competition will be had by breaking down state barriers so that all qualified carriers can legally market insurance in all jurisdictions. And finally, more provider competition should be encouraged with the use of paramedical practitioners, midwives and the like.
Michael Tanner gave a telling analogy in summation: your pet dog doesn’t have much say in the level of treatment he gets at the vet! In other words, who decides?
Our group members thank Michael Tanner and the Cato Institute for a brilliant presentation. A password protected recording of the event will be available to our members on this website.
Tom Motherway, tom@renohayek.com
Washington Post Editorializes On Obama’s Car Mess
Posted by Tom in Centrally Managed Economy on June 9, 2009
Could it be that even the Washington Post editors see reality when it them in the face? Below is a soft ball editorial from today’s edition critical of the political interference with our nationalized car business. Hopefully these sharp eye liberals will be as alert on health care and cap and trade!
Car Quandary
Political and economic contradictions of the ‘new GM’
POOR BOB LUTZ. The vice chairman of General Motors loves “muscle cars” like the Camaro. He knows that, unless fuel prices go much higher and stay there, the American market for big cars is likely to exceed the market for small cars. Yet he has to build a little four-seat plug-in electric hybrid called the Chevrolet Volt, roll it out next year and try to sell it for $40,000 (not counting a likely $7,500 federal tax rebate). It doesn’t make much sense economically, and the few thousand Volts that GM plans to produce at first won’t dent U.S. carbon emissions much either. But, as Mr. Lutz told The Post’s Michael Leahy, he feels pressure from Washington to do something spectacular on the electric car front. The Volt, he says, “is an important symbol. We need it. It has a chance to change our image.”
When GM was still a privately owned company, this latest episode of Detroit agonistes would be no one’s problem but GM’s and its stockholders’. But soon, if they become owners of 60 percent of the company, taxpayers could be on the hook for the Volt. And Mr. Lutz’s quandary epitomizes the political and economic contradictions of the “new GM.” The taxpayers’ interest is to get GM out of the red and back in private hands as soon as possible, consistent with environmental and fuel-efficiency standards. By that logic, the automaker’s only goal would be to make what people want to buy; expensive “image” projects such as the Volt would wait. Yet the political pressures that drove GM to build the Volt in the first place — namely, Congress’s demand for a U.S.-made answer to the Toyota Prius — are stronger than ever now that the government is about to own the company. So GM will build the Volt, even if it loses money, taxpayer money.
And members of Congress will delve into other aspects of the car companies’ business. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Banking Committee, has already prevailed on GM to extend the life of a plant in his district. GM and Chrysler dealers, thousands of whom are set to close in order to streamline the companies’ sales efforts, have flocked to Capitol Hill demanding relief. In response, House members of both parties have introduced a bill that would block the closure of GM and Chrysler dealerships. If this proposal ever makes it to his desk, President Obama should veto it. America can have nationalized auto companies with a chance, however slim, of someday turning a profit. Or it can have nationalized firms subject to constant political tinkering. It can’t have both.
via The Political and Economic Contradictions of the ÂNew GM’ – washingtonpost.com.
Here We Go Again, “Creating or Saving!”
Posted by Tom in Stimulus/Bailout on June 8, 2009
Bloomberg reports that President is putting his “creating or saving” program in high gear. He intends to “create or save” more than four times the number of jobs he has already created or saved, 600,000 of them!
June 8 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama, trying to bolster an economy he says still has a “long way to go,” announced 10 projects aimed at creating or saving more than 600,000 jobs, according to the administration.
The plans are meant to boost the effectiveness of a $787 billion stimulus measure sought by Obama and approved by Congress in February. The projects will be a key focus of recovery efforts during the next three months and create or save four times more jobs than during the first 100 days since the rescue bill became law, according to a White House news release……..
The new projects are being framed as the beginning of a “summer of accelerated Recovery Act activity” by the administration and include new services at health centers in 50 states, work on 107 national parks, improvements at airports, highway locations and veterans’ medical facilities. They will also provide funding for schools to hire more teachers.
via Obama Unveils New Projects, Says Economy Has ‘Long Way to Go’ – Bloomberg.com.
Apparently no consideration is given to the economic value or sustainability of these government jobs funded at taxpayer expense much less the economic loss and jobs lost by virtue of the excessive government spending. Hiring more teachers as part of the summer of accelerated Recovery Act activity, now that’s a plan. Seems this administration may be confusing activity with progress!
Tom Motherway, tom@renohayek.com
From Great Nation to Mediocre Nation
Posted by Tom in Foreign Policy on June 7, 2009
In what direction is Obama leading us? It seems he is leading from a nation of principal, freedom and independence to a nation resigned to its mediocrity and thus swayed by the ascendent nations of the world. Diplomacy and appeasement will replace leadership and strength. We will deny our Judeo-Christian roots and become one of the largest Muslim countries in the world, since that Muslim world is the fastest growing state religion in the world.
Mark Steyn captured the direction in his June 6th NRO article, “The Muslim World.” Excerpts follow:
As recently as last summer, General Motors filing for bankruptcy would have been the biggest news story of the week. But it’s not such a very great step from the unthinkable to the inevitable, and by the time it actually happened the market barely noticed and the media were focused on the president’s “address to the Muslim world.” As it happens, these two stories are the same story: snapshots, at home and abroad, of the hyperpower in eclipse. It’s a long time since anyone touted GM as the emblematic brand of America — What’s good for GM is good for America, etc. In fact, it’s more emblematic than ever: Like General Motors, the U.S. government spends more than it makes, and has airily committed itself to ever more unsustainable levels of benefits. GM has about 95,000 workers but provides health benefits to a million people: It’s not a business enterprise, but a vast welfare plan with a tiny loss-making commercial sector. As GM goes, so goes America?
But who cares? Overseas, the coolest president in history was giving a speech. Or, as the official press release headlined it on the State Department website, “President Obama Speaks to the Muslim World from Cairo.”
Let’s pause right there: It’s interesting how easily the words “the Muslim world” roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives who’d choke on any equivalent reference to “the Christian world.” When such hyper-alert policemen of the perimeter between church and state endorse the former but not the latter, they’re implicitly acknowledging that Islam is not merely a faith but a political project, too. There is an “Organization of the Islamic Conference,” which is already the largest single voting bloc at the U.N. and is still adding new members. Imagine if someone proposed an “Organization of the Christian Conference” that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and presidents, and vote as a bloc in transnational bodies. But, of course, there is no “Christian world”: Europe is largely post-Christian and, as President Obama bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer last week, America is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Perhaps we’re eligible for membership in the OIC.
I suppose the benign interpretation is that, as head of state of the last superpower, Obama is indulging in a little harmless condescension. In his Cairo speech, he congratulated Muslims on inventing algebra and quoted approvingly one of the less bloodcurdling sections of the Koran. As socio-historical scholarship goes, I found myself recalling that moment in the long twilight of the Habsburg Empire when Crown Prince Rudolph and his mistress were found dead at the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling — either a double suicide, or something even more sinister. Happily, in the Broadway musical version, instead of being found dead, the star-crossed lovers emigrate to America and settle down on a farm in Pennsylvania. Recently, my old comrade Stephen Fry gave an amusing lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London on the popular Americanism “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” — or, if something’s bitter and hard to swallow, add sugar and sell it. That’s what the president did with Islam: He added sugar and sold it.
The speech nevertheless impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, “esteemed editor” being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: “Fundamentally, Obama’s goal was to tell the Muslim world, ‘We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don’t hate us and murder us in return.’” But those terms are too narrow. You don’t have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders. And you don’t even have to hate him if you’re too busy despising him. The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush sharing a latrine with a dozen halfwitted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers — including the wish to expand the boundaries of “the Muslim world” and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The non-terrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to western notions of liberty and pluralism.
Once Obama moved on from the more generalized Islamoschmoozing to the details, the subtext — the absence of American will — became explicit. He used the cover of multilateralism and moral equivalence to communicate, consistently, American weakness: “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.” Perhaps by “no single nation” he means the “global community” should pick and choose, which means the U.N. Security Council, which means the Big Five, which means that Russia and China will pursue their own murky interests and that, in the absence of American leadership, Britain and France will reach their accommodations with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea, and any other psycho-state minded to join them.
On the other hand, a “single nation” certainly has the right to tell another nation anything it wants if that nation happens to be the Zionist Entity: As Hillary Clinton just instructed Israel re its West Bank communities, there has to be “a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.” No “natural growth”? You mean, if you and the missus have a kid, you’ve got to talk gran’ma into moving out? To Tel Aviv, or Brooklyn, or wherever? At a stroke, the administration has endorsed “the Muslim world”’s view of those non-Muslims who happen to find themselves within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: The Jewish and Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to grow. Would Obama be comfortable mandating “no natural growth” to Israel’s million-and-a-half Muslims? No. But the administration has embraced the “the Muslim world”’scommitment to one-way multiculturalism, whereby Islam expands in the west but Christianity and Judaism shrivel remorselessly in the Middle East.
And so it goes. Like General Motors, America is “too big to fail.” So it won’t, not immediately. It will linger on in a twilight existence sclerotic and ineffectual, declining unto a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past, but able on occasion to throw out impressive words albeit strung together without much meaning: empower, peace, justice, prosperity — just to take one windy gust from the president’s Cairo speech.
There’s better phrase-making in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in a coinage of Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations. The president emeritus is a sober, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes, “The country’s economy, infrastructure, public schools, and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit.” That last is the one to watch: A great power can survive a lot of things, but not “a mediocrity of spirit.” A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2009 Mark Steyn
A Lesson in Civil Discourse
Posted by Tom in Law, Morality & Religion in the Public Square on June 3, 2009
Today’s NRO editorial (below) sums what we’ve heard for the last several days on the murder of George Tiller. It’s sadly ironic that the killer supposedly professed to life sees the taking of life as legitimate and justified.
Simple morality: moral ends do not justify the immoral means. Never, never, never!
Hopefully this tragedy is a lesson in civil discourse, a perverse lesson, but a learning opportunity nonetheless.
Scott Roeder, the man who killed George Tiller, must bear the blame for his wicked act, even if it turns out that mental incapacity mitigated his guilt. Some blame must also attach to that tiny fringe of the anti-abortion movement that traffics in fevered theories about the justifiable killing of abortionists. That fringe doesn’t just set back its purported cause; it perverts it. The pro-life movement aims to end a scourge of violence, not to invent new excuses for violence. It seeks to abolish a private right to kill, not to license one. It aims to return the law to its moral foundations, not to abandon the rule of law altogether.
Almost everyone who calls himself a pro-lifer has condemned Roeder’s evil. All pro-lifers should make it clear that those who take up the gun, or tolerate it, have no place in their movement. Our only weapons should be persuasion, law, and prayer.
That renunciation does not go far enough for some on the other side of the debate. They say that the mainstream pro-life movement bears responsibility for Tiller’s murder. In one sense it must be admitted that this accusation is true. If there were no pro-life movement in America, or it muted its claims, the likelihood that anyone would twist its premises to violence would be lower.
That observation applies just as well to many other movements. Without abolitionism there would probably have been no John Brown. Without anti–Vietnam War activism, no Weathermen. (At the very least, disturbed and violent people would have found other outlets for their rage.) The abolitionists and the antiwar movement could not reasonably have been asked to foreswear passionate advocacy of their causes in order to minimize the chance of violence. Pro-lifers cannot reasonably be asked to stop saying that George Tiller spent his days killing young human beings — especially since what they say is true.
What any group of activists can reasonably be asked is to condemn violence and to do the best they can to root out anyone who does not condemn it. This pro-lifers have done and are doing. They can also be asked to do and have done one more thing: to support the just punishment, by legitimate authorities, of murderers.
via Murder Most Foul by The Editors on National Review Online.
Tom Motherway, tom@renohayek.com
Red Ink with Green Energy
Posted by Tom in Energy Facts & Policies on June 3, 2009
Alex Alexiev’s article, “Obama’s Green Delusions,” in today’s NRO brings some untold reality to the alternative energy discussion. Were it not for subsidies green would not be economically viable until traditional sources reached a sustainable price point that justified the green costs. Subsidies are simply taxpayer assumption of differential costs; most of those taxpayers being non-users do not otherwise benefit. The issue then becomes the role of government versus the marketplace in bridging the conversion gap, the time it takes to transition from traditional to green.
Since green technologies are known, there is no steep, long-duration learning curve in development. Thus, I would argue that the marketplace is a better, more efficient transitioning agent. Obama, Gore, the green industry and the liberals that follow them would argue otherwise and since in their minds the subsidies are free, that is come from the taxpayers now and future, they will proceed with the green agenda. So we will have an inefficient transitioning agent taking investment capital out of the marketplace. The opportunity costs lost on government inefficiencies and lost investment in other fields will be a steep price to pay.
Standing in front of an array of photovoltaic solar panels at Nellis Air Force Base last Wednesday, President Obama gave us to understand that his vision for an America powered by clean, renewable energy and awash in green jobs is becoming a reality faster than anyone could have imagined. Nellis, near Las Vegas, is the home of the largest solar-energy plant in the Western Hemisphere and, in the president’s words, a “shining example” of what renewable energy can do to put our economy on a “firmer foundation for economic growth.” It is a success story that needs to be replicated “in cities and states across America,” Obama said, and he announced a “solar energy technology program” to do just that.
The figures do indeed look impressive at first sight. The $100-million plant was built without a penny of government money, we are told, yet it provides the base with electric power costing 2.2 cents per kilowatt/hour, which is less than one-fourth of the 9 cents that Nevada Power charges its other customers. The annual savings will amount to $1 million, guaranteed for 20 years. Proof positive, it seems, that our green future is now. Or is it?
Beyond these numbers, uncritically reported by the mainstream media, is the reality of a make-believe industry touted by environmental zealots, corporate freeloaders parading as entrepreneurs, and a president capable of staggering disingenuousness. If the Nellis solar project is a “shining example,” it is a shining example of everything that’s wrong with Obama’s green delusions. The project makes no economic sense on its own merits and, like all renewable-energy projects, was made possible only by a combination of government coercion and state and federal handouts at the expense of utility customers and the American taxpayer. The coercion in this case came in the form of a state mandate that Nevada utilities must obtain 20 percent of their power from hugely expensive renewable sources by 2015; the handouts came in the form of a 30 percent federal tax credit, accelerated depreciation rates, “solar energy credits,” and similar goodies. It is such government largesse — and the promise of more to come — that convinces the renewable-energy industry’s corporate welfare queens to line up behind dubious projects like Nellis.
In his speech at Nellis, President Obama asserted that he wants “everybody to know what we’re doing here in Vegas,” and he pointed to Germany as an example to follow in the solar business. He should have followed his own advice and looked more closely at the German example. After Germany guaranteed solar producers a rate seven times as high as the market rate, the country’s electric bill jumped by 38 percent in one year.
Obama also should have mentioned what happens to investors who fall for Washington’s green hype. For the two private companies involved in the Nellis project, it has not been a success story. SunPower Corp., the builder of the solar plant, has lost 75 percent of its market value in just the past year and is facing an uncertain future (to put it mildly). MMA Renewable Ventures, a San Francisco–based firm, which financed the project, was recently sold to the Spanish company Fotowatio for the fire-sale price of $19.7 million, after losing more than half of its business between 2007 and 2008.
The Spanish purchase of the dying MMA made no business sense except in one critical area: It allowed Fotowatio to establish a beachhead in the United States, which, with $20 billion of green-energy tax incentives in 2010 alone, increasingly looks like the world’s last refuge for solar freeloaders. Most European countries have seen the damage that green energy can do to their economies and are rapidly (if quietly) scaling back their support. This is especially true in the countries that have been leaders on solar and wind power. Both Germany and Spain have dramatically slashed their subsidies for renewables, and Spain has reduced its commitment to green power from 2400 megawatts in 2008 to 500 megawatts or less in 2009.
There is yet another lesson from Spain that Obama prefers not to discuss. The $100-million Nellis project created 200 jobs at a cost of $500,000 per job. The longer Spanish experience, according to a recent study from Juan Carlos University, shows a cost of $774,000 for each government-subsidized green job created since 2000. More disturbingly, for each of these jobs, 2.2 jobs in other industries were destroyed because of higher energy prices, not counting manufacturers who vote with their feet. This is surely a success story that Americans can do without.
via Obama’s Green Delusions by Alex Alexiev on National Review Online.
Tom Motherway, tom@renohayek.com
The Mind of a Liberal
Remember George McGovern, the South Dakota Senator who ran for president in 1972 and lost to Richard Nixon? In the June 1st WSJ he penned an op-ed, “My Advice of Obama,” subtitled, “We could defend ourselves with a military budget half the current size.”
He is a decorated WWII combat veteran who served as a B24 pilot in North Africa and Italy earning the DFC. After the war he went to Garrett Theological Seminary and worked as a Methodist minister; he eventually earned a Ph.D. and became a history professor at Dakota Wesleyan University.
He rejected his Republican upbringing, became a Progressive, was influenced by Adlai Stevenson, became a Democrat, opposed the Viet Nam War, and as they say, the rest is history. He is obviously a caring, magnanimous man with a big heart. As obvious are his leftist leaning and liberal naiveté. His WSJ op-ed is quoted in full below:
Most Americans probably agree that we have elected a highly articulate, talented president in Barack Obama. He has also given us a potentially great Secretary of State in Hillary Clinton. It makes me proud to witness these two recent political rivals working together to strengthen and enrich America at home and abroad. Recognizing the major economic crisis our new leader has inherited, we must hope his proposed economic plan will be helpful.
I think it will. But as someone on the sidelines, may I suggest a few other steps?
First, why not order all U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan by Thanksgiving? They should be greeted at home with a duplication of the GI Bill of Rights that I enjoyed as a combat bomber pilot following World War II.
This means offering each soldier a college education at any school of his or her choice. In 1945, after completing my few remaining months for a Bachelor’s degree at Dakota Wesleyan, I enrolled at Northwestern University and went all the way to a Ph.D. in history without any cost to me except hard work. Other veterans chose to buy a farm or start a business with low-cost, government-guaranteed loans.
We now spend $12 billion a month on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — two mistaken invasions that have increased violence and terrorism in the Middle East. For a fraction of what we are spending on these badly conceived interventions, we could fund a new GI Bill with full medical care for the tens of thousands of veterans who have lost legs or arms or suffered lasting nerve or brain damage.
The second step I would take is to ask Congress to shift half of our military budget to other sources of national security. For almost 50 years, American foreign and national-security policy were believed to require a military budget big enough to win wars against Russia, China and a smaller country such as North Korea simultaneously. We waged what was called a Cold War against an alleged “Sino-Soviet bloc.”
As we now know there was no such thing as a bloc involving Russia and China. The relations between these two large communist nations could have better been described as a rivalry.
In his second term, Ronald Reagan met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who proposed that the two countries end the Cold War and the arms race. Reagan agreed, and the danger of war between the two nuclear giants has since subsided. As for China, no one any longer fears war with this most-populous, fast-developing country to which we have extended “most favored nation” trading status. It would seem that no nation now threatens us.
There is the terrorist danger, but this is not a military problem. Terrorism is a by-product of military weakness. The terrorist has no battleships, bombers, missiles, tanks, organized armies or heavy artillery.
The only significant terrorist attack on the U.S., on Sept. 11, 2001, was carried out by 19 young men from Saudi Arabia and Egypt armed only with boxcutters. They used these devices to intimidate the crews of four airplanes into surrendering control of their planes. The terrorists then suicidally flew the planes into buildings.
This event, which took place nearly a decade ago, dramatized the limitation of a huge military budget in assuring national security. Nonetheless, our military budget is higher than ever — $515 billion annually, not including the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan.
This figure is greater than the combined military budgets of the rest of the world. We could defend ourselves with an arms budget half that size. If we directed the $250 billion we could save annually into national health care, improved education, a better environment and restoring our infrastructure, the nation would be more secure, better employed and have a higher standard of life. Or the savings might be used for annual reductions in the national debt.
To cut spending for more and more costly armaments and these two wars would require both common sense and a measure of political courage on the part of the president and Congress. Why? Because all 50 states have either a military installation or a defense contract or both. These create payrolls and jobs.
That is a major reason for investing an equal sum in the public programs suggested here, which should provide as many or more jobs than are now offered by surplus military spending. Much of the arms spending is for things that are capital-intensive but low on job creation. The reverse is true for public investment in such things as upgrading our decaying infrastructure, protecting the environment, providing quality teachers and schools, and improved health care.
Finally, I would like to see America build the fastest, safest and cleanest-powered railway system in the world. This nationwide system of passenger and freight rail service should be integrated with equally superior public transit facilities in our cities.
Very few Americans are in the market for a tank or aircraft carrier. There are many eager consumers for the world’s best, fastest and safest rail and transit systems.
All aboard!
Parsing the article shows the ever hopeful optimistic liberal advising and even more optimistic leftist: He blames our current straights as “inherited” but not from the Barney Franks and Chris Dodds who promoted them. He then “hopes” Obama’s economic plan will be “helpful.” But, he would add a suggestion or two: First, withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan by Thanksgiving and make this politically popular by duplicating the GI bill of rights. After all these were “two mistaken invasions.” Second, shift half of our military budget to “other sources of national security.” He then posits that Gorbachev told Reagan to end the cold war and Reagan agreed. (Thank God for Gorbachev!) He suggests that “no nation now threatens us.
But give him credit, he acknowledges a terrorist (not “man-caused”) danger which is a mere by-product of military weakness. Further, there was only one significant terrorist attack in 2001 where 19 young men with box cutters flew airplanes into buildings. This of course goes to prove the limitations of our higher than ever military budget. That budget is embarrassingly high, greater than the budgets of the rest of the world! (Apparently he is unaware that we have been defending the rest of the world. And he actually fought in WWII!) But cutting that budget in half (why not by 75%?) we could: a) provide health care, b) improve education, c) better the environment and d) restore our infrastructure; thus, the nation would be more secure, better employed, and have a higher standard of life.
Ah, but cutting that military spending involves cutting jobs in all 50 states with military installations and defense contracts and such, a political problem, perhaps even a social and economic problem. So, we should invest an “equal sum” in “public programs” such as building the “fastest, safest and cleanest-powered railway system in the world.” He finishes by avowing that while few Americans are in the market for a tank or aircraft carrier, many are eager for “rail and transit systems.” (Take that one to Costco or Walmart!)
While many accuse liberals of being bleeding hearts, few have accused them of being good at economics or, for that matter, defense!
Dear Mr. President, please ignore McGovern’s advice.
Tom Motherway, tom@renohayek.com