Perry and Warming

Governor Perry made a stir yesterday when he made a statement about global warming. Here's what Perry actually said:

I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. I think we're seeing, almost weekly or daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. Yes, our climate has changed. They've been changing ever since the earth was formed. But I do not buy into a group of scientists who have in some cases [been] found to be manipulating this information. ...

The initial wire story that I saw skipped the first couple of sentences. This changes the statement.

Of course, the left is up in arms. The real question is if Perry's statement is justifiable?

First, has global warming become politicized? All you have to do is look at Perry's supporters and detractors to prove that statement.

So, has the data been manipulated? That is much harder to answer, mainly because a good portion of the data is is the keeping of global warming evangelists. We know that the raw data from ground sensors is altered to account for urban heat island effect but the exact mechanism for this is a closely guarded secret. We also know that the record for pre-1970 readings has been altered downward. Again, the reason for this is a secret. Part of the ClimateGate emails was a discussion on how to refuse freedom of information requests so that this data could be reviewed.

There are three bodies that monitor global temperature. One of them is NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory which is run by Dr. James Hansen. Hansen is also a leading voice in the debate and a dedicated believer. He once compared coal cars to the Holocaust. His own record on predictions is rather poor. In 2000 he was asked what the climate in New York City would be like in 2010. He predicted that part of the island would be underwater and that high rise buildings would have covered their windows because of the increase in high-speed wind. Given that nothing remotely like this happened, why would anyone believe further predictions? Hansen has also made large sums in speaking fees. I can give other examples but you get the idea.

So, Perry is on firm ground in making this statement.

Texas Trade-offs

Rick Perry is running on the platform that Texas has been out-performing the rest of the country economically. If he is elected president then he will do for the country what he did for Texas. This is a winning platform in a bad economy. Reagan and Clinton used variations of it to unseat incumbent presidents. Dukakis tried to use it in 1988 against George H. W. Bush.

The best defense is to puncture the challenger's claim. Bush did this with Dukakis, portraying the "Massachusetts Miracle" as the "Massachusetts Mirage". Ross Perot tried to do this with Clinton by pointing out that Arkansas was one of the worst states economically. Had Bush taken the same approach he might have stayed in office. Instead, Clinton ran ads pushing "My little state" as an example of economic rebirth.

In the few days since Perry announced, the left has started portraying Texas as a problem child. Harold Meyerson's Washington Post column is typical. Entitled "The sad facts behind Rick Perry's Texas miracle", Meyerson portrays Texas as a third world country that somehow manage to sneak into the US.

Rick Perry's Texas is Ross Perot's Mexico come north. Through a range of enticements we more commonly associate with Third World nations — low wages, no benefits, high rates of poverty, scant taxes, few regulations and generous corporate subsidies — the state has produced its own"giant sucking sound," attracting businesses from other states to a place where workers come cheap. 

[...] What Perry touts in his stump speech, however, isn't the oil boom but, rather, the low-tax, low-reg, handouts-to-business climate that prevails in Texas. It's the kind of spiel that businesses hear every day from leaders of developing nations — Mexico and, even more, China.

[...] Perry's economic vision is the kind of race-to-the-bottom mercantilism we've come to expect from developing nations in the globalized economy, although, as China, Brazil and India illustrate, many such nations have begun to provide citizens with more schooling and better jobs as they grow wealthier. No comparable developments can be seen in Rick Perry's Texas.

He goes on to list all of Texas's shortcomings which mainly consist of insurance (which he restates three different ways as if they were unrelated) and education.

What we have here is really a debate on trade-offs. Would you prefer to have a job that does not include insurance or no job at all? Can our society exist solely on a highly educated workforce (with crushing college debt) or do we still need people with less formal education? At what point do regulations become burdensome (keeping in mind that federal safety standards apply regardless of state regulations)? Is zoning worth higher real estate costs and housing shortages?

Meyerson is arguing that we can have it all. The Texas model says that we cannot and we have to decide what is most important. Meyerson indirectly cedes this point in his closing paragraph:

Perry wants to unravel the national social contract and once again have us go state by state, with the low-wage, low-reg states dragging down the others, much as Chinese mercantilism has dragged down wages and living standards across the United States. He is the 21st-century, homegrown version of the Manchurian candidate.

 
If the low-wage, low-reg states were so undesirable then they would be losing population instead of growing. Obviously they are offering something that people want.

I'll note in passing Paul Krugman's novel explanation for Texas's relative prosperity. He says that it is entirely caused by its population surge. The new influx of people creates new demand and jobs. This is only true if the new population can find jobs in the first place. If hoards of unemployed entered most states the only thing that would grow would be the welfare rolls. These people are going to Texas for good-paying jobs which let them spend money, creating the demand that Krugman sees.

A Bold Jobs Program?

I lost track of how many voices on the left are calling for a jobs program. Most seem to refer to it as a "bold" jobs plan. Apparently "bold" means big or expensive since they also complain that the last stimulus was not big enough. So we are talking about at least $2 trillion in new spending. There is no chance of this going through the current Congress but even if it did, it wouldn't work.

The heart of the problem is that the government cannot create jobs because its only source of income is to take it from other people. If you work for the government you are being paid with other people's money. At best, the government redistributes jobs rather than creating them.

That doesn't stop the left. For some reason, they only see half of equations. They see the government hiring people but they don't see the hardships caused by increased taxes. In fact, they celebrate paying taxes. Remember Biden's statement about taxes being patriotic?

This is the same debate that we keep having about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They have trust funds but these funds have to be paid from the general fund which is currently borrowing $0.40 out of every dollar spent.

There is also the question of what these jobs would be. "Infrastructure" keeps being tossed around but President Obama already admitted that there is no such thing as a "shovel ready" job. An major investment in infrastructure now would not see any real job creation for years. It might not help unemployment much, either. A big problem in the current economy is the mismatch between job openings and job seekers. An unemployed real estate seller might not take a construction job, even if one was offered. This is especially true when unemployment benefits go for almost two years.

Government can also "create" jobs through regulation. A requirement that every restaurant have an in-house health inspector would create a lot of jobs but it would also put a lot of marginal restaurants out of business. This is a variation of the "broken window fallacy". If someone breaks all of the windows in a village it will create work for the glaziers but repairing the windows would divert money that would have been spent elsewhere, depriving all other parts of the economy.

The most that government can do is to try to get out of the way. It needs to keep regulations and taxes down to the minimum and provide certainty. Currently the EPA is increasing regulations and Obamacare has created uncertainty about the cost of future employees.

In the 1980s, Reagan cut taxes on everyone and slowed the growth of government. The economy soared. In contrast, Obama has temporarily cut taxes on the non-rich while increasing the cost of doing business and openly calling for more taxes. Then he wonders why businesses are hoarding money.

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Related mini-post: How Government Gets Its Money

As I said, the government's only source of income is other people. The most direct source is taxation. This is often combined with social policy. That is why half the country pays no income tax while Obama desperately wants to raise taxes on "the rich", AKA "Millionaires and billionaires." Obviously, money paid to the government in taxes cannot be used elsewhere.

The government can borrow money. In theory this will be paid back (with other people's money). In practice, the government pays current amounts due by borrowing more. It also pays interest on the debt. There is a very real danger that the interest on the debt will swallow the rest of the budget within a decade. Any new jobs bills would probably be paid for with borrowed money.

Finally, the government can print money. This still takes other people's money but it does it indirectly. Every dollar that the government adds to the money supply reduces the total value by that much. This shows up as inflation which is currently increasing and declining exchange rates. Even if the government does not take your money, it does not go buy as much as before so your total buying power is reduced.

Presidential Vacations

President Obama is getting some flak about going on vacation to Martha's Vinyard. His press secretary had to defend the trip last week.

...yes, the President does plan to travel with his family at the end of August to Martha's Vineyard as he has in the past. And I don't think Americans out there would begrudge that notion that the President would spend some time with his family. It is also, as I think anyone who has covered in the past, either in this administration or others, there is no such thing as a presidential vacation. The Presidency travels with you. He will be in constant communication and get regular briefings from his national security team as well as his economic team. And he will of course be fully capable, if necessary, of traveling back if that were required.

Time away from the White House does not always reflect well on a president. Two damaging reports undercut the Clinton administration. The first was him collapsing during a race. After that people started talking about how much he had aged in office. The second one was worse. While fishing, a rabbit swam in the general direction of the President's boat so the Secret Service took steps, driving it off with a paddle. The White House refused to release photos of the incident prompting CBS to run a clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the knights attacked a killer rabbit.

Reagan was a master at public relations. He vacationed on his ranch and pictures of him usually showed him riding a horse or clearing brush. The message was that even though Reagan was one of the oldest men ever elected president, he was still healthy.

George H. W. Bush (41) was on vacation when Iraq invaded Kuwait and gas prices soared. He spent the day driving his cigarette boat which burned several gallons of gas per hour. This image was part of the general impression of him as being out of touch with regular people.

The Clintons went to Martha's Vinyard. Like Obama, they were criticized. Clinton's answer was that he was not a rich man with his own estate so he had to stay with friends (in their expensive homes on exclusive islands) for vacation.

George W. Bush (43) learned from both Reagan and his father. He bought a ranch and spent his vacations clearing brush. This also kept the press at arm's length since the closest hotel was a long distance away. The ranch did not protect Bush from war-protester, Cindy Sheehan who set up camp at the other end of the road. This expanded into Camp Casey (named after her son who had been killed in Iraq). This was the real start of the anti-Iraq war movement. (While the Democrats supported Sheehan at the time, they split with her after taking control of Congress but allowing the war to continue. Sheehan later admitted that she had been used by the Democrats.)

Early in his administration Bush was criticized for the amount of time be spent on vacation. Michael Moore even included clips of Bush with the song "Vacation." This was misleading. It turned out that the list of time Bush spent on vacation included weekends, state dinners, time spent at Camp David entertaining visiting heads of state, and time spent on official trips abroad. Remember this when the Press Secretary talks about the American people knowing that the presidency travels with you.

Which brings us back to the Obamas. Last year Michelle was heavily criticized for the number of vacations she took at taxpayer expense. They also spend Christmas in Hawaii. They do not seem to have learned much from previous criticism. Presidents can get a big boost from symbolism. Obama could have announced that it was wrong to go on an expensive trip in a down economy and spent the time at Camp David. It would have given him a needed public relations boost.

Tea Party Downgrade?

Standard and Poor (S&P) downgraded the US's credit rating from AAA to AA+. The initial reaction from Democrats was "Who are you to do this? It was your AAA rating of junk bonds that caused the recession." They followed this up by naming it the Tea Party Downgrade. Is this accurate?

While S&P did have some bad things to say about the recent brinkmanship over raising the credit ceiling, they made it clear that their long-term worry is the size of the deficit. They said all along that they wanted to see a reduction of $4 trillion. Instead Congress reduced it by $1 trillion immediately with another $1 trillion to be named later. These cuts will not take place until after the next election.

S&P felt that this was inadequate because 1) Within ten years interest on the national debt will be unmanageable and 2) The real growth in the debt over the next decade will be in entitlements which were considered untouchable in the current negotiations.

The President's reaction to this was to say, "The fact is, we didn't need a rating agency to tell us that we need a balanced, long-term approach to deficit reduction."

Actually, we do need a rating agency to tell us this. The Tea Party was formed over deficit reduction but has not been taken seriously. The President has not proposed any sort of deficit reduction. To the contrary, his proposed budget called for greater deficits and he asked for a "clean" debt ceiling increase (one with no conditions). The only solution he ever proposed was raising taxes on the "rich" and on corporations and even this seems to be motivated by ideology rather than concern over the deficit.

The biggest proof that S&P's rating has little to do with the Tea Party is that they are also threatening to reduce France's rating for the same reason - because it owes too much money.

Trying to Overturn Elections

Wisconsin just had a recall election for six state senators who voted in favor of anti-collective bargaining legislation. The Democrats needed to win three seats to take control of the State Senate. They won two.

Prior to that the legislation was held up for weeks by Democrats who fled the state in order to prevent a quorum.

Here in Ohio, the anti-union SB5 bill is up for referendum.

In both states the bills had major protests prior to being passed. I heard Ohio protestors complaining that the will of the people was being ignored.

None of this is part of a healthy democracy. I am especially disturbed by the movement to recall elected officials.

To be fair, the Republicans are fighting a similar fight against Obamacare. The difference there is that there are real constitutional questions involved.

President Obama was quoted telling the Republicans that elections matter back in 2009. This is a lesson that both sides should accept.

The Left's Favorite Economist (and it's not Paul Krugman)

Would you buy a car designed by Henry Ford? Or fly in a plane that Lindbergh might have flown? Was your doctor trained by someone born in the 19th century? The answer to these is probably 'no'. So why do economists swear by John Meynard Keynes?

After yesterday's stock market crash the left is calling for more stimulus spending. They justify this using Keynesian economics.

Keynes believes that markets were imperfect and that government can improve on them in maximizing employment and minimizing economic downturns. He saw a recession as being caused by people saving too much of their money. His prescription was for the government to take up the slack by spending more, particularly on infrastructure projects.

This is a seductive idea for politicians in general and even more so for the ones who are convinced in the powers of government to do good. It lets them be seen doing something during an economic downturn and, to politicians, being seen working on problems is more important than solving them, even if they are actually making things worse.

While the left uses Keynes as justification, they don't actually believe in him. He not only suggested government spending, he also felt that the government should cut taxes during downturns. Try selling that to today's Progressives.

Keynes saw government as a moderating force. It should spend more during hard times but during the good times, it should slow the economy by cutting back on spending and raising taxes. This would help to balance the spending and tax cuts from the bad times. No one ever followed through on that part so Keynes became an excuse for ever-expanding government.

There were always problems with Keynes. It was long assumed that there was a direct inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment. Raising one causes the other to drop. Government's job was to find the optimal balance point. The stagflation of the 1970s discredited this theory and threw Keynes into disrepute until the Great Recession.

In the meantime, the problems with Keynes's policies have multiplied over the decades. In the 1930s most labor was unskilled or semi-skilled. If there was widespread unemployment in one sector of the economy it was fairly easy for workers to move to another sector. Today's workforce is much more skilled. An unemployed web designer is unlikely to take a job running a bulldozer. Moreover, with up to two years unemployment benefits, office workers do not have an incentive to take a construction job. This means that infrastructure jobs will not help the economy as a whole.

Then there is the lag in starting infrastructure work. President Obama already found out that there are no "shovel ready" jobs. He's even joked about it. In the 1930s, if the government wanted a bridge, it bought the land, hired an engineer, and started work. These days, before work can start the government has to do a traffic study and an environmental impact study. There may be legal challenges to eminent domain. The contracts for designing and building the bridge have to be bid out. All of this adds years to a project and makes immediate economic relief impossible.

There is also the problem that the government does not actually create jobs because it does not have any income of its own. What it spends comes from others as taxes and loans. Taxes take money from one part of the economy and put it into another. Economists sometimes claim that there is a multiplier effect where the money the government spends generates additional economic activity, offsetting the taxes. This is controversial and almost impossible to prove one way or the other. This can be offset somewhat by financing the projects with bonds as long as the deficit is eventually addressed and as long as the downturn does not go on too long. This is where we are now. We have spent three years trying to offset a downturn with high deficits and our debt is rapidly getting out of control.

Which is where we are now - two years into a flat recovery with our quiver of Keynesian tools exhausted.

The modern Keynesians have an answer for this, of course - more of the same. Much more. Keynes didn't fail, it was the scope of the stimulus that failed. We need to spend trillions more in order to get the economy to take off. It doesn't matter if we can afford it. It has to be done.

But what if we continue to spend and nothing happens? That's what happened in the Great Depression (Yes, I know that FDR tried to cut the deficit in 1937 and brought on a new downturn. He also raised taxes and implemented Social Security early.) The sad truth is that the Keynesian's first instinct will probably make things worse.

The New Incivility

After the Giffords shooting the left rushed to blame the right's "hate speech" for inspiring it. At the same time then sprained their collective arms patting themselves on the back for their own tolerance. Of course it was all a crock. Just a few weeks before the shooting President Obama set the tone by calling Congressional Republicans "hostage-takers". Now that they lost the debt ceiling show-down, the left, starting with Vice President Biden, has taken to calling the Tea Party "terrorists". Do these guys even listen to themselves? But, why are they so angry? Why are they using such hostile terms? There are three factors.

Many of them are simply venting. They are angry. Not only did their man, Obama, fold again, but this was supposed to be a big win for them. The plan was to force the Republicans to pass some sort of tax increase, even a symbolic one. That would open a split between the moderate Republicans and the Tea Party that the Democrats could exploit. It was a promising tactic but it failed and they are frustrated because it did.

The next factor is how to explain their failure to their base. The left is using the excuse, "We couldn't help it, the other side is crazy."

The final factor is the set-up for the next battle. All along the left has insisted that the Tea Party is a fringe element and that the Democrats represent the mainstream. This is the classic "big lie". It doesn't matter if it is true or not. The idea is to keep repeating it until the general populous believes it. Many Democrats already believe it. The Tea Party has always been incomprehensible to people who see big government as the solution to all problems.

Put it all together and we get an incredible wave of vindictiveness.

The Debt Deal

The debt deal is a moderate change. It reduces the projected ten-year deficit from $10 trillion to $7.5 trillion with most of the cuts starting more than two years from now. It is mainly notable because Congress normally raises the debt ceiling without condition. The deal does not change the long-term deficit from unsustainable to sustainable, it does not fix the long-term problems with Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. It does not even cut spending noticeably before the next election. It was a triumph for the Tea Party mainly because it included some sort of cuts without an accompanying tax increase. Assuming that Congress follows through on its promises, it will slow the growth of government slightly over the next decade.

You would never know this after listening to the left. Democratic senators and Vice President Biden are alleged to have referred to their opponents as terrorists. Rep. Steve Cohen didn't mince words, he called it "evil". Paul Krugman compares the deal with a banana republic. His fellow NYT columnist, Joe Nocera, followed the Democrats' example and used "terrorists".

The main message from the fight is that the Tea Party has the momentum and discipline that the left was hoping Obama's election would provide the left. After the bruising and fruitless fight over health care, they have no more big issues. In his State of the Union address, President Obama listed liberal accomplishments and called for more of the same.

While many on the left mourn the days of great liberal advances and want to bring them back again, they have to face a truth. They have already won most of their battles and we are now struggling to pay the bills that they ran up. The fight to make the US more like  Europe looks a lot worse when you look at the state that Europe is currently in.

The real reason for the anguish from the left is that they see this as the first of many declines. The days of Hope and Change passed.

The President and the Rich

The relationship between President Obama and the "rich" is a strange one on both sides.

On the President's end, it starts with his definition. He has taken to referring to "millionaires and billionaires" but his low end includes people making $200,000-$250,000 per year (depending on marital status). A billionaire has 4,000-5,000 time the assets of this lower end.

Obama likes to include himself in this group. He regularly drops the phrase "like me" when talking about the rich. He is a millionaire, mainly through sales of his books. Before that he was a regular working stiff like the rest of us struggling to pay off college loans. Except, as a university professor married to a well-placed lawyer, he still probably qualified as rich under his own definition.

If you are rich then President Obama is sure that you have too much money. Some of it rightfully belongs to the government but was given away by the Bush Tax Cuts For the Rich (Bush cut everyone's taxes but Democrats always add the qualifier "for the rich"). Obama has no problems with the tax cuts that the rest of the country got under Bush, only the part that went to the rich.

This isn't an issue of fairness. Under the current system, around half of the country pays no income tax and some of that group gets money back from the IRS. The top 10% of wage-earners pay around half of the taxes. You might think that this constitutes a "fair share" (another term that the President likes to use). Possibly Obama's judgment on taxes has been warped by the involvement of George W. Bush. Like many on the Left, Obama reflexively hates anything that Bush touched.

Some of this is a knee-jerk reaction - how can we allow people to make so much money when there is widespread unemployment and misery? Many countries have tried equalizing income. It doesn't create prosperity.

While President Obama dislikes the rich in general, he saves special animosity for people in professions that he does not like. Bankers and investors are high on this list, especially if their income includes any sort of bonus. He tends to lump everyone on Wall Street together as being responsible for the Great Recession.

This is where things get complicated. President Obama dislikes Wall Street and everything it stands for but the Street loves him. Most of the campaign contributions in 2008 from people working on Wall Street went to Obama.

A few years ago someone wrote the book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" analyzing why the state votes Republican when the Democrats represent their true interests. I think that a good follow-up would be "What's the Matter with Wall Street?" The Democrats in general and Obama in particular hate Wall Street and everything it stands for but they keep supporting the Democrats over the Republicans.

The same thing happens in Hollywood but the entertainment industry never thinks of itself as rich.

The President has the same relationship with large corporations. He hates them and wants them taxed at a higher rate (even though the US corporate tax is already the highest in the world). These same corporations support Obama. This should come as no surprise since the large corporations are run by the same rich people who already have a dysfunctional relationship with the President.

There are rumors that this relationship is coming to an end, that the bankers and investors are getting tired of always being Obama's scapegoat. We will see what happens in 2012. At this point in 2003, Bush had raised more funds than Obama raised in 2011. Possibly Obama's wealthy donors are beginning to desert him.

Voting Reform

A column in the Washington Post by Katrina vanden Heuvel insists that there is no such thing as voter fraud and that Republicans are really engaged in disenfranchising citizens likely to vote Democrat. I will agree that the people most affected are likely to vote Democrat but I take issue with the rest of her column.

Is this a problem? vanden Heuvel quotes a report by the Brennan Center for Justice saying that it is not. She failed to mention that the Brennan Center is not apolitical. It receives funding from George Soros, a major supporter of the left. Their report assures us that voter fraud is extremely rare without revealing the methodology behind these statements.

One problem with evaluating voter fraud is trying to detect it. Often states only require proof of residency and that can be as simple as a utility bill. Notice that this does not establish citizenship.

My congressional district is a great example of why this is important. I live in the Ohio 15th. This include tens of thousands of (legal) immigrants who are not eligible to vote. It also includes tens of thousands of students who may also be voting absentee from their parents' residence.

The 2006 and 2008 elections in the 15th have been close. The 2006 election was settled by 1,054 votes out of over 200,000. The 2008 election was settled by 2,311. The 2000 presidential election was settled by slightly over 500 votes. Given these stakes, legitimate voters have the right to be assured that elections are not decided by people ineligible to vote.

Keep in mind that Democrats have their own history with unfounded problems. After the 2000 election, Congress tried to modernize voting machines. This hit a snag when Democrats insisted that the machines keep an auditable record of votes. The voting machine companies had to go back and redesign their machines.

During the 2004 campaign the founder of a voting machine company referred to doing whatever it takes to reelect George W. Bush. He said it at a fundraiser and obviously was referring to fund-raising but many Democrats took him literally. They assumed that the voting machines were programmed to shift votes to the Republicans. They took Bush's win as proof of this and spent the next several weeks looking for evidence. Ironically, they discovered that counties with older punch card readers were more likely to vote for Bush. They simply took this as proof that the conspiracy went back decades. Their new demand was that all voting machines be crapped in favor of optical mark paper ballots which would be tabulated at a central location. Minnesota followed these recommendations. The senate race was close enough to force a recount which drug on for months as both sides argued over what constituted a valid vote.

When arguing against voter id laws, the Democrats usually insist that certain groups do not have identification. This is hard to believe in the modern world. You have to have a suitable id to cash a check, open a bank account, rent an apartment, or even to buy liquor and cigarettes. Just exactly how do these people live without ids?

The truth is that the Democrats have a vested interest in getting non-citizens to vote and the Republicans have an interest in limiting voting to citizens. Any comparisons to Jim Crown laws are slanderous.

Captain America

I wasn't expecting a lot from Captain America. I disliked star Chris Evans in the Fantastic Four and advance hints about the plot were not encouraging. My wife expected even less. She knew nothing about the character except that her brother likes him.

The movie was a pleasant surprise. It is very enjoyable. Like Iron Man, some of the best parts come before the action when we are watching Steve Rogers. The German scientist  Dr. Erskine, who creates Captain America, is also fun to watch.

An interesting thing about this movie is how firmly it is embedded in the Marvel Universe, even though most of it takes place decades ago. I'm going to examine this with lots of spoilers. You have been warned.

When we first see the World of 1938 exhibit there is a glimpse of a figure dressed in red under a bell jar. This is the original Human Torch (who was actually an android). Howard Stark is either the father or grandfather of Tony Stark although the character is based on Howard Hughs. The movie opens with a few mentions of Asgard and Odin as the Skull seizes the Cosmic Cube.

What we think of as Marvel only published a few stories of Captain America during WWII. The company was called Timely in the 1940s and the style of stories written then does not lend itself to modern movies. The film-makers cheated a bit by combining Captain America with the WWII comics that Marvel actually did write - Sargent Fury and his Howling Commandos.

A side note here - Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had been doing the Sergent Fury comics for a while when the secret agent craze hit. Rather than create a new character to be a secret agent, they reused Fury, making him head of SHIELD. At the time it was quite reasonable that WWII sergeant could have risen to colonel and be chosen to lead an elite operation. The timing no longer works since the modern Fury would be in his 90s (in the comics it was explained that he was given a longevity drug).

What we end up with is Captain America doing double duty as himself and as the replacement leader of the Howlers. It makes more scense than the original comic books.

One place where this melding happens is with the Red Skull and Hydra. In the comics, the Hydra was founded by a villain from Sargent Fury and the Skull a Captain America villain. In the movie, the Skull is the head of Hydra. Also, during WWII, the Skull was just a regular person with a skull mask. His face was deformed after he was transferred into a clone of Steve Rogers, complete with Super Soldier enhancements.

Hydra itself is an interesting addition that I am sure was put in for the international crowd. The movie makes it clear that Captain America is saving Germany from Hydra along with the rest of the world. In fact, the movie completely glosses over the evils of fascism. This is possibly its biggest flaw. I assume that this was done for the European audience. At least the movie never lapses into Superman territory (Truth, Justice, and all that).

One big change between the comics and the movie is the character of Bucky Barnes. In the comics Bucky was a costumed teen-age sidekick. In the movie he is a full-grown adult and Cap's best friend.

It is jarring at the end when Cap is confronted by the 21st century. The character only frozen for 20 years in the comics but nearly 70 years in the movies. In the comics, Cap replaced his WWII sweetheart, Peggy Carter with her younger sister. Now he could be dating her granddaughter.

Things Democrats Say

There are a few things that I keep hearing from the left. These are repeated so often that I doubt that they even think about them.

Right now the big thing is to claim that the Republicans are threatening the economy with their inflexible demands. The thing here is that it takes two to have inflexible demands. The Republicans are demanding budget cuts without a tax increase. The Democrats are demanding a tax increase. The Republicans' demands are only inflexible if you accept the Democrats' position on continuing government growth.

A corollary is that the Republicans didn't care about the deficit under Bush. There is a little truth to this since Bush was a Republican and ran deficits. That is about as far as it goes. The truth is that Bush was fighting his own party over spending and the Bush deficits were nothing compared to the Obama deficits. The graph here shows that, except for 2009, Bush's deficits ran around 2% of the GDP while Obama's deficits are quite a bit higher. His lowest projected deficit is 4.1% GDP followed by years of increases. The chart here puts the Bush and Obama deficits into a 30-year perspective. The deficit is a concern because tax revenues are the lowest they have been in seven years and government spending is the highest it has been ever. The fact is that if Obama's deficits were as low as Bush's we would not be having this fight.

It should also be remembered that Bush had significant trouble getting the Medicare drug plan, No Child Left Behind, and the TARP passed. His party split on these and they only passed because of significant Democrat support.

The final thing that Democrats keep saying is that the Republicans have moved to the far right. This is rather silly considering that both the President and the Secretary of State were Marxists in college and followers of the Marxist writer Saul Alinsky (Obama's work as a community organizer was based on Alinsky's theories and Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis on Alinsky). Starting with Howard Dean in 2004, the Democrats moved to the left. Both Presidents Bush and Bill Clinton were centrists and both parties have abandoned the center. The Republicans only seem to have moved further to the right because the Democrats made their own move to the left earlier.

So Long Shuttle

I have to admit, I won't really miss the Space Shuttle. If a camel is a horse designed by committee, the Shuttle must have been their next assignment.

Prior to the Shuttle, astronauts jettisoned everything except for a small capsule which splashed down in an ocean and had to be recovered by an aircraft carrier. The Shuttle began as a design for a craft that could be controlled during reentry and land on a conventional airstrip. The early design used a dynamic lifting body (it could glide without wings) and had the code name "dynasore". A version of this piloted by Tony Stark made a cameo in a Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD comic in the mid-1960s.

Then the committee got a hold of it. It was bad PR to abandon so much of a spacecraft so NASA decided that their new craft would have as many reusable parts as possible. That included the rocket engine which was one of the most complex parts. At the same time, NASA was planning for a space station and wanted a space truck to ferry building material and personnel to and from orbit. The plan was to have something that could be quickly serviced and reused. Plans called for a fleet that could support monthly launches.

The Shuttle took shape. Budget cuts meant that it had to use an external fuel tank. This required a pair of solid state booster rockets to help get it off the ground. Once in the sky, it would roll onto its back so that the Shuttle could support the fuel tank. That is why the engines seem to point up at a strange angle.

This design led to the destruction of two shuttles and the death of their crews. It turned out that the booster rockets were sensitive to cold. When launched in freezing weather, an O-ring could fail allowing hot gas to burn through the booster and ignite the fuel in the main tank. Also, with the tank full of liquid oxygen strapped to the belly of the Shuttle, the inevitable ice that formed could (and did) hit the Shuttle, damaging the critical heat shielding.

For those worried about the suspension of manned American space shots, it happened in the 1970s, also. The Shuttle took longer to build than expected leaving a gap of several years without an American presence in space.

By the time the Shuttle launched, the space station that it was to service had been cut from the budget. NASA went ahead with the Shuttle on the theory that, as long as they had a space truck, they would eventually get approval for a station to fly to. In the meantime it struggled to find a mission. NASA offered it as a platform for launching satellites but had to subsidize launches in order to keep them competitive.

The concept of a reusable spacecraft making flights cheaper never really paid off. The Shuttle still needed expensive maintenance after every flight and an army of support staff. Just look at the news stories about unemployment on Florida's "Space Coast" to see where the real expense of operating the Shuttle went.

Also, the one-size-fits-all approach meant that the Shuttle was often bigger than required for a job. When every ounce adds high costs, this is a problem.

But the Shuttle's biggest problem is that it never became safe and reliable. With two shuttles destroyed out of 135 missions, it is one of the most dangerous vehicles in use in decades. The problems that destroyed the Columbia were never solved, only minimized.

The Shuttles are vehicles conceived of  in the 1960s, designed in the 1970s and built in the 1970s & 1980s. They are overdue for retirement. Operating the Shuttles as long a they did kept NASA concentrated on low-earth orbit instead of deep space exploration. Here's hoping that they return to their roots.

Did the stimulus work?

David Weigel of Slate asks if the stimulus failed. His answer is no but his reasoning needs further scrutiny. He starts by quoting an estimate that jobs created by the stimulus cost $278,000 each then follows up with:

The analysis that the Weekly Standard tore apart found that the stimulus increased employment by about 400,000 jobs in the first quarter after it went into effect, and increased it by about 2.7 million at its peak. If you're deriding the price tag for those jobs, you're acknowledging that the jobs exist.

He does admit that the bill was oversold but excuses that:

At his most optimistic, he (President Obama) said the stimulus would be a success if it "created or saved" 4 million jobs. It fell far short of that. But ambitious, expensive bills have fallen short before, and it hasn't discredited their reasons to exist. George W. Bush's tax cuts were supposed to balance the budget by 2010. That hasn't happened, obviously, but tax cuts have not been discredited—in fact, they're central to the discussion about how to dig out of the recession now.

This is an interesting piece of logic. Yes, Bush's budget projections said that the budget would be balanced by now which did not happen but tax cuts were only a small part of the reason. No one projected the economic disruption caused by 9/11, two wars, and a housing boom. Taking a longer view, tax cuts have produced results in the past but stimulus packages never have. The Obama Administration promised that this time would be different. The question here is not if the Bush tax cuts worked. The only question is if the Obama stimulus worked.

Weigel insists that it did and insists that the real problem was getting the message out.

So, did it work? At $278,000/job, or even the lower estimate of $180,000/job then you have to accept that only a fraction of the money spent went to jobs. Can a program that wasted most of its money be considered a success?

But this still ignores the main point. The stimulus was supposed to stimulate the economy. Did it do that? Considering current unemployment figures, it did a terrible job of that.

The dirty little secret of the stimulus is that it was never expected to do much. The White House's projections showed that the recession would end on its own in the Summer of 2009 followed by a steep recovery. The expectation was that things would start getting noticeably better right about the time that the stimulus really kicked in.

The stimulus was roughly divided into three parts. It had a short-term bail-out for cash-strapped states and cities to tide them over until the economy recovered, it had a small tax break for lower-earners. The rest was pork barrel projects. The "shovel ready projects" were never more than a small part and, as the President now admits, never existed.

The real question is why we are even having this conversation? The recession did end on schedule (which means that the stimulus did not save us from a depression) but the recovery has been exceedingly weak. Obviously the stimulus accomplished very little.

The Debt Limit - what's really going on

Currently the government borrows $0.40 out of every dollar it spends. The total amount that the Treasury is allowed to borrow is the debt limit and is set by Congress. Typically when the Treasury gets close to the debt limit, Congress raises it. Sometimes there are some speeches about how the government needs to get its house in order and stop borrowing. Senator Barrack Obama gave one of those speaches in 2006. The limit was raised anyway.

Why are things different now? There are three parties involved, each with their own agenda.

First are the Congressional Republicans. They came to office with an ambitious agenda but they only control the House. This is their big club to force the Senate and the White House to compromise. They have taken a lot of criticism from the left about being too radical but many of them are following the wishes of their electorate. The ones in swing districts worry that they will lose if they agree to a deal that includes tax increases.

Next are the Congressional Democrats. Some of them are ideologically motivated. They believe that the rich are not paying enough taxes and will not agree to any deal that does not include tax increases. The rest of the Democrats are trying to discredit the Republicans by including tax increases. That is why meaningless increases like depreciation on corporate jets have entered the conversation. When talking about the trillions of deficit over the next decade, $3 billion is not even a rounding error but it keeps coming up.

So far the Democrats are winning the public relations battle but they are not fighting fair. It is easy to gain public support when your polls are disingenuous. For example, Medicare as it currently exists cannot continue. There is not enough money. But, rather than present two ways of reforming it, they phrase the choice as being between the Ryan plan and the current system. The rich do not make enough money to solve the deficit but they ask if people would favor tax increases on someone else (the "rich") over cutting programs.

The final party in the debt negotiations is the newest - President Obama. The states are high for him. As things stand now, he has no accomplishments to run on for reelection. Unemployment it likely to be 8% or higher. He is not going to win in Afghanistan. The best he can hope for there is to have a no more troops stationed there than when he took office. Obamacare continues to be controversial and may be declared unconstitutional by the election. Regardless, most of it will not even go into effect until after the election.

That is why Obama is pressing for a Grand Plan that will include $4 trillion in deficit reduction and changes to Social Security and Medicare to keep them solvent. If he can accomplish that with Republican assistance, then he has a shot at reelection.

And that is why the stakes are so high. Each side is fighting for political advantage.

Democracy and Big Government

Matt Miller of the Washington Post has a column bemoaning the current state of government. He attributed this to the lowering standards of democracy and compares it to a moral erosion:

In 1993, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a brilliant essay in the American Scholar in which he argued that America was "defining deviancy down" — that is, lowering standards as to what comprised normal (as opposed to aberrant) behavior in ways that skewed society's proper judgments. His addictive phrase spawned a cottage industry thereafter of things the country has been "defining down." But I'd wager that if Moynihan were here today he'd agree that the way we're defining democracy itself down is among the most depressing collapses we face.

The problem, according to Miller, is that our leaders now congratulate themselves when they avoid catastrophe instead of doing big things.

Once upon a time Americans could come together through government and create universal public education, build interstate highways, bring security to old age through Social Security and Medicare, and nurture the most dynamic economy on Earth.

Do you see the problem here? Miller's goals have nothing to do with democracy. Our interstate highways were inspired by Hitler's. Social Security and Medicare are not products of a democracy. After all, our democracy along for 150 years without Social Security and nearly 190 years without Medicare. These are not products of democracy, they are products of big government. Miller even gives China a passing mention as an example of what we should be doing.

At its heart, Miller's complaint is not about democracy. He is bemoaning the limits of government. This is ironic because the current crisis is caused by our inability to pay for the very programs that inspire Miller. Miller is just a progressive who missed out on the glory days of FDR and LBJ. It's always more fun spending the money than paying the bill but that's no excuse to go shopping again.

Gay Marriage

Let's be honest about gay marriage - both sides have valid points. I will start with the opponents.

The big argument against gay marriage is that once the one man/one woman definition is abandoned it is impossible to draw the line. As Rick Santorum pointed out, polygamy and adultery are sure to follow. Others have taken a softer stance but even in President Obama's "evolved" view, marriage should be reserved for one man/one woman unions with civil partnerships for other relationships.

They are absolutely right. Once you change the definition of marriage once there is no reason not to do so again.

But here's the counter-argument - these unions already exist so why not recognize them? My daughter is in a civil partnership and I know people in a polygamous relationship. This is the pro-gay marriage argument and it is hard to refute.

The other argument against redefining marriage is "What bout the sanctity of marriage?" Won't this hurt it? This one used to bother me. Traditional marriage is in trouble. Wouldn't a redefinition of what marriage is destroy it completely?

The reason that this no longer bothers me is that the sanctity of marriage no longer exists. In my lifetime, two presidents (JFK and Clinton) have had affairs in the White House. At least one vice-president (Gore) and an almost vice-president (Edwards) have also had affairs. Plus the former Speaker of the House (Gingrich) and the governors of multiple states (Schwarzenegger is just the most recent). If our elected officials don't recognize the sanctity of marriage then why should the rest of us?

In fact, the rest of the country does not care much about marriage. For the first time ever, the census reports that more couples are living together than are married. The number of women having children out of wedlock, and to multiple fathers, keeps increasing. Many poor women see marriage as something to aspire to in the future.

The one thing that might save, or at least strengthen, marriage would be an influx of committed couples who want to be married. In the short run, at least, gay marriage is likely to strengthen the institution rather than weaken it.

Cars 2 and Alternate Fuel

Warning - This whole post is going to be a major spoiler about Cars 2.

Here's the set-up for Cars 2 - a wealthy car (all of the characters in this movie are intelligent vehicles) converts to "green", converting himself to electric power and inventing a new alternate fuel. In order to publicize the new fuel, he sponsors a set of races. The competitors will use the new fuel.

The villains, a collections of lemons like the AMC Pacer, found that the new fuel becomes explosive under special conditions. They use a modified TV camera to cause race cars to blow up, discrediting the new fuel. In the meantime, the lemons control the world's biggest unexploited oil field so they will get rich by scaring cars away from the new fuel.

Big Oil vs the Environment. And the good guys have to prove that the alternate fuel is safe. Typical liberal message-movie, right?

But wait - it turns out that there is no miracle alternate fuel. It is just regular gas with some additions to make it explosive. And the head villain is the car who sponsored the races in the first place. He never converted to electric and the whole plot was just meant to discourage research into alternate fuels.

So the car who represents alternate fuel also represents Big Oil. That really messes up the message.

Actually, the whole alternate fuel plot was nothing more than an excuse to drive the movie.

President Obama and the Corporate Jets

In his first full press conference in three months, President Obama listed tax breaks for corporate jets as an unacceptable tax give-away for the rich. To make sure he got his message across, he mentioned them five more times. The current Democratic leadership hated corporate jets. The first time the CEOs of GM and Chrysler came to Washington for a bail-out they were turned away, partly because they used corporate jets.

So what is this horrible tax loophole? It is something called accelerated depreciation. When a corporation buys a piece of equipment it can deduct the cost from its taxable earnings but it has to spread the deduction across the equipment's expected lifespan. This is called depreciation. Accelerated depreciation means that a corporation can take a larger deduction up front making the equipment cheaper to buy, at least for the short-term.

The deduction was passed in order to make buying jets more attractive. The figuring was that this would give a boost to the corporate jet makers who are mainly domestic.

So, where did this deduction come from? Is it part of the hated Bush Tax Cuts For The Rich?

No. It was part of the stimulus which was passed by the Democrats and signed into law by President Obama.

Why is the President trash-talking his own deduction? Because it makes a convenient sound-bite.

The movement to repeal this tax break reminds me a little of the George H. W. Bush yacht tax. In an effort to reduce the deficit, Congress passed and Bush signed a luxury tax on yachts. The idea was that these are rich men's toys and billionaires can afford to pay a bit more to own them.

That isn't how it worked out. It turns out that most boat sales are to middle-class boat-lovers. These people save up a down payment and finance the rest. The tax doubled the down payment which either made the buyers switch to a cheaper boat or give up completely. The boat-making industry was hit hard and the tax ended up costing much more in lost income tax than it raised.

If the corporate jet deduction is actually effective then repealing it will hurt the domestic jet industry.

But that's ok because they are making toys for the rich.

Solomon and Obama

Back when National Lampoon magazine was still around and funny, they had a cartoon on "Great moments in justice" with two women leaving Solomon's court, each carrying a half child. The joke was that this was the worst possible result.

In his desire to render Solomonic judgment on Afghanistan, President Obama did a similar split. One side wants the troops out as soon as possible. The other wants them to remain as long as the Taliban is active. The President compromised by promising to withdraw around a third of the troops by the next election.

Honestly, the President is in a tough position. There is no evidence that the Taliban will ever give up or be totally defeated. The war will be ten years old this Fall with no real end in sight. The President's strongest supporters are expecting him to wrap the war up quickly and the general public is tired of casualty reports and stories about separated families.

On the other hand, a quick pullout will likely throw away the gains of the last two years (when Obama, in an imitation of Solomon, sent half the troops that the Pentagon requested). After insisting that Afghanistan is the "good war", Obama does not want to be the president who lost it.

A stronger president would choose sides and make his case. He could point out that we were after al Qaeda, not the Taliban. With Osama dead and al Qaeda dispersed, there is nothing to gain by a lengthy conflict with the Taliban. This is the "declare victory and go home" option. Or he could insist that Islamic extremism cannot be allowed to regain a foothold and that we will stay until Afghanistan has a strong government, no matter how long that might take.

But, Obama is a "split the difference" president so we will pull out some troops but leave a substantial force behind.

I doubt that this will help him politically. Neither side is happy with his solution.

Obama, Libya, and the War Powers Act

In the wake of Viet Nam, it became obvious that World War II would be the last declared war. For political reasons, Korea and Viet Nam were never declared. In an effort to escape blame for an unpopular war, Congress pointed at the Presidency and essentially said, "He did it." The public was supposed to infer that Congress's hands were clean because they had not actually approved the war.

At the same time, they passed the War Powers Act in an effort to stop future Viet Nam's. The idea was that the President could not start a conflict and allow it to drag on indefinitely on his own authority. He had to get Congressional approval. To allow for emergencies, the President was allowed 60-90 days to get the approval.

President Nixon vetoed the act but it was passed over his veto. Since then, every president who engaged in protracted hostilities (Reagan, both Bushes, and Clinton) at least paid lip service to the act.

Depending on your reading of it, the law may infringe on the President's authority as commander in chief. Regardless, it provides convenient political cover in case a conflict turns sour. George W. Bush was able to point to leading Democrats' votes authorizing the invasion of Iraq.

We are passed the point in Libya where President Obama should have made his pitch to Congress and asked for authorization to continue the action. His reason for not doing this was that American servicemen are not actually in danger so this does not count as hostilities. In taking this stand, he ignored the advice of a team of lawyers.

This is the part that confuses me. It is pretty much a given that Obama could have a resolution supporting the action in Libya if he asked for one. So why didn't he? Why is he using twisted logic to justify going alone?

There are several ways that Libya could go wrong politically. The current stalemate could continue allowing Gaddafi to stay in power after Obama said that he must go. Gaddafi could mount a new offensive, suppressing the rebels and, again staying in power. Or the worst could happen and Gaddafi's government could disintegrate leaving us with yet another nation to rebuild. The ideal resolution, Gaddafi leaving office but leaving behind a strong enough government to assure honest elections, is unlikely.

Clearly it would be in President Obama's best interests to have some prominent Republicans vote in favor of continued operations. That could neutralize what could otherwise turn into a major issue in next year's campaign. It is also giving the Republicans a chance to distance themselves from the Bush-era image as a the party of war-mongers.

In the meantime, even Democrats and liberals are attacking Obama on his failure to comply with the War Powers Act. Unless he acts soon this will become a millstone around his neck.

How far right?

Possibly the most commonly heard phrase from the Democrats is about how far the Republicans have moved to the right. They often point out that Ronald Reagan would not be welcome in the party today. Is this correct or even fair? I don't think so.

Before I talk about the Republicans, let's look at the Democrats. They have not stood still. Ralph Nader entered the race in 2000 as a protest to the Clinton years. He insisted that there wasn't a dime's worth of different between the two parties. Despite Nader's pronouncement, Gore ran to the left of Clinton, launching a campaign based on class-warfare.

In 2004 John Edwards and Howard Dean energized the party's left. Kerry got the nomination but Dean chaired the party and made it his goal to move it to the left by recruiting progressive candidates.

In 2008 there was no doubt that the three leaders - Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Edwards - were the most radical candidates since McGovern. Obama had been a communist in college (he says so in Dreams From My Father). Hillary wrote her thesis on the communist community organiser, Sol Alinsky. Edwards continued his own version of class warfare.

With Obama's election along with Democratic majorities in both houses, Progressives vowed that a new age had come.

So, the middle moved substantially to the left between Clinton and Obama regardless of anything the Republicans did.

Then there was George W. Bush. I remember ten years ago progressive blogger Eric Alterman insisting that Bush was far more conservative than they expected - "even worse than Reagan!"

In fact, Bush was nothing of the sort. He was a big-government Republican. Prior to 9/11, his biggest accomplishments were expansions of government - the Medicare Drug Plan and No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Both passed with bi-partisan support. Ted Kennedy was a major supporter of NCLB. Other than pushing through some tax cuts, Bush's record was as a strong moderate. The size of government grew instead of shrunk under him.

So, if you define the middle as being between Bush and Obama then, yes, the Republicans have moved to the right. But by this measure, Bill Clinton comes out on the right.

So, what does it mean when Democrats complain about the Republicans moving to the right? They are not complaining about foreign affairs. Obama adopted most of Bush's foreign policy while the Republicans are growing tired of the cost of foreign wars. The Republican challengers sound more like Democrats than Obama when talking about Afghanistan or Libya. The Democrats have also upheld the Patriot Act and other measures they objected to under Bush.

What's left? The size of government and how to reduce debt. The big complaint is that the Republicans are not willing to raise taxes. More specifically, the complaint is that they are not willing to soak the rich.

This is not new. One of the things Reagan is remembered for is flattening the tax rates. Mondale ran on a platform of raising taxes in 1984 and lost. In 1988, George H. W. Bush ran on the platform "Read my lips. No new taxes." He won that election. After breaking that pledge he lost in 1992. Clinton raised taxes and won reelection with a plurality but more than half the country voted against him. The message the Republicans see in all of that is that voters do not want their taxes increased.

Shrinking government, or at least slowing its increase, has also been party mainstream since Reagan. Bush (43) was the exception to that but the Republicans have simply returned to a long-held position. Remember that after the Republicans took Congress in 1994, even Bill Clinton declared that "the era of big government is over".

What has changed is the nature of the nation's problems. The deficit is unsustainable. Programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are growing so fast that they will crowd out all other non-military spending in the foreseeable future. The Republicans are offering solutions to these problems. Rather than engaging with them, the Democrats are ignoring the real problems and accusing the Republicans of wanting to throw seniors over a cliff (literally in one ad).

The truth is that the Republicans have returned to traditional positions but the Democrats have move so far to the left that the Republicans are now incomprehensible to them.

Voting and politics

E. J. Dionne has a new column that accuses Republicans of trying to rig elections through changes to voting laws. This is a very disingenuous column.

Election laws have to straddle the line between making sure that everyone who is qualified to vote can cast a ballot and preventing election fraud. For the last few decades, Democrats have been trying to make it easier to vote. They are not doing this out of magnanimity. They are convinced that this will give them an advantage at the polls.

Keep in mind that many Democrats see themselves as the protector of the common man. They are convinced that most voters should recognize this and vote in their own self-interest. Their preferred voter does not care about candidates or issues. He only goes to the polls to vote a straight party ticket. If you bring issues into it then voters get confused. That is what President Obama was talking about when he referred to poor people in Pennsylvania "clinging to guns and religion".

Democratic efforts have included "get out the vote" initiatives where non-voters are rounded up and bussed to the polls where they can register and vote Democratic.

But, the reforms that the Democrats have pushed to make it easier to get people to vote also make it easier to cheat. Once the new voters have been herded onto a bus there is little to stop the organizers from taking them to multiple polling places. There are reports of this happening although it has never been verified by an outside investigator.

The reforms that the Republicans are pushing are fairly simple. You can't just show up and vote. You have to have an official ID proving that you are who you way you are and some proof that you actually live in the precinct. Democrats insist that this is fixing a non-existent problem. They point out that convictions for voter fraud are almost non-existent. Their argument is not as solid as it appears. It is almost impossible to even find someone who voted under a false id. A few years ago NBC found that tens of thousands of people voting from both their summer and winter residences at the same time. This is fairly easy to track but the states don't bother to do even that much.

Note, Dionne complains that student IDs are not accepted in Texas. He sees it as an attempt to disenfranchise a group that votes Democrat. Since many students are also listed under their parents' address, I see this as a reasonable attempt at preventing double-voting.

This is the conflict in a nutshell. Dionne rails against any barriers to voting, calling up visions of racial discrimination. It is true that our nation erected barriers to keep women and minorities from voting. At the same time, we also have a long history of election fraud. There are still people who believe that Nixon won the vote but lost Illinois due to ballot-box stuffing in Chicago.

Ironically, the movement to clean up elections was part of the Progressive movement of a century ago. The Progressives believed that they would win in open, honest elections. The modern Progressives don't have the same faith in the honest elections as their predecessors.

Obama's Wars

It's kind of shocking when you realize how many conflicts we are currently engaged in. Although US service men are not always in harm's way, people are dying in these conflicts - mainly enemies of our nation but also some innocents.

Here's the list.

Iraq - President Obama inherited this one from Bush. It was covered by the War Powers Act although the various Democratic candidates who voted for it have spent the last seven years trying to backtrack from it. As conflicts go, this one is fairly good at the moment. The country is stable and US soldiers are more likely to die from a traffic accident than from enemy actions.

Afghanistan - "The good war". This is another one that Obama inherited but it is not going so well. After a surge of troops, Obama wants to draw down the troops. The Pentagon wants to keep them for another couple of years. Relations with the Afghanistan government have deteriorated. They don't trust Obama.

Pakistan - This is a continuation of the war in Afghanistan. Again, things are not going as well as they might. Relations with the Pakistani government have cooled quite a bit since we discovered bin Laden in a suburb. At the same time, the Pakistani government is growing tired of being treated as a client state.

Libya - Exactly what is our role in Libya and is it covered by the War Powers Act? That is being hotly debated between the White House and Congress. The Obama administration argues that, as long as Americans are not coming under fire, we are not engaged in hostilities. Congress counters by pointing out that the effort is commanded by an American officer (on loan to NATO) and we seem to be engaged in regime change. Some reports say that we have a more direct role than in being reported and our allies are asking for us to expand our role.

Yemen - We are engaged in a covert war in support of the government against Islamic extremists. We are mainly using unmanned drones so, again, no Americans are in harm's way.

Somalia - We have covert troops training and assisting a new government. We are also hunting down al Qeda operatives. This is mainly a "boots on the ground" action and I bet yuo didn't know about it.

That's the complete list that I know of but I only learned about Somalia from an article in Wired. This is considered to be the model for the future - an outsourced war that gets little press coverage, costs little, and does not require Congressional approval under the Obama definition of the War Powers Act. Expect this list to grow in the near future.

Sunspots

Just a couple of days ago it was announced that the sun seems to be cooling. The speculation was that this could be similar to the "Maunder Minimum" of the 17th and 18th centuries. This is usually given as the cause for a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age.

Sounds like we should forget about carbon taxes doesn't it?

Not so, says Michael Mann. Mann insists that it was a total coincidence that the Little Ice Age coincided with the Maunder Minimum. Volcanoes were to blame instead.

What goes unsaid is that Mann has a conflict of interest. His professional career has been built on the proposition that the main driver of climate change is CO2. Never mind that the only source of light and heat in the solar system is the sun, it is irrelevant to climate, according to Mann. He can prove it, too. He cites an article in Science magazine. Although, he wrote the article so he is citing himself.

Actually it is a major concession for him to admit that there was a Little Ice Age. He first came to prominence when he presented his reconstruction of historic climate to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It showed a fairly steady climate until the start of the Industrial Revolution. After that the global temperature rose rapidly. The chart is known as the Hockey Stick which it vaguely resembles. At that time the Little Ice age was dismissed as a phenomenon local to Europe.

Since then research has shown that the Little Ice Age was global. The idea of decades-long volcanic eruptions altering the climate is Mann's attempt to allow for a terrestrial explanation for the Little Ice Age.

So, Mann is hardly an unbiased source to evaluate the meaning of new solar activity.

Greeen or Greenwash?

The Washington Post has a column by Stephen Stromberg asking "How to get Republicans to go green?" I'm going to challenge most of his assumptions. A lot of what is being proposed is not "green" in that it does not really reduce carbon dioxide emissions. It is "greenwashing" - something that does little good but makes us feel like we are doing something. An example of this is unplugging chargers when they are not being used. It is true that they continue to draw power but the total savings are almost unnoticeable.

Stromberg mentions green energy as a means for energy independence and as a jobs program. The jobs argument is easily dismissed. Spain, a leader in green energy, found that two jobs were destroyed for every green job created. Green jobs require high government subsidies in order to even exist.

Energy independence is a more complicated issue. Green energy usually means wind and solar. Both of these take up large amounts of land. They also have their own effect on the environment. The noise from windmills makes it impossible for humans to live near them and may also affect wildlife. Also, these technologies require rare earth metals which currently come from China and are being treated as a strategic resource. We don't want to exchange one dependency for another.

Wind and solar have other problems. Obviously solar power only works during the day. Wind power is less reliable. None of the wind farms built to date have produced the expected amount of power. There are too many days where the wind is too light or too strong. That means that we have to have traditional generators as backups for wind power. This is a huge expense.

If energy independence was the goal then we would be including everything - nuclear power, deep water drilling, oil sands, coal, and natural gas. The Green lobby objects to all of these. Even clean-burning natural gas has come under attack after an Oscar-winning documentary.

Electric cars, the darling of the Greens, are also suspect. Between the carbon plume for the batteries and the carbon emissions of power plants, they do not really reduce CO2 emissions.

Stromberg suggests a carbon tax to be offset by other corporate tax breaks. Previous efforts at negotiating cap and trade degenerated into corporate cronyism. This is likely to do the same. Favored companies and industries will get large tax breaks. Small businesses and companies with ineffective lobbyists will foot the bill.

All of this pales next to the big question, is the world warming? Forbes recently ran a column pointing out that temperatures flattened out over the last decade. More important, all of the global warming models predict a rise in upper air moisture which become the actual driving force for warming. This has not happened.

We might even be headed for global cooling instead of warming. Three different government bodies announced that the current solar cycle is not behaving as expected. The sun seems to be going into a cool phase. The last time this happened is associated with a period known as the Little Ice Age. We may want a nice warming blanket of CO2 to hold in what heat we have.

Weiner Should Go

Representative Weiner sent numerous photographs of himself to complete strangers. Some of them were suggestive. Others were explicit. Is that enough that he should resign from office? After all, President Clinton took phone calls while being serviced by an intern. Is Weiner worse than that?

Yes. Weiner is an exhibitionist. He exposes himself to strangers. If he was doing in person what he has been doing electronically he would be arrested and charged with a misdemeanor. In some states he would end up on a sex offender list. In contrast, Clinton had an affair. That is disgraceful but not illegal. Side note - Clinton was not impeached for having an affair. He was impeached for lying under oath.

But that is not the real reason that Weiner should go. He should resign for the good of his party. Following a win in a special election, the Democrats were planning a full assault on the Republicans over Medicare. They already have ads made talking about how the Republicans want to destroy Medicare. It doesn't matter that the various fact-checking organizations have ruled these ads outrageous.

But none of that has happened because no one is paying any attention to the Democrats when they talk about issues. All the press wants to talk about is Weiner. If Weiner resigned then the stories would stop. In the meantime, the Democrats cannot get a word in edgewise.

The Limits of Economics

Today's Washington Post has a column on the economy by Larry Summers, a former member of President Obama's economic team. In it he talks about how the President's policies saved the country from economic collapse and what is needed to continue the recovery.

The big question is why anyone would listen to a word that Summers or any of the President's other advisors says? A bit over two years ago they projected how bad the recession would be with and without a stimulus and what the recovery would look like. They got everything wrong. The measures they took to stimulate the economy also failed. The economy stalled after the so-called QE2 instead of picking up.

The problem is that no one really understands economics. It is one of those chaos systems where there are too many inputs to even be identified to say nothing of tracked.

Economists think that they understand the economy but, unlike the hard sciences, they cannot test their assumptions in a lab. They can only observe the economy and come up with a theory that attempts to explain what happened. Even there, economists often come to different conclusions.

In addition, social policy has become heavily intertwined with economics. Take the year 1937. Paul Krugman wants to see more government spending. When he looks at 1937 he sees that FDR became worried about the deficit and took measures to reduce it, causing a recession. According to Krugman, the Great Depression would have ended if FDR had just kept spending.

But, a recent column by Amity Shales points out that other things also happened in 1937. The Social Security tax started and the Wagner Act was implemented which caused the number of strikes nationwide to more than double. This caused millions of lost hours of work. Could these have been a stronger factor in the recession than FDR's deficit reduction?

Several years ago, Christina Romer, another of Obama's former advisers, wrote a paper saying that government stimulus programs never worked. They either arrive too late or they are targeted at the wrong parts of the economy. After joining Team Obama, she reversed herself, justifying Obama's stimulus program. Would she have reversed herself if she had not joined the government?

Everyone agrees that government spending has an effect on the economy but there is a lot of disagreement on what that effect is. Obama's advisers believe that the effect is around 160%. Every dollar spent causes $1.60 in increased spending in the economy. Other economists believe that the effect is 60%. Every dollar spent caused $0.60 in economic activity. This is an important issue. Does government spending cause the economy to grow by 60% or to shrink by 40%? No one can say for certain.

I have been seeing a drumbeat of columnists insisting the the stimulus worked and that we need a new one, bigger if possible. Again, none of these people can really say if a new stimulus will work. I'm sure that they really think so but that is not the same thing as proving it.

The one thing that we know for certain - we will have to pay interest on every dollar borrowed to pay for new stimulus spending.

Yemen?

We're at war in Yemen? According to a wire service report the US is intensifying drone attacks in Yemen. That's in addition to Bush's two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, and Obama's war in Libya. Granted, we are drawing down troops in Iraq and plan to draw them down in Afghanistan. Still, we are making 1/4 of the air strikes in Libya and our allies are pushing for us to increase that. Our involvement there has gone far beyond establishing a no-fly zone. Instead we are trying to overthrow the Libyan government.

In Yemen we seem to be trying to prop up a crumbling government against rebels allied with al-Qaeda.

I thought that the Democrats were the party of peace. Or at least the party of the War Powers Act.

Is there a right to buy a home that you cannot afford?

It has been a long time since I bought a house. When I did there were fairly tight standards about how large the down-payment had to be and how large the monthly payment could be in relation to your monthly income. The housing bubble and the corresponding mortgage crisis were direct results of waiving those standards.

In the wake of that crisis new standards have been proposed. To get a premium loan you will have to put down 20% down-payment and payments cannot exceed 1/3 of your income. These are important.

The down-payment is to keep people from walking away from their loans. It is one thing to default on a zero-down home because is it worth less than your loan. You are not losing anything. If you had to put up a big down-payment then you would be leaving that behind. It also reduces the amount of your loan so that your house could lose 20% of its value and still be worth the amount of the loan.

The requirement that payments cannot exceed 1/3 of income is even more basic. This makes sure that you can afford the payments.

If you don't qualify for a premium loan then you still might be able to get one but it would not be as attractive to you or the bank. On your end you would probably have to pay higher interest. The bank would have more trouble selling the loan so they would have an incentive to be selective about who they grant loans to.

These regulations should be obvious but there are objections.

If this rule goes through as it stands, the demographic of borrowers who get (favorable rates) will be white and wealthy," said David Stevens, chief executive officer of the Mortgage Bankers Association and former commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration. "African-American, Latino and first-time home buyers will be charged higher prices.

This raises the question, is it a right (or even desirable) to get a mortgage that you cannot afford? The Clinton administration seemed to think that there is such a right which is why the loan requirements were waived in the first place. The Bush administration continued this practice.

So, why is this a good thing? I know that "the American Dream" is supposed to include owning a house but historically more than a third of the nation rented. We got into trouble when we tried to change that proportion. Why keep encouraging people in self-destructive behavior?

The President and the Economy

The economy continues to slump. President Obama has around a year to turn it around. That will give people enough time to recognize a robust economy and for him to campaign on it. If things do not improve by the Summer of 2012 then he will be in the same position as George H. W. Bush. The mild recession of 1992 actually ended before the election but economists didn't announce that until early 1993. That let Clinton take credit for the recovery.

Obama will not be able to renew his "Hope and Change" campaign. Sitting president have to run on their record. Obama's foreign policy is too close to Bush's to win an election. Rather than removing troops from Iraq as fast as they could march, he continued Bush's policies. He escalated Afghanistan without much to show for it. the excitement over killing bin Laden has already faded. His promise to make America popular again never panned out. Obamacare continues to be divisive. That leaves the economy as the issue that will decide the election.

The current economy is in much worse shape than the one in 1992. Policies were put in place by Clinton and continued by George W. Bush to encourage home ownership. As a result, the percentage of families owning their home rose from an average in the low 60 percentage range to the high 60s. In addition, a lot of other people bought houses that were more expensive than they could afford. That created the housing bubble and caused a host of other problems. Things will not improve until housing values and ownership work back to where they would have been without the bubble. This process is still going on and will continue.

A big portion of the economy in the 2000s depended on new housing. This started with the actual home builders and mortgage companies but included every business that makes or sells the things needed to outfit a new home. So that portion of the economy will not recover in time to help Obama.

Obama has spent the last two and a half years blaming the Bush administration for the recession. Unfortunately the man in the Oval Office is held responsible for the economy. That allowed Clinton to take credit for a recovery that predated him but it also means that Obama will be held responsible for economic problems in 2012.

It doesn't help that his policies have probably hurt the economy. His stimulus package didn't stimulate. A large portion of it went for tax breaks that were so small, most people didn't notice them. Most of the rest went to keep cities and states from laying off government workers.

Obamacare has probably hurt employment although it is hard to tell. Most of it has not gone into effect and thousands of waivers have been issued. Still, it increases the future cost of employing someone so it is unlikely to have helped.

The Obama administration has pursued a weak dollar policy. This is another continuation of the Bush administration but there is a difference. The idea is to reduce the value of the dollar overseas. This makes imported goods more expensive and encourages people to buy American. It also makes American products cheaper overseas and encourages exports. This might work in a strong economy but the rest of the world has its own problems. There are no strong markets to sell to. The main result of the weak dollar is to make imports cost more. That is one big reason the price of gasoline has gone up. It hurts food prices, also.

The Administration was counting on pent-up consumer demand to drive a the recovery. It worked for a while but rising costs, especially on gasoline, are causing consumers to cut back. This represents a failure of Obama policies.

The rest of Obama's economic plans are closer to crony capitalism than anything else. Businesses and industries that the President favors are given advantages or even direct subsidies. Others are left to fend for themselves.

The automotive industry is a perfect example of this. There are only two US-owned large car-makers - GM and Ford. Chrysler went from being German-owned to American-owned before Obama sold it to the Italians. Honda and Toyota are Japanese-owned but most of the cars sold in the US are made here by American workers. Of these five companies, GM and Chrysler were given billions in grants and loans (they paid the loans back but not the grants). Ford was offered assistance but refused it. Toyota was hit with a major recall.

Even allowing for the fact that the two Japanese companies were in better financial shape, it still looks like the Obama administration was favoring unionized manufacturers over non-unionized ones.

This example holds true in general. The Obama administration has given huge subsidies to industries like trains, wind and solar power that are unlikely to ever show any return. At the same time, it has crippled the oil industry.

The Obama Administration's love of picking winners and losers means that only a few parts of the economy are able to grow and even this is distorted by government money. In the 1970s and 1980s, Britain and the US reviewed regulations and rewrote the ones that kept businesses from hiring. The Obama administration would never even think of doing something like that. Their answer for everything is more government, not less.

While big pieces of the economy are beyond the Administration's control, the Obama administration has failed to properly manage the pieces that it does control.

A Debt-based Economy?

Reading columns by Paul Krugman is always an education. It's not what he says that is illuminating, it is what you learn from picking apart his arguments.

He has written several columns against the austerity measures being undertaken by several countries. His reasoning is that none of the measures enacted so far have brought prosperity so austerity is discredited.

Where to start with this one? Austerity is needed because of previous excesses. Countries such as Greece have run up such a debt that they cannot keep borrowing. There is a real danger that they will default on their current debt so no one wants to give them any further loans except with unaffordable interest rates. For these countries, austerity will not make things better. Services and social programs will have to be cut. This will be painful but not as painful as the crash that will occur if they don't make these cuts now.

Think of a family budget. You have been spending more than you earn for some time. You can stop eating out and switch to Hamburger Helper or you can keep on spending until you have to declare bankruptcy and loose your house and car. And are still stuck eating Hamburger Helper. Neither choice is desirable but one is less painful.

Krugman insists that the road to prosperity is paved with government spending. Since forty cents of every dollar the government spends is borrowed, he is trying to base the economy on ever-expanding debt.

A quick aside here - some government debt is a good thing. If the government needs to build a bridge it can either set aside money for years until enough is accumulated to pay cash for the bridge or it can borrow enough money to build it now and pay off the loan over time. If the economy grows then the amount of money the government can borrow also grows. The problem comes when the government starts borrowing faster than the economy is growing and interest payments get out of hand.

Krugman would brush off this argument saying that we can worry about the debt after the economy recovers. The problem is that we are two years into a recovery and economic growth has been sluggish at best. A major school of economics says that government spending slows an economy instead of accelerating it so Krugman's prescription might be doing ore harm than good.

More recently Krugman called for a jobs program comparable to the WPA. He proposed that it be sent to patch potholes. How many potholes can I find in Krugman's proposal?

First, this is an echo of the "shovel ready" jobs of a couple of years ago - the ones that President Obama admitted do not exist. Big infrastructure program take years to plan and get approval for. For immediate jobs, things have to be scaled back to something that takes no planning or approval. That means the simplest jobs like patching potholes.

Even there, there are problems. During the Depression a worker might be issued a shovel and told to get to work. Modern roads need heavy equipment. If a city has cut back on patching then it might have some excess capacity but otherwise some of the money will have to go for buying the required equipment. That caused delays and diverts money from a straight jobs program into a stimulus for heavy equipment manufacturers.

But, assuming that there is a large excess capacity, there is the matter of hiring the workers. Krugman treats the unemployed as an amorphous mass, willing and able to take any job offered. Will unemployed office workers be willing to take a job that requires them to work outdoors in the hot sun with dangerous equipment and hard manual labor? If my wife was unemployed she would never consider such a job.

How much will Krugman pay his patching crew?  A large percentage of the unemployed are getting unemployment benefits. They would lose these if they took one of Krugman's jobs. Will they break even? How many people would be willing to make this trade?

If the patching jobs pay more than unemployment benefits then they will cause other distortions in the job market. People who are already employed in lower paying jobs will be tempted to switch. This would create new openings but in low-paying jobs that would not interest people on unemployment.

Then there is the seasonal nature of his proposal. Around here you can only patch part of the year.

Part of the reason that unemployment has stayed to high for so long is that the new jobs that are being created are specialized and the majority of the unemployed do nto have the right skill set. Krugman would do nothing to solve that problem.

And then there is the problem of paying for these workers which brings us back to the national debt. He wants to borrow money to employ people to do essentially meaningless work. Any economic expansion will have to be repaid with interest at a later date.

Krugman's arguments boil down to one simple idea - cuts are painful so don't make them. Instead keep believing in the power of state spending state to solve all problems and keep borrowing.

Medicare and the Democrats

Medicare as we know it cannot continue. The trustees in charge of the trust fund say so. The Congressional Budget Office says so. The Republicans say so.

But, thanks to a special election held in New York last week, the Democrats will spend the next year and a half insisting that any attempts to change Medicare amount to throwing seniors off a cliff. They even ran an ad during the New York election that literally had a Republican pushing people over a cliff.

The Democrats are overestimating the meaning of the election. It was a three-way race between a Democrat, a Republican, and a Tea Party candidate who had previously been both a Republican and a Democrat. The district had been comfortably Republican and carried by McCain but the Democrat won after running a campaign focusing exclusively on the Republican plan for Medicare.

Because a Democrat won a Republican district, the party decided that they will run the same campaign nationally. The problem with this reasoning is that it was a three-way race and the winner's percentage of the vote was comparable to Obama's.

This is a problem because the Democrats have sacrificed real discussions about the nation's future for short-term tactical advantage.

The Republican plan as advanced by Paul Ryan would move Medicare from being a pure government program to one that includes insurance pools with government assistance. If the idea of insurance pools sounds familiar, it is because they are included in Obamacare.

Medicare will run out of money in the 2020s, partly because of rising medical costs. The Ryan plan hopes to contain costs by passing some of them on to seniors. The hope is that they will shop around. There are problems with these assumptions and the entire issue needs a real debate. Instead we have people like the new DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz saying

They would take the people who are younger than 55 years old today and tell them, 'You know what? You're on your own. Go and find private health insurance in … the health care insurance market. We're going to throw you to the wolves and allow insurance companies to deny you coverage and drop you for pre-existing conditions. We're going to give you X amount of dollars, and you figure it out.' And these are people who have paid for their whole life into the system, are counting on that safety net.

This statement has been ruled false by sites such as PolitiFact. The Democrats should be advancing their own proposal with will likely involve tax hikes and cuts in services. Instead they pretend that Medicare is sustainable and that the Republicans are trying to destroy it in order to satisfy the radical Tea Party.

It is easy to understand why the Democrats are taking this tactic. It allows them to score cheap points against the Republicans. It also allows them to hold off on the wrenching admission that their crown jewels (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) have to be reformed.

But it puts the entire nation's future at risk.