Last Chance to Save America

I hate to sound as alarmist as Glenn Beck but the next week will determine the future of America. Health care is big but it is only the first step. To quote Robert Creamer form the Huffington Post:

Everyone realizes that health insurance reform is not just another piece of legislation. But its significance goes well beyond the fact that it affects one-sixth of the economy; or that it will massively impact our country's ability to create jobs in the future; or even that it will determine whether or not health care finally becomes a right in America.

If we succeed in winning health insurance reform we will have breached the gates of the status quo. We will demonstrate that fundamental change is possible. Into that breach will flow a wave of progressive change. That victory will also make it possible for us to pass legislation to restructure the energy economy -- to put the brakes on climate change and free us from the tyranny of foreign oil. It will make it possible for us to rein in the power of Wall Street and pass long-overdue comprehensive immigration reform. It will make it possible to structure a bottom-up economy that can produce the jobs of the future.

He's probably right. If we can't stop health care then we will not be able to stop the rest of their agenda.

This is about control - personal control. The Progressives don't want you to have any. Their first step is to establish a requirement for being a citizen living in America. I'm quoting from the Congressional Budget Office. Along with their budget analysis they point out that this will make it a punishable offense to fail to buy something. Once you have established that president, nothing is out of bounds.

And nothing will be out of bounds. Just look at the rhetoric from the last few months. The Progressives want to control how much you earn, how much medical insurance you get (including an upper limit). They will limit how you drive and what temperature your house can be. The health care bills alone allow them to punish you for weighing too much (insurance companies can charge as much as five times the base rate for "high risk" factors).

This will kill jobs and stifle freedom. It will not work. It's been tried all over the world and it always fails. Most of Europe is moving away from a Progressive agenda. France has chronic 20% unemployment (much higher for youth and Muslim) and their health care is running out of cash as fast as ours but they want us to be like the French.

The goal is to push so many changes through that the Republicans will never be able to undo them. There can be no compromise. The Democrats are using every trick in the book to advance their agenda. In order to get the health care bill out of committee, they promised to remove the public option. The bill that was introduced to the full Senate had it restored. Once it passes the Senate, the bill that both houses of Congress vote on will remove limits on abortion and no longer allow states to opt-out of the public option. When Republicans complain about bait-and-switch, this is what they mean. The final bill will be voted on late at night with no chance for anyone to read it.

Then they will use the same tactics to pass cap-and-trade and cripple power production.

On top of that, they will cripple the economy with new debt. They used book-keeping tricks to hide the real cost of health care $900 billion in ten years but the first four don't count). That's on top of Obama's projected record deficits for the next decade.

We are in for a lost decade like Japan's unless we stop it now.

World War II and the Economy

With an economic summit planned for December, it is likely that the Obama administration will ask for a second stimulus early next year. Part of the reasoning comes from a group of economists led by Paul Krugman. They maintain that the Great Depression and Japan's Lost Decade happened because the governments had not spent enough money. They point out that spending for WWII reached astronomical levels but just a few years later the national debt was back to manageable levels and the country began a twenty-five year boom. If the government just spends enough money then history will repeat itself.

It would be nice to believe that economics were that simple but there are a number of factors that make WWII unique. Simply spending without these other factors will not produce the same result.

The most obvious factor is that WWII was a war. It had a beginning and an end. By the end of the war the nation was sick of it. There was strong pressure to send the troops back home and get on with life. That put a natural end on the spending. In contrast, Krugman and company are proposing peacetime spending which will be hard to cut once it is established. What starts out as a short-term stimulus will likely turn into permanent programs.

Another factor was pent-up demand. The war years were years of deprivation. No new cars were built and few new houses. Even new clothing was a luxury and food items that we take for granted such as hams and chocolate were hard to come by. With the war over, people wanted these things.

By the end of the war, the US was the only major power to end the war with its manufacturing base intact. In fact, years of war spending had paid for upgrades to American factories. At the same time, Japanese and European manufacturing was in ruins. These other countries had to buy from the US in order to rebuild their own manufacturing bases.

In contrast, we are not experiencing any long-term privation nor are we bombing our competition out of business. No amount of spending in the US is going to dismantle Chinese factories.

WWII was financed by war bonds which were bought by Americans. When the debt was paid down, the money went to Americans who could spend it in the American economy. Our current debt is largely financed by long-term bonds sold to foreign countries. Running up a massive debt today means shipping dollars overseas and draining them from the economy.

When the Great Depression started, the Roosevelt Administration feared deflation. Under normal market conditions, high unemployment should have meant falling wages. The Roosevelt administration kept wages high through a combination of government coercion and union support. This system was finally scrapped during the war and never reestablished. This lowered the cost of hiring new employees. Krugman is advocating the opposite approach today. In a recent column he suggested that the government make it harder to fire or lay off employees. The Democrats have been working hard at raising the cost of hiring with increases to minimum wage and health insurance mandates.

Obviously the huge deficit that the nation ran up during WWII was only a small part of the story. Running up a new deficit and expecting a boom is irrational.

Justice or Ideology?

In 2001, President Bush declared war on International Terrorism. Last week, the Obama administration signaled that that war never happened with two separate actions.

First there is the Fort Hood shooter who has been charged with 13 counts of murder but not terrorism. There has been some argument (exclusively on the left) about whether his actions actually amount to terrorism. This is fairly ridiculous. He had a history of justifying terrorism and corresponded with radicals. Murder and terrorism charges are not mutually exclusive. So why not charge him.

Then there is the announcement that the terrorist known as KSM (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) will be tried in New York rather than by a military tribunal. There is a long history of try foreign combatants by tribunals and there are good reasons for doing this. The Constitutional guarantees given to citizens are difficult to apply to apply to foreigners. Presenting the evidence against KSM in an open court will almost certainly compromise on-going intelligence operations. The sticking point here is the term "foreign combatants". The left has always held there there is no war on terror. With no war, there can be no combatants and no military tribunals, only open courtrooms. President Obama will not even use the term "War of Terror".

Keep in mind that this is not about justice. It is about ideology. We already know that he is guilty. KSM has already boasted of his guilt in front of a tribunal. The whole point of starting over again with a new trial is meant as a slap at the Bush administration.

There are several ways that this can backfire. The trial is likely to turn into a circus that runs on for weeks or months. The OJ trial turned the brutal murder of two people into a national joke. What will the KSM trial do to the murder of 3,000 people?

The worst thing that could happen is that, like OJ, KSM might not be convicted. It has already been decided that he will not go free. If he is not convicted then he will be charged with new crimes and stand for a new trial until he is convicted. This makes a mockery of the justice system. The courts exist to weigh evidence and decide guilt. We already know that KSM is guilty - he admitted it under oath. Trying someone when it is known ahead of time that he will eventually be found guilty of something makes us look like a banana republic.

Confused Priorities and a Tin Ear

There are a couple of reasons that the Democrats are likely to lose big next year - confused priorities and a tin ear.

Obama and the Democratic leadership have their priorities and these do not match the public's priorities. All recent polls put jobs and the economy at the top of the list. They want to know that their government is working hard to put things right. They are also concerned about the war in Afghanistan.

What do they get? Six months of constant talk about health care with cap and trade next on the list. The Obama administration rushed through a stimulus package, bank bailouts, and auto maker bankruptcies in order to clear the decks for its real priorities. Troops were rushed to Afghanistan early in Obama's term and a request for more troops submitted in September is still waiting for a decision. The latest report is that Obama rejected the four options given him and asked for new ones.

The fact that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are all ignoring the public shows an incredible, collective tin ear. It gets worse.

The White House has released figures about jobs created or saved due to the stimulus. I doubt that the public is buying into this. Unemployment is at a 25-year high. Even the major news organizations have found major holes in the official figures. In one instance, stimulus money went for raises. The White House maintained that this counted as multiple partial saved jobs.

Obama's supporters say that he saved the world's economy and averted a second Great Depression. Maybe. Most of the saving that he did was followup from policies begun in the last couple of months of the Bush administration. Regardless, Obama was also responsible for creating the over-used Wall Street/Main Street meme. For much of the year, the Obama administration has been seen as propping up Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. Firms that were too big to fail have grown larger.

Liberals have been outraged by bonuses and pay packages that still approach the GDP of small countries. Conservatives are shocked by the way that the administration has taken over entire industries. without input by Congress or the Courts, the White House was suddenly running GM, installing its own CEO and decreeing which divisions would continue and which would close down.

The deficit is an example of both a tin ear and broken promises. In both 2006 and 2008 the Democrats pitched themselves as the party of fiscal restraint. They pointed out that we were running a surplus during the Clinton years which went back into a deficit in the Bush years. "Put us in charge again," they said, "And we will return to fiscal responsibility."

This was an outright lie. Even before Obama's inauguration, Pelosi announced the suspension of "Paygo" (rules that required all new expenditures to be funded through new taxes or cuts elsewhere). While economists like Paul Krugman argue that deficits are good in a recession, the top Democrats refuse to discuss the issue.

The Tea Parties have been fueled largely by a sense of betrayal at the Democrats' spending. Rather than addressing this, they are dismissed with a derogatory term referring to oral sex.

History is against the Democrats to begin with. Presidents with long coattails usually lose party members in the mid-term elections. They could try to minimize this by paying attention to the polls. Instead they have convinced themselves that the only reason that Clinton lost Congress was because he failed to pass health care. They are clinging to health care as their 2010 salvation, ignoring the fact that at least half the country thinks that this bill will make things worse rather than better.

Parties that ignore their constituents always end up regretting it.

Dr. Who and Politics

You would expect a column on the British TV show, Dr. Who to be a politics-free zone. Unfortunately, with some people there is no such thing as a politics free zone. In a four paragraph column on Dr. Who in Wired, the writer, Scott Brown, injects this:

Sound familiar, America? Oh, I can hear the teabaggers now: This is defeatist talk! Doesn't sound like your cup of Tetley, eh, Glenn Beck? Fair enough: Enjoy your Transformers and the baby-faced club kids of the new Enterprise. But I'd highly recommend a field trip to Whoville.

Brown makes to many bad assumptions it is hard to list them all. First, he assumes that everyone who reads his stuff agrees with his politics. He compounds that by throwing in a derogatory term for the Tea Party movement. He also assumes that Enterprise and Transformers only appeal to conservatives (I guess because he considers both the movies and the audience to be less enlightened). Finally, he thinks that Dr. Who supports his politics. I'll examine this last assumption in depth.

First, I'm going to make an assumption. Since the Brown doesn't like the Tea Parties or Glenn Beck, I'm going to assume that Brown is a big-government liberal.

So, what politics does Dr. Who espouse? It's hard to generalize but there have been a number of episodes that have a strong Libertarian/anti-big government element. In fact it's a given that any episode that features a large government agency or big business, the agency or business will turn out to be run by evil aliens for nefarious reasons.

At the end of the first season the Doctor was on a satellite that housed a totalitarian government. This turned out to be a cover for a plot to recreate the Daleks. The following season a government agency called Torchwood seized the Doctor's TARDIS, saying that all alien technology in Britain belonged to them. They also opened a door to an alternate universe populated by Cybermen.

The Cybermen came from an alternate world where they were manufactured by a large corporation working with the government.

In a later season finale, a charismatic politician named Harold Saxon was elected Prime Minister. It turned out that Saxon was the Doctor's fellow Time Lord the Master who took over the Earth with the intention of using humanity to conquer the universe.

In the spin-off Torchwood, the government blew up Torchwood's Welsh branch and arrested the survivors. Their reason - they didn't want Torchwood to interfere with an alien race's demand for 10% of all children.

Clearly, in the Doctor's universe, big government and big business working with big government are bad. They inevitably end up threatening humanity.

So, why would Glenn Beck object to this?

Mourner in Chief

One of the President's duties is to act as the unofficial Mourner in Chief. When done right, the President helps the nation to put a tragedy in perspective and the President's approval ratings rise. When done poorly, the nation turns its anger on the President.

Bill Clinton's response to the Oklahoma City bombing comforted the nation. The event came at the end of a long series of public relations problems and repaired his image. His approval rating climbed.

George W. Bush took a day to strike the right tone but after that his response to September 11 was what the nation needed and his approval rating climbed into the 90+% range. Four years later his response to Hurricane Katrina was seen as inadequate and his approval rating started a drop that ended in a historic low.

How will the nation judge Barack Obama's response to the Fort Hood shootings? While not on the same level as these other tragedies, it was still a shocking event.

Obama's initial response was shockingly callous. Rather than changing his schedule, he simply inserted a mention of the shooting into a prepared speech. He didn't even lead with it. Instead he began with a "shout out" to a member of the audience who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor (he actually won the Congressional Medal of Freedom - the civilian version). Fort Hood's mention came two minutes later.

Obama has made some further remarks since then but he will not travel to Fort Hood until a memorial service on Tuesday. He spent Saturday lobbying Congress to pass health care. He even used the Fort Hood tragedy in this context, reminding Congressmen in marginal districts that their sacrifice was nothing compared to the people in uniform.

Over the last year the Obama administration has shown that it is single-minded in its agenda, no matter what else happens. The unemployment rate is at a 25 year high and a request for more troops for Afghanistan has waited two months for a decision but the Obama White House seems focused on health care. Even a major tragedy seems unable to get more than a moment's notice.

To their credit, the White House said that the timing of Tuesday's memorial service was for the convenience of the families and not the President. Still, one wonders. Obama postponed an overseas trip by one day. Had the service been any later it would have been much less convenient for the President to attend. Was this just good luck?

Regardless, the President has one last chance to set the right tone before public opinion starts to turn against him.

New York 24

What to make of New York's 24th results? Actually, the whole situation was so muddled that you can make anything you want of it.

To recap - this was a special election to fill a vacancy. Obama won it in 2008. The Republicans nominated a liberal who supported most or all of the Obama agenda. A conservative independent surged after getting support from Sarah Palin. The official Republican dropped out of the race and threw her support (including her robo-calls) to the Democrat. The Democrat won the election with 49% of the vote.

The result of this mess is that:

A Democrat won this district for the first time since the 19th century.
Even with all of this, the Democrat could not get a majority of the votes.
Even if the independent had sat the race out and allowed the Republican to win, the Democrats would have gained a reliable vote.

The most important lesson for the Republicans and independents (and I'm not the first to point this out) is that they need each other to win. If the Republicans had nominated a candidate who was closer to mainstream Republican then this seat would still be in Republican hands.

On the other hand, trying to turn a single special election into a national mandate to continue the Obama Revolution is a stretch.