The Return of Tax and Spend

President Reagan dismissed Democrats as Tax and Spend liberals. Those days are back again with a vengeance. President Obama's budget is spending unheard of amounts of money and projecting unheard of deficits. At the same time, he is proposing hundreds of billions of new taxes, many of them hidden.

O is most forward about taxing the "rich". The taxes is his new budget go beyond what he proposed on the campaign trail. There is a merciless logic to this. With his new tax cuts, less than half the country pays any income tax so it is easy to promise new government services without raising taxes on the majority. By classifying professionals and middle-tier executives as rich, O implies that these people don't deserve all of the money that they currently make so it is just for the government to redistribute it. This is questionable logic at the best of times. During a recession it is only likely to make the downturn worse.

But O has a lot of hidden taxes that will affect everyone, the poor more than the rich.

One of the tax increases on the rich is cutting the credit that they get for charitable contributions. This will hurt charities instead of the rich. If you take away the tax incentives to donate then people will simply stop donating.

O has a new charge for carbon emissions. The details of how this will be implemented have not been released but it does not matter. These new fees will be added to the cost of producing electricity along with some heavy industry like steel production. These fees will amount to hundreds of billions. The poor will feel this the hardest since a larger portion of their income goes to paying for utilities.

Your wireless phone plan will cost more, too. The mobile carries thought that they bought the rights to this spectrum but O wants to add a new levy on using them. This will start out at $50 million this year per company, $200 million next year, and top out at $550 million for a total of $5 billion over the next decade. This will be added to your monthly phone bill.

Even with these new taxes O only promises to cut the deficit in half in the next four years. Since he nearly doubled the deficit that Bush left him, that will still be an astounding trillion dollars a year for the foreseeable future. This is unsustainable spending. People are beginning to speculate on the US defaulting on its debt. So far this is not considered a huge risk but we are already rated as being a bigger risk than Japan or Germany. If this fear grows then we will be unable to sell treasury bills or have to sell them at a much higher interest rate. Either one will cause unimaginable trouble to the economy. If we cannot sell our bonds then we will have to print new money to pay our debts which will trigger inflation rates that we haven't seen since the 1970s. If our bonds go for a higher rate then we will see interest rates jump sky-high which will also trigger a round of inflation. Either way, people on adjustable-rate mortgages will see their payments jump and trigger a new round of foreclosures and bank problems.

Economists have been saying that it would be crazy to raise taxes during a recession. O seems to be banking on his stimulus to fix the economy so fast that new taxes are not a problem.

Obama is being audacious. Unfortunately, this is not a good quality in a president:

au·dac·i·ty
1. Fearless daring; intrepidity.

2. Bold or insolent heedlessness of restraints, as of those imposed by prudence, propriety, or convention.

3. An act or instance of intrepidity or insolent heedlessness:

Obamanomics

Obama, along with most other presidential candidates for the 2008 election, preferred to call himself a progressive rather than a liberal. There was a historic progressive movement which peaked decades ago and receded until only a few on the leftist fringe called themselves progressives. Now the term has made a major comeback. So, what does it mean?

Thomas Sowell defines that liberals are people who believe that people are naturally good while conservatives know that, alas, we are fundamentally bad. I will add my own definition for progressives - they are people who believe that they know more than anyone else who ever lived. Considering the way that the Obama administration is acting, it is hard to credit them with the slightest bit of humility.

There are six words that will not be heard as the Obama administration justifies its programs and policies, "This is what has worked before."

Take the stimulus. Various authorities including the CBO and Obama's own economic advisers say that stimulus spending has never worked in the past. It is late and targeted wrong. Instead of helping, it causes inflation and adds to the national debt. This has been true for small stimulus packages under Clinton and Bush as well as for massive ones such as the New Deal and Japan in the 1990s. Not one of them worked. So why did Obama insist that his stimulus would work when no other one has? The usual answer is we know what went wrong before and this time we will get it right. What is more, the process was so rushed that no one in Congress had a chance to read what they were voting on. Obama's people not only had to get it right for the first time ever, they insisted that it had to be done fast. No humility there.

When Obama took office the assumption was that a declining economy and massive budget deficits would make him wait at least a couple of years before trying to push universal health care and other reforms. His not-quite-a-state of the union speech proved that assumption wrong. He hasn't announced what he has in store for us but he is already budgeting for it.

The Obama administration is also planning on revamping and re-regulating our banking system, changing welfare, laying out a new national electric system, and restructuring the automotive industry. They are also planning to impose $80 billion a year carbon fees (taxes) on manufacturing and power generation.

Along with this we will see major redistribution of wealth. Salaries and bonuses are being capped. Taxes are being increased on some people and tax credits given to others in the interests of sharing the wealth.

Put it all together and you have a massive upheaval of society greater than the New Deal and the Great Society put together. And it's all being planned by a select group of progressives in back rooms (they've been holding secret meetings with Ted Kennedy's staff to plan health care for months).

Conservatives insist that major changes have to be approached slowly and carefully because of the problem of unintended consequences. The progressives scoff at that. They are so smart that they can reshape America and get everything right the first time. After all, they are the smartest people, ever.

Not everyone is buying this. Every time someone from the Obama administration announces a new policy the stock market has a historic drop. Wall Street has no faith in these guys. Do you?

Hard Times Ahead

Regardless of what happens with the economy, we are going to see some hard times ahead in science and technology as we hit hard limits in what can be done. Some of this has already happened.

People my age realize that the future didn't turn out like we expected. A TV ad that ran a couple of years ago asked, "Where's my flying car?" 2001 came and went without a permanent moon base, space clippers, orbiting space terminals, or even picture phones (the closest we have come are webcams).

An article written here points out that we have made no progress in the last 30 years on several important scientific fronts including important ones such as a vaccination for malaria.

There are several reasons that things didn't turn out as we expected but the biggest one is that we are running into limits in what can be done. A big reason that we do not have flying cars, jetpacks, or regular flights to the moon is that we have not discovered any new sources of energy nor have we discovered any new ways of storing it. Flight takes a lot of energy and we are still using the same fuels as a century ago. We are using them more efficiently but we reached efficiency limits a long time ago.

This is beginning to happen with computers, also. There has been an idea floating around for a few years that we will soon reach the Singularity when biology and technology merge. This is based on the expectation that Moore's Law will continue indefinitely. Moore's Law says that we will be able to double the complexity of computer chips every two years. For a long time this meant etching smaller and smaller lines in silicon chips and running the chips at ever-increasing speeds. We already hit the limits on that. Intel and its competitors have tried to keep up with Moore's Law by producing multi-core CPUs. These add computational power but they don't run any faster. The idea is that computing can be split into pieces to be processed separately. There are two problems here - one is that software has to be rewritten to take advantage of the multiple processors. The bigger problem is that this produces diminishing returns. If a task can only be split into a dozen parallel tasks then doubling the CPUs from 24 to 48 will not give any performance gain.

All of this means that we might soon hit the limits of high end computing. In the meantime, the requirements for low-end computing have not kept growing even as low-end computers got more powerful. The end result is that people are discovering that entry-level PCs can satisfy nearly everyone's computing needs. This is part of what is fueling the growth of the dirt-cheap netbooks.

The long-term implications of this are that the computer industry may stagnate over the next decade. The industry is built on the idea of constant growth.

This has happened in other industries. A century ago an automobile was a luxury item. The Model T changed that making cars affordable but the Model T-era car had huge drawbacks. Compare cars from 100 years ago with cars from 50 years ago. Cars are more sophisticated now than 50 years ago but these are evolutionary changes. This is even more true if you look at cars from 25 years ago. There are very few real changes. Safety features such as airbags and anti-lock brakes are standard now but they existed then and the general driving experience hasn't changed.

Airplanes followed the same track. 100 years ago the Wright Brothers were still flying an open biplane. Fifty years ago planes were pretty close to what we fly now with the airline industry about to switch completely from turboprop to jet. Flying in a 1950s 707 was pretty similar to flying in a more modern plane (in fact, 63 707s are still in use). Planes that were made 25 years ago are still flying. The big changes in the last few decades have been in fuel efficiency and noise. Again, just evolutionary changes.

So what does this mean? Microsoft is having problems convincing people to upgrade to its Vista operating system. Vista offers some security fixes and a different user interface but it does not offer increased functionality. Its successor, Windows 7, has been written so that it will run on low-end hardware. This is a big change for Microsoft where the next-generation operating system usually requires the next generation of hardware to run properly.

Microsoft was built on the model of constantly selling new, improved versions of its software. They already seem to have hit a plateau with both Windows and Office. Apple has been doing the same thing with computers and IPods. Intel has been doing it with chips. If we are reaching natural limits then these companies will have to change their business models.

A lot of the growth over the last 50 years has been technology-based. Major industries were created where nothing existed before. This could settle into a long decline like the auto industry has seen.

A lot of societies are based on consistency. Ours has been based on change to the point where constant change is the consistency. What will happen if change slows?

Washington's Birthday

Technically I just missed posting on Washington's actual birthday by an hour. Since Congress saw fit to combine Washington's and Lincoln's Birthdays into a moving Monday holiday that never actually hits Washington's Birthday, I think I can be forgiven.

This year the big emphasis in on Lincoln. In recent years it was on Adams and Jefferson. Teddy Roosevelt was big for a while, also. No one seems to pay attention to Washington anymore. He has receded to being just a guy with wooden teeth and a wig.

The historic figure is much more important. It is no exaggeration to say that the United States as we know it would not exist if not for Washington. What is more, he did three notable acts that created our country.

The first one is obvious - he was the general who won the Revolutionary War. He didn't win many battles but he kept his army together and built it up until it was able to defeat the British at Yorktown. This was not an insurgency, striking at civilians, it was an actual war and we won it against England at its height.

Then came Washington's second act. There was a lot of pressure for him to dissolve Congress and take personal command of the nation. He didn't. Instead he retired. Think about how rare an act like this has been in history. It is pretty much unheard of.

Of course, the original Articles of Confederation didn't work out. Washington chaired the Constitutional Convention which created our modern government.

These were his biggest accomplishments but he did others. One was leaving office after two terms. This set a precedence that lasted until FDR and was written into the Constitution after him. He set other precedents, man of them important.

Other presidents have struggled with major problems but our unborn nation was on the knife edge in the 18th century. With the slightest nudge, Washington could have created a completely different country - one that would certainly not have thrived.

"The" Cartoon

That's how it's being referred to - The Cartoon.

A chimp recently attacked someone and was shot by police. The New York Post quickly turned this into a political cartoon with the police looking at the slain chimp and saying that they will have to get someone else to write the stimulus bill. This is being taken as a horrible, racist attack on the president.

Two points:

1) The stimulus bill was written by Congress. This was one of the Republicans' big complaints - that Pelosi and company wrote a bloated spending bill disguised as a stimulus. The implication of the cartoon is that the bill was so badly written that a chimp must have done it. It makes to sense to say that the chimp represents President Obama since he was not shot.

2) For the last eight years, President Bush has been portrayed as a chimp, as Satan, and as a Nazi officer with blood dripping from his fangs. No one on the left ever complained about this. After all the cheap shots that have been taken at Bush, the left has no moral standing to complain about any depiction of Obama.

Note: There is a column about the cartoon on Huffington. One of the commenters says this:

If the cartoon is not racist " then there is no political or personal parody since there is no other connection between a rampaging chimp and the President or to the Recovery Bill " since the cartoon does make that connect, it is therefore racist and in addition suggests the RepoTalibans or the police assassinate the President if they disagree with his policies.

That is not parody or humor that is the direct encouragement to commit murder.

I don't agree with this statement for a moment but let's suppose that it is true. So what? How many plays, novels, and TV movies openly called for the assassination of President Bush? Who on the left complained? Again, the left has no moral standing to complain from.

Obama the Conservative?

I can't find a link to it but years ago, when far-left writer Eric Alterman was writing for MSNBC.COM, he ran across an observation that President Bush was far more moderate than he was given credit for. Part of the proof was his spending. Bush out-spent Clinton on nearly all social issues. Alterman, who sees Bush as being to the right of Reagan would have none of it. His explanation for Bush's spending was that he was playing the long game (my term, not his). Alterman speculated that Bush was spending so as to run up the national debt to the point where interest payments took up all available government money. At that point, future presidents would have to start cutting services.

So, what are we to make of President Obama's spending? In his first three weeks he nearly doubled federal discretionary spending and he is just getting started. He still hasn't explained how much federal money will go to the next round of bank bailouts. We've been given a figure of $3 trillion public/private money with no breakdown of how it will be split. He just proposed $75 billion for mortgage foreclosure relief (remember when $75 billion was a big number).

GM is seeking more than $16 billion in new bailout money. Chrysler is a bargain at $5 billion.

After complaining on the stump about how much money was being spent on Iraq, Obama is ramping up Afghanistan.

And we haven't started talking about universal medical coverage.

When Clinton came to office he was astounded to find that payments on the national debt were the largest item in the budget. By refinancing government bonds at a lower rate, Bush was able to keep debt payments from rising as fast as new spending but that was a one-time savings.

It took Bush eight years to raise the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. Obama is on track to do that in a much shorter period.

This money has to come from somewhere. Obama and the Democrats have been so busy authorizing new spending that they have not addressed how it will be repaid but the bill will come due sometime.

By spending so freely now, Obama may be fulfilling Alterman's prediction of assuring small government in the long-term by spending too freely in the short term. Does that make Obama a Conservative?

Government and Business

What caused the sub-prime credit crisis? Liberals say that it was a combination of predatory lenders and lax regulators enabled by President Bush's laisseze-faire policies. Conservatives say that the Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to issue loans to people who should never have been home-owners. A recent column in Forbes by Peter J. Wallison and Edward J. Pinto supports the conservatives' argument and supplies facts and figures to support their contention.

The point of the Community Reinvestment Act was to increase home ownership rates among minorities. Using this act as a base, the Clinton administration took action against several major banks. The banks were accused of redlining areas. The banks argued that they were not excluding minorities (this would be difficult since loan applications do not include race). The problem was that a disproportionate number of minority members didn't meet traditional standards for getting a loan. The government told the banks to change their standards. They also ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start increasing the number of loans they serviced for these groups.

Sidebar - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created during the Depression to free up bank resources. Banks issue mortgages then sell them to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These entities are Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) created by the government and are guaranteed lower-than market interest rates.

As ordered, the banks dropped most of the traditional restrictions on loans. Previously you had to have a substantial down payment and the amount you could borrow was based on your income. These restrictions were dropped and the bank regulators were instructed to be sure that the banks were sticking to the new standards. In other words, the problem wasn't that there were no regulators, the problem was that they were pushing the wrong regulations.

What about predatory lenders? Yes, they existed but they only amounted to 5% of all mortgages. The GSEs were a bigger problem since they were willing to buy low quality loans. Forbes points out that nearly 20% of Fannie Mae's loans in 2001 and 2002 were to people below the traditional minimum credit score.

The Bush administration bought into the Clinton-era policies that increasing home-ownership was always a good thing. Home-owner rates increased by 3.3% under Clinton and 1.7% under Bush. Even Barney Frank, a long-time supporter of affordable housing loans now admins that many of these people would have been better off renting.

Eventually the bubble burst. For decades the home ownership rates and the mortgage default rates had been stable. This new influx brought an unprecedented wave of defaults which dragged down house values which is leading to even more defaults.

The whole thing started with the government telling banks to alter their business practices in order to meet a social goal.

This is important because, under President Obama, the government is likely to be involved in an expanding number of businesses. Obama and the Democrats have already taken control of executive pay for banks and warned them that, from now on, conventions can only be held in boring cities.

In the next few days GM and Chrysler will be asking for more money. Democrats are anxious to take over their businesses, also. Many are suggesting that Detroit should be mandated to make smaller cars and/or hybrids. Again, the desire for social policy is likely to supersede good business.

Many Democrats believe that the current economic problems refute Reagan and the idea of small-government. A closer look at our problems shows that it was government interference in markets that brought us where we are now and that further tampering is likely to make things worse.

Mr. Obama's Bad Week

Let's see, how bad was last week for President Obama?

Two of his nominees had to bow out because of tax problems. One of them, Daschle, also turned out to be a lobbyist in all but name. His nominee for heading the CIA also turns out to have lobbying connections. So much for the most ethical administration in history.

Then there is the stimulus bill. Obama promised that it would be focused on infrastructure and totally transparent with no earmarks. Then he let the business-as-usual crowd in Congress write it. They treated it as a chance to hide everyone's pet projects. The earmarks are there but they are hidden a bit better than usual. On top of that, there is a clause about Buy American that has already drawn sharp responses from Canada and the European Union.

Obama's charm offensive on the Republicans was a total failure. They said afterward that he was charming but that he had been given a bad bill that they couldn't support. All of the Republicans and half of the Blue Dog Democrats (11) voted against the bill. So far the only bipartisan support has been for voting against the bill. Obama still got it through the House and it looks like he will get the Senate to pass it but it is an ugly win. So much for post-partisanship.

Then there was the gathering of Democrats in Williamsburg at the end of the week. After complaining about Wall Street executives using public funds for expensive retreats, the Democrats did the same thing. In addressing them, Obama seems to have lost his eloquence and resorted to the same fear-mongering that Democrats complained about President Bush using.

To top it all off, things got so bad mid-week that the Obamas had to get out of the White House so they visited a charter school and the President talked about Batman and Spider-Man. What will he do in a real crisis?

So, how bad is the damage? This writer at Slate thinks that Obama will emerge stronger. Because he can learn something from it and because a little humility is a good thing. This assumes that Obama does learn anything. Time will tell.

Regardless of any personal growth that Obama might gain from this week, he is weakened in several ways.

He is no longer the post-partisan president. Obama was supposed to convince the other side to adopt his positions without having to resort to the messy compromises that upset liberals during the Clinton years. We knew that no one could live up to that but we didn't know that he would disprove it so fast.

All claims to doing away with business as usual in Washington are also gone.

In his first major piece of legislation he knuckled under to Pelosi and the Congressional Democrats. This was supposed to be a bill about infrastructure but that was reduced to a tiny portion of the bill.

He enabled a Republican resurgence. Under Bush, Republicans spent so freely that the Democrats ran as the party of fiscal restraint in 2006. Now, Obama has introduced a bill nearly equal to all discretionary spending for a year. Republican excesses now look restrained. Just two weeks ago Republicans were irrelevant. Now they are united and relevant.

He pushed through a bill that the public doesn't want. Polls show that slightly over 50% of the population thinks the stimulus will hurt the economy. Several economists including three Nobel Prize winners and the Congressional Budget Office project that the bill will hurt the economy later on. Obama should have picked up on all of this and withdrawn the bill for reworking. This would have shown that he and not Pelosi is in charge, that he is post-partisan, and drawn the fangs of the Republicans. Instead he got angry. He pointed out several times that he won the election as if that made him king of the world instead of President of the United States.

In short, he diminished himself.

Several days ago I said that the president Obama most resembled was Bill Clinton. This week reminds me of the first couple of Clinton years when they had one blunder after another. Clinton eventually recovered but not before losing both houses of Congress. Clinton himself admitted that he was at best a B-level president. This may be the best that Obama can aspire to being.

Real Jobs and Government Jobs

In the middle of the argument over the stimulus bill a new sub-argument has erupted - can the government create jobs?

To many, there is no question. Newsweek dismisses any argument to the contrary.

These claims are so peculiar that it's hard to know where to begin. Contrary to Steele's assertion, in the history of mankind, the government has in fact created many, many jobs (including the one he held for a few years: lieutenant governor of Maryland). Today, government accounts for 22.5 million of the nation's 135.5 million payroll jobs, or 16.6 percent. Those numbers include people who work for the federal, state, and local governments—doctors and nurses in public hospitals and teachers at elementary schools and public universities. Government also has created—and continues to create—all sorts of private-sector jobs, for defense contractors, the aerospace industry, medical-device makers, real estate companies, and construction firms. The economy of the Washington, D.C., area has boomed in recent decades not so much because the federal government has expanded its payrolls massively but because private government contractors have been thriving. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics notes, in January, "the large areas with the lowest jobless rates in December were Oklahoma City, Okla., and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, D.C.-Va.-Md.-W.Va."—a capital city, and the capital city.

Time similarly dismisses the argument.

Again, there has been an Alice in Wonderland quality to much of the criticism, as if Keynes were a fraud and government spending couldn't possibly create jobs — especially spending on biomedical research or education about STDs or any other programs that sound vaguely liberal and exotic. But biomedical research jobs are real jobs. So are jobs beautifying the Mall and warning teenagers about herpes. So are jobs building and engineering rail lines for Amtrak, regardless of the company's current profitability.

Obviously the government does employ people and it gives money to others who employ people. The thing is, this is only half of the equation. The problem is that the government does not create any wealth. It just redistributes it.

I'll offer my own job as an example since I work for local government. My job is paid for by a 2% income tax. That means that 1 of every $50 that a taxpayer earns go to pay for the city government. If we oversimplify, then, for every 50 workers, one of them works for the city. We have subtracted a worker from the private workforce and added him back in as a government worker.

This is why Republicans are saying that the government does not create jobs. The government redistributes jobs. You can make the case that this is an acceptable trade-off since the government does many things that private industry will or cannot do but you cannot escape the fact that these jobs eliminate other jobs elsewhere in the economy.

Obama and the Democrats are trying to hide this fact by borrowing the money to create the jobs. They are planning on either borrowing a trillion dollars (which will have to be paid back) or printing a trillion dollars in new money (which will eventually cause inflation until the current money supply is worth a trillion fewer dollars than before). Either way, we will have to pay for the stimulus in the future and any jobs created by the spending bill will only exist as long as the government pays for them.

This article in the Washington Times quotes a CBO report that indicates that the stimulus will be harmful over the long run.

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

A lower GDP means fewer jobs. That's why Republicans say that the government cannot create jobs.

Spinning Salaries

Two takes on the salaries that bank executives are getting:

The commonly reported one - banks that accepted government bail-out money are giving their executives huge bonuses giving the impression that they are using public funds to pay the bonuses. President Obama is outraged and plans to take action limiting executive pay until all of the money has been repaid.

The nuanced version - the Treasury was worried that giving TARP money to some banks and not others would identify the weak banks and cause a run on them. To prevent this, they forced healthy banks to accept TARP funds that they did not need. These healthy banks are doing what healthy businesses normally do when they are doing better than the competition, they are rewarding management.

This shows one of the big problems with government interference in private industry. We start running businesses according to moral outrage instead of sound business practices.

Obama and Business

Republicans have the reputation of being pro-business and Democrats as anti-business. Obama's actions in the first two weeks of his administration put him squarely in the anti-business category. Unfortunately, this also translates into being anti-job.

In a previous post I mentioned Obama's order to the EPA to allow states to make their own regulations. This is aimed directly at the auto industry. Several states decided that they were unhappy with federal response to global warming and tried to establish their own policies. This will create several problems. The first is the nightmare of dealing with 50 different policies. The second is that this will limit the number of high-margin vehicles that can be sold. Detroit depends on these sales to stay in business. It is also very possible that once this president has been set, the states will extend their policies to other industries.

With much fanfare, the first bill that Obama signed into law makes it easier for women to sue for pay discrimination that happened years before. While this may have been a good idea during a prosperous period, it is going to be a job-killer now. Businesses will have to spend money on legal battles that will have to be trimmed from other places. Many of the flood of suits that are likely to be filed will be unjustified. Note - I'm not justifying unequal pay. I am pointing out that passing this measure during a deep recession shows the Democrats' total disregard for jobs when ideology is at stake.

With much less fanfare, Obama also issues an executive directive making it harder to avoid using union labor when federal money is involved. Union labor is normally charged at a premium, in part because set-asides such as this distort the labor market.

All of these measures were done to please Obama's base - environmentalists, feminists, and unions. None of these groups have a record of caring about the average worker, especially environmentalists. Between this and the stimulus bill, Obama's message is that he only cares about jobs that he creates. When he has to choose between pleasing his special interest groups or saving jobs, he decides against jobs.

What's at stake with the stimulus

The Obama-backed stimulus bill isn't really a stimulus. Yes, some of the money will stimulate the economy. Estimates on this vary partly because no one knows when the economy will recover. Once it does, this bill goes from stimulus to deficit spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the economy will start to recover on its own by the end of the year. They also estimate that only a fraction of the stimulus will be spent this year so the vast majority cannot be called a stimulus. If you assume that the recession continues on into 2010 (making it several times longer than any previous recession) then there will still be at least 20% unspent.

There's a lot of money in the bill that could never be called a stimulus under any definition. There's $20 billion for Pell grants. This may be a worthy cause but it should be judged on its own. The vast sums set aside for green energy will not do much stimulus, either. If they ever pay off, it will be years in the future. Again, spending like this should be judged on its own merit.

I doubt that anyone in Congress really knows everything that is in the bill. It has been rushed through without hearings. The Democrats complained for years when the Bush administration did this with the Patriot Act.

That is the whole point of the bill. Democrats are anxious to start a new New Deal. They lumped everything that they could think of into a single bill and tried to sell it as an economic stimulus that was too urgent to be discussed. The public is becoming skeptical and is probably suffering from bail-out fatigue. Rasmussen says that only 42% of the public supports the bill. This highlights one of the reasons for the urgency. Democrats are worried that the bill cannot stand up to too much scrutiny.

If the bill becomes law then it will change daily life. Spending initiatives that are being sold as temporary will become permanent. That is why the Democrats are pushing the bill so hard.

At the same time, without Bush and his own big-government leanings, the Republicans have recovered some direction. The House Republicans were unanimous in voting against the bill. Even if it was a meaningless gesture, they are on record as being against this major expansion of government. Bipartisan support would have made it difficult to oppose unrestrained spending in the future.

Truth After Retirement

For years Dr. John Theon was in charge of NASA's weather and climate research programs. James Hansen, the scientist who first discovered global warming worked for Theon. Now that he is retired and safe from any consequences for going against the official line, he has added his name to the list of skeptics.

It isn't surprising that he would wait until his retirement to announce this. The professional consequences of being a denier can be serious with calls for more severe action. Such luminaries as Al Gore and Hansen have called for war crimes trials for skeptics and polluters.

So what does Theon really think?

My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it.

They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.

Note - the part about manipulating the data is a direct dig at Hansen who has been adjusting actual temperature measurements going back decades but refuses to document his methodology.

Theon is not the first scientist to wait until retirement to announce skepticism. While it is fashionable to look for links between skeptics and oil companies, billions of dollars in grants are available for climate research but only if you are a believer.

In the meantime, Hansen's letter to President Obama has been published. Among other things, Hansen calls for a carbon tax and for closing all coal-fired power plants. Obama is moving on allowing states to set CO2 emissions standards and Secretary of State Clinton has appointed a new envoy to the follow-up talks to the Kyoto treaty.

We are about to put our automobile makers out of business, raise the price of food, and start rolling brownouts over fraudulent science.

Obama's First Week

We are one week into the Obama presidency. What should we make of it? First, there are his early executive orders on Iraq and Gitmo. About the only thing that we can say is that he backtracked on some campaign promises. He didn't order our troops to get out of Iraq as fast as possible and shutting down Gitmo while moving the worst of the terrorists elsewhere is meaningless.

So far so good.

Today he made a couple of announcements on environmental policy. He is going to demand higher gas mileage and allow states to set their own environmental policy. In doing this, he has doomed Detroit.

Detroit's problem is that it costs them around $70 an hour in labor to make a car. They don't pay their people that much. Around half of it is being paid to retirees. Rather than invest retirement funds for each worker, the Big Three opted for a pay as you go retirement. They are paying retired workers out of their current earnings (or, to be more accurate, they are adding the retirement pay to their losses). The only way that they can afford to do this is to sell lots of big SUVs with high profit margins. For years they have only continued to sell smaller cars in order to meet CAFE (mileage) standards. They don't actually make money on the smaller vehicles. With new mileage requirements approaching 40MPG, the big SUVs will be outlawed. Worse, the price of smaller cars will go up in order to meet these standards. Every car will be an hybrid or at least turbocharged which will make them more expensive. Smaller, more expensive cars will invigorate the used car market, cutting demand for new cars even more.

Then there is the stimulus. At $825 billion and growing, this should be a scary figure even if it would work. It will not. The economy is projected to start a slow recovery long before most of the stimulus is spent.

Obama and Congress promised that the stimulus would be open and transparent. I'm not sure how they can accomplish that when Congressional leaders insist that it is too urgent to have a single day of hearings.

In reality, the stimulus bill is the mother of all partisan spending. The number are so large that no one notices a few hundred billion extra here and there.

So much for fiscal responsibility.

Finally, Obama has shown that he does not have any class. A presidential inauguration is supposed to be a time to make peace with the other side. Obama used his to chide Bush. He has done this several other times in the last week such as when he said that he was bringing science back to the White House.

Last Spring someone posted to Huffington that Obama would not have to compromise. Instead he would convince his opponents of the validity of his views through strength of personality. Obama must have ready this and took it to heart since that is how he is treating Congressional Republicans.

A week ago Obama's approval ratings were a stratospherically 83%. Now they have dropped to 68%. Still pretty good but no longer in the superhuman range. Now that he has gone from a superman who can do no wrong to a politician making actual decisions, the public is taking another look at him.

Failed Presidency?

No, not Bush. I'm looking at all of the ways that President Obama is setting himself up for failure. The list is daunting for any president but more so for one who has already been proclaimed the next Lincoln/FDR/Kennedy/Reagan. Many events are outside of his control but he made them his anyway. Here's my list.

Unreasonable Expectations
As I blogged earlier, the big question on inauguration day was which former A-list president Obama most resembled. This is an almost impossible standard to be judged by. Obama invited such talk during his early campaign when he ran as the candidate of unspecified hope and change and let each voter project exactly what that meant. He continues to add fuel to this fire as he and Secretary of State Clinton talk about their new aggressive diplomacy and how different it is from Bush's. Bush's foreign policy was far more nuanced than he is given credit for and Clinton's new policy sounds like a retread of failed initiatives from the Clinton years.

Relations with the Press
No matter how they start off, all presidents develop a bunker mentality with the press. Because of the requirements of the newscycle, the press needs a constant flow of information. They also repeat questions that the administration doesn't want to hear. Even a president who has a good relationship with the press during the campaign starts seeing them as the enemy once he is in the White House.

Obama's honeymoon with the press might end sooner than most. On a personal level, he hates the loss of his privacy. Last month he evaded the press long enough to take his kids to a waterpark. He has also cut reporters off from asking questions that he considers out of scope. His administration is currently in a dispute with the press pool over photographs. All of this while he is still in a controversy-free honeymoon period. Imagine when a real scandal or crisis happens.

There is also the possibility of a backlash after fawning election coverage. The excuse given inside the industry is that they went overboard for Obama as an act of contrition after giving Bush a pass on the lead-in to Iraq. With new books due out soon that documents their Obama-bias, they may react by being more vigilant than otherwise.

The Economy and the Stimulus
Right now the American people say that they will give Obama time to fix the economy. That attitude will probably change as time passes, especially after his stimulus passes. The Congressional Budget Office says that the stimulus will come too late to help with unemployment. The White House Budget Office argues back that 80% of the stimulus will be spent by the end of next year.

With that much money being thrown around so quickly, there will be a lot of boondoggle projects and wasted funds. This is where a hostile press will hurt. A friendly press will sit on these stories. An adversarial press will run them.

Between his own stimulus and various bail-outs, Bush spent a lot of money - around $1 trillion. Obama is likely to match that this year and may double it. Somehow we will have to pay for that in the near future, likely with stepped-up inflation. It's been 30 years since we had high inflation. No one under 40 is really aware of how it affects every aspect of life. Obama himself might be too young to remember it well and may be treating the threat too lightly.

Iraq and Afghanistan
Iraq is a no-win issue for Obama. Bush left him an apparent victory. If things continue to go well then Bush gets the credit. If they get worse then Obama will be blamed. A failure in Iraq will help Republicans for a generation.

Afghanistan offers more opportunity but Obama has already fenced himself in. Conflict there has been escalating. Obama promised to win in Afghanistan and capture bin Ladin. Given the realities in Pakistan, this may be impossible. At best it will take a long war of attrition, the type of conflict that Iraq became.

Bush won in Iraq through stubbornness. Two years ago even Bush's generals told him that it was a lost cause and that he should cut his losses and leave. Instead he looked for a new strategy and browbeat the generals into accepting it.

Obama is in the wrong party for this. His side includes the anti-war groups like Code Pink and Not In Our Name and activists like Cindy Sheehan. Even the hawks don't seem to have the stomach for a drawn-out conflict. If Obama's surge into Afghanistan doesn't produce quick results then the public will tire of the drip of casualty reports. Currently Afghanistan has the support that it does because so much of the news comes from Iraq. As Iraq winds down and Afghanistan ramps up this will reverse.

Health Care
People expect Obama to provide fast, efficient, free medical care for everyone from now on. Everyone expects it from him. The problem is that once he gets down to specifics, a lot of people are going to attack it. This is what happened with Clinton. Health Care reform looked like a certainty at Clinton's inauguration but never happened.

There is going to be a lot of pressure on Obama to hold off on health care until the economy recovers. It is going to be expensive. His promise that he can give everyone health care by streamlining the system is a pipe dream. If he waits too long he will not have enough political capitol.

There is also the possibility that he passes something and people hate it. The lessons of Canada and the United Kingdom are that health care suffers after the government takes it over.

Terrorism
One of Bush's biggest claims to fame is that he kept us safe from follow-up attacks after 9/11. Obama already made a show of prohibiting the more controversial aspects of the War on Terror. If terrorists strike America then people will blame him for not stopping it. It doesn't matter if his executive order had any affect at all. He will be blamed. Especially if the press has turned against him.

So that's Obama's impossible task. Any one of these could drag down a presidency and he has to get everything right on all of them. If he can manage that then he deserves his place among the A-list presidents. If not then he can always rehabilitate him image by building houses for Habitat for Humanity. It worked for Carter.

Who is Obama Like?

It's almost been a party game - which president is Obama most like? Is he Abraham Lincoln? Franklin Roosevelt? John Kennedy? Ronald Reagan? Here's one where he is compared to George Washington. I have one of my own - Bill Clinton.

The parallels with Clinton are striking and much closer than with any of these other historic presidents. Consider:

They have each been called "America's first black president" even though some scholars think that Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge all had black ancestry.

Both lost their biological father at an early age (Clinton's was killed before he was born, Obama's deserted his mother). Both were raised by grandparents at some point. Both graduated with a law degree from an ivy league college and both married ivy league lawyers.

Obama spent time as a community organizer based on the teachings of Saul Alinsky. Bill's wife did a thesis on Alinsky.

Both were known on the campaign trail for their oratory. Clinton ran as the Man From Hope. Obama ran as the candidate of Hope and Change.

Both men chose a Senator as his running mate.

Neither man has any military experience but won against a decorated war veteran (Clinton ran against two of them).

There are rumors that each was involved in corrupt practices when in state politics. Several of Clinton's associates were convicted of various offenses. We do not know how deeply Clinton was involved in these since everyone who did know refused to testify. Obama's relationship with convicted developer Tony Rezco has not been investigated.

The wife of each candidate became an issue during the campaign.

Both ran during a recession. The economic news might be worse in Obama's case but unemployment was higher when Clinton took office (technically the recession had already ended by the time Clinton was inaugurated but it took months more for unemployment to drop.

Even though both men inherited a Congress under Democratic control, each treated his election as "taking back America".

Each followed a President Bush with low approval ratings.

Both invoked a revered president on his way to the inauguration. Clinton made a bus tour with a stop at Jefferson's home, Monticello. Obama recreated Lincoln's train trip from Illinois to DC then used the same bible as Lincoln for the swearing-in.

Both made a point of walking part of the parade route during their inauguration.

Both had cabinet nominees forced to drop out for ethical reasons.

Both promised health care reform.

Both upset gays between the election and his inauguration (Clinton by promising to allow gays in the military, Obama by his choice of ministers for the inauguration).

Then there is the Hillary factor. Clinton let her interview cabinet nominees and allowed her to pick one (Attorney General, Janet Reno). Obama made her his Secretary of State.

Clinton did not inherit a war but he did inherit an occupation in Somalia that was about to turn nasty. Obama, of course, inherited two wars.

So what do these parallels mean for Obama and the future?

Based on the number of Clinton retreads in his cabinet, it looks like Obama's policies will be fairly close to Clinton's especially his foreign policy.

Both men became president sure of their own ability to change government. Clinton soon found out how difficult this is and salvaged his presidency through a policy of triangulation - positioning himself as a moderate and the leaders of both parties as extremists.

What about the other presidents? The Lincoln comparison comes because both were single-term congressmen from Illinois with a gift for rhetoric. Also, as Obama shares his skin color with the slaves that Lincoln freed, there is some sort of symbolic connection. FDR took office during an economic meltdown as did Reagan. Kennedy was young and handsome with a pretty wife and young children.

More important, all of these presidents are seen as successful. Lincoln saved the Union. FDR and Reagan changed how we look at conservatives and government. When people compare Obama to these men they are really projecting their hope that he will be as successful as they were. Clinton, on the other hand, admitted that he was, at best, a second-tier president. None of Obama's admirers want to admit that he could be anything but top-tier.

Some Thoughts on the Transition of Power

Barack Obama is now President of the United States. As a conservative who voted against him, I have several thoughts about this event.

First, I'd like to rub it in the nose of liberals such as Naome Wolf and the crowd at the Daily KOS. They insisted that the Bush administration had already installed a fascist government and would not allow the other side to come to power. The Congressional election of 2006 and the Presidential election of 2008 shows that there was nothing to their conspiracy theories.

Next, I'd like to caution conservatives to refrain from acting like the loony left did for the last eight years. Don't put on bumper stickers saying that Obama is not your president. Conservatives have spent the last eight years saying that people should respect the office if not the man holding it. It's time to live up to that. Don't engage in conspiracy theories. Rumors about him not being born in the US (he was) or being a secret Muslim (he was raised as a Muslim for a while by his step-father but has been Christian for decades) should be dropped. Forget everything he said on the campaign trail. He has dismissed this himself as campaign rhetoric. Don't accuse him of selling out America to special interests (blood for oil, 9/11 Truth, etc.).

Obama has not left many footprints as a legislator. He will leave plenty as President. Judge him on those. We will know just how liberal or centrist he is soon enough.

Do not treat him as Bush was treated. Too often anything with Bush's name on it was reflexively rejected by the left without judging it on its merits.

Remember Clinton. Like Obama, Clinton went to Washington sure of his ability to change the country. In the end the major achievements of his administration came from Republicans and were opposed by Democrats (Welfare Reform, NAFTA). Obama already seems to be to the right of Nancy Pelosi on economic issues. Obama will need conservative support to resist her.

Obama's presidency does not mean an end to race in America. While it is true that a majority of white voted for a candidate based on who he is rather than his skin color, the same cannot be said for blacks. Howard Sterns had no trouble finding blacks who had no idea what Obama's stand was on issues. At the same time, Obama's unique heritage (the son of an African exchange student and a white American, raised by whites) made him non-threatening. Possibly none of this will matter the next time a black candidate is on the ballot just as no one currently cares about Catholics since Kennedy.

I don't begrudge Democrats their celebration today but I would like to point out that they would have been very critical of the excessive inauguration. Enough money was spent swearing Obama in to ($175 million) run a credible presidential campaign. With all that going on, they won't miss me if I'm outside cheering along.

Obama Worries

Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard lists four things that he fears in an Obama administration. They are: He doesn't know what he's talking about, He's a pushover, He's another Jimmy Carter on foreign and national security policy, and that he has nerves of jello.

I'd like to add my own worst fear - that he is too enamored with the power of big government and doesn't respect its limitations.

Obama says that he can fix the economy, all we need is to spend a lot of money and wait a while. The problem with a stimulus is that you have to apply it at the right time and the right place. If you miss your window then you just end up running up the national debt and increasing inflation with nothing to show for it. In addition, as Max Borders at TCSDaily points out, the economy is not a machine. It is so large and complex that it should be considered organic rather than mechanical. Worse, it is partly psychological. We fear therefore we save.

Obama's whole stimulus package is based on being able to redirect society with some government control and money. He's going to invest heavily in green energy. Clinton tried something like that - he had a joint project between the Big Three automakers and the military. The goal was to produce a supercar with exceptional milage. The project was a complete failure.

Obama isn't alone in overestimating the power of government. George Bush has the same problem. Look how well it turned out for him. In fact, the most successful president of the last few decades was Reagan who joked that the scariest words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Reagan understood that, for reasons that are inherent in its structure, there are any things that the government does poorly.

Take Katrina and New Orleans as an example. Thousands of people refused to evacuate. Government-built flood walls broke, and those thousands of people had to be rescued. The press crucified Bush for all of this, especially the parts that he had no influence over. In the aftermath, FEMA made countless errors. Bush accepted the blame for this and promised to do better. Bush's opponents insisted that all of the problems could have been avoided had there been better leadership at the top. Reagan would have pointed out that the government was doing the best that it could but it will never get everything right.

There are 300 million people in the United States. The government touches us all many different ways. That means that there are a billion different things that can go wrong. Obama thinks that he can fix all of these from the top down.

Take Social Security. One projection is that it will go from being a surplus to a deficit in the next two years. Its supporters shrug this off saying that it will simply have to start dipping into the trust fund. The problem is that there is no trust fund. There is just a pile of IOUs that the government wrote to itself. In order to redeem these, Obama will have to cut spending somewhere else or cut benefits or do both. There are powerful political groups opposing each option but Obama says that fixing Social Security will be easy.

When the government fixes things it often makes them immeasurably worse. Last year, in response to reports of lead in Chinese imports, Congress passed new legislation requiring everything marketed to children 12 and under to be tested for lead. Everything. Toys, books, stickers, clothes, shoes, telescopes. And it doen't matter how small your production run is, either. If you sell wooden toys finished with linseed oil at a craft show or self-published a children's book, you will have to have your product tested. This is how government fixes things.

But Obama doesn't see this as a limitation. He stood on the Capitol Building and told the crowd that anything is possible.

Obama, Palin, and Family

Geoffrey Dunn of the Huffington Post is calling Sarah Palin a liar. He is wrong. Here's why.

Last Spring, Michele Obama said that she had not been proud of her country until it voted for her husband. Many people pounced on this. In response, Barack said that his wife and family were off limits. The press accepted this restriction.

Within days of Palin's nomination as McCain's running mate, bloggers started a rumor that her youngest child was not hers, that Trig was her grandchild and she passed it off as her own. This got picked up by such sources as Andrew Sullivan who writes for the Atlantic. Sarah had to announce that her daughter could not have delivered a child a few months ago because she was six months pregnant at the time.

In a recent interview, Palin complained that she expected the families are off-limits rule to apply to her as well as Obama.

This is where Geoffry Dunn jumps in and calls Palin a liar.

While Obama did say that he found attacks on his wife "unacceptable," he also very bodly and emphatically stated that Palin's family was also off limits when asked a question about Bristol Palin's pregnancy

 

[...] He wasn't protecting simply his own family with that assertion, he was also protecting Palin's. And Palin lacks the basic grace, integrity and human decency to acknowledge Obama's gesture. And then she twists the truth to make Obama seem selfish and the media unfair.

While it is true that Obama said that Palin's family should be off-limits, he said this months after he had declared his own family off-limits and days after his supporters had started slandering Palin. Dunn has reordered events to suit his own assertion that Palin

will say anything, lie about anything, if it is to her own benefit to do so.

It is also true that many conservatives continued to attack Michelle right up to the election. They were quite open in their reasoning that statements that Michelle made on the record while campaigning were fair game, regardless of Barack's wishes. The attacks on Palin and her children were very different. The only thing comparable would be to demand that Barack submit to genetic testing to prove that the girls are actually his daughters. Even if someone made such a suggestion (and I am not), the press would ignore it like they did the rumor about Obama's birth certificate.

Palin has every right to complain about how she and her family were treated. Dunn should accept that he and his confederates were over-the-top in their persecution of Palin.

Judging Bush

It is difficult to properly judge a president during his last days in office. When asked to judge Ronald Reagan at the end of 1988, George Will, a long-time Reagan supporter, insisted on judging Reagan's first and second term separately. Time has blurred the distinction. The issues that Will was referring to in Reagan's second term have faded. What is remembered is that he was a transitive president - something that Barack Obama aspires to be. During his administration, Reagan was depicted as an amiable oaf, taking the position of the last adviser he talked with or the one with the showiest graphics. Since he left office a different picture emerged of a smart, knowledgeable, and engaged president who achieved his goal of destroying the Soviet Union, thereby making the world a better place.

Trying to judge Bush is equally difficult. The press, mainly Gore supporters in 2000, defined Bush as a dumb party-boy who only made it into office because of favors owed to his father. It has been widely supposed that he is the puppet of either his Vice-President or Karl Rove. The war in Iraq was supposed to have been fought solely to benefit big oil companies, Israel, or both. He has been blamed for every part of Hurricane Katrina including the hurricane itself. At the same time, his achievements have been ignored or minimized. Bush has most often been characterized as "disinterested" and "incurious".

Now that we are in the last days of the Bush administration, the press is letting some other voices through. People who are close to Bush say that he is very informed and hand-on. Advisers know that they have to have all facts available because Bush asks detailed questions and can tell when someone doesn't have detailed answers.

The Howard Dean version of events has been repeated so often that we often forget the real Bush record on the defining points of Bush's presidency: the war of terror, Iraq, and Katrina.

According to polls taken after 9/11, most of the country expected a similar or larger attack within two years. Instead we've gone more than seven years without any terrorist attacks. Other countries have not been so fortunate. Great Britain has had a couple of attacks. India just had a horrendous one. Even Germany, which thought that it was safe for not supporting the Iraq invasion, was the subject of a failed attack.

Bush deserves a great deal of credit for this. His administration has disrupted al Qaeda's international operations and stopped several domestic plots. Much of this seldom makes the news or, when it does, it dismissed as irrelevant. The defense attorney for a domestic group recently convicted tried to downplay his clients as people who talked big but would not have actually acted. This, after they bought weapons, practiced with them, and made a trial run through the military camp that was their target.

In a few days Barack Obama will discover how difficult it is to conduct the war in Afghanistan. The left has often complained that Iraq was a distraction from the real war on terror in Afghanistan. With al Qaeda and the Taliban taking shelter in Pakistan, it is nearly impossible to take the war to them. In the meantime, the training camps in Afghanistan are closed.

The war in Iraq should be judged in three parts. The initial overthrow of Saddam was accomplished quickly and easily. US tanks were rolling through the streets of Baghdad almost before the MSN could finish the word "quagmire". The occupation went poorly. Billions of dollars and thousands of lives were squandered. About the only good thing that you can say for this part of the war was that al Qaeda put its reputation on the line in Iraq and lost. They lost numerous people but more important, the world's Muslim population now sees them as willing to kill Muslims in order to stir up trouble. They tried to provoke a civil war in Iraq and failed.

Bush's outstanding achievement was to push a new strategy in Iraq. There was strong resistance to this from the Pentagon and Bush ended up overriding his generals. As it turned out, the Surge worked. Had Bush pulled out of Iraq when things got difficult it would have handicapped every future president for generations to come. al Qaeda and the insurgents in Iraq were sure that they could outlast us. Our pull-out in Viet Nam and Somalia proved to them that we were technologically strong but unwilling to take casualties. If Bush hasn't put the memory of Viet Nam to rest, he has at least shown that not all quagmires are unwinnable.

Katrina is an example of Bush's worst weakness - its inability to refute critics and play up its own accomplishments. Yes, Bush showed a tin ear by doing a fly-over of the damage rather than land and inspect it first hand. This wouldn't have changed how it was handled but it would have reflected better on him.

Things that Bush was incorrectly blamed for:

• The hurricane itself. While it was a huge storm when it was in the Gulf, what hit the coast was a typical hurricane. What hit New Orleans didn't even count as a category 1 hurricane. Some people speculated that, had Bush ratified the Kyoto Protocols, global warming would have been stopped and the storm would have been lessened. Kyoto only called for minor reductions in the amount of CO2 being added to the atmosphere. It was never meant to stop global warming, just slow it slightly over fifty years.
• The flooding. Before the water finished rising, liberals had found stories about funding cuts for the levies. If only Bush had spent the money on the levies instead of on Iraq, they insisted, then the flooding wouldn't have happened. As it turned out, the flooding happened because flood walls, not levies, collapsed. The problems with the flood walls went back decades and had more to do with local corruption than federal funding.
• The people stranded. Thousands of people had to be rescued from their homes. The left insisted that Bush was somehow responsible for this. Later studies found that most of them had been offered a ride out of New Orleans but preferred to remain.
• Then there were the outright lies - the murders in the Superdome. Gangs of men breaking into hotels and raping occupants. People shooting at rescue helicopters. None of these reported stories happened.

What did happen was that the military worked night and day to rescue people who ignored warnings to leave. This was seldom mentioned. The news anchors preferred to stand in knee-deep water and say that it was Bush's fault.

It is hard to believe that Bush started his administration with a push for bipartisanship. He invited leading Democrats to the White House for pizza and movies. The No Child Left Behind act was a joint effort with strong Democratic support. So was the Medicare drug benefits.

By several traditional measures, the Bush administration was to the left of the Clintons. Spending increased across the board and projects like AIDS in Africa got an order of magnitude increase. This has lead some Republicans to name Bush a RINO (Republican in Name Only). At the same time, Democrats refused to acknowledge any of this.

International relations under Bush have been a mixed bag. Anti-Americanism existed before Bush and will exist after him. Some governments, most notably France and Germany, have moved closer to the US while others such as the UK and Austrailia are more critical. Our ties with India are closer than ever which is good for several reasons. Keep in mond that the people currently protesting US policies against terrorists were protesting 25 years ago against the policies that ended the Cold War. Sometimes it is better to be right than loved.

It is still too early to evaluate the last six months of the Bush administration and its response to the financial meltdown. We don't know how this will end. About all that can be said is that he did not react as a fiscal conservative.