BEST OF THE WEB TODAY JULY 11, 2011 The First Rule of Liberalism Government failure always justifies more government.
By JAMES TARANTO
www.wsj.comRemember the "stimulus," or, as it was officially titled, the Recovery Act of 2009? It was President Obama's first major legislative initiative, enacted the month after he took office with only Democratic votes in the House and just three Republicans in the Senate (one of whom was a Democrat by that summer). The price tag was huge, some $800 billion, or 50 times the size (in nominal terms) of the stimulus Bill Clinton proposed at the outset of his presidency. Congress killed the $16 billion Clinton stimulus because it was too expensive.
Unemployment that January was 7.6%, and Obama's economic advisers warned that it could rise as high as 8% without the stimulus. With the stimulus, it rose as high as 10.2% in October 2009. Last month's rate was 9.2%, still 1.2 points higher than the level the stimulus was supposed to prevent us from ever reaching. By contrast, in January 1993 unemployment was 7.3%. Without the Clinton stimulus, it had declined to 6.5% by the end of that year.
Oh well, at least school janitors in Nebraska have "diversity manuals," as the Omaha World-Herald reports:
The Omaha Public Schools used more than $130,000 in federal stimulus dollars to buy each teacher, administrator and staff member a manual on how to become more culturally sensitive. . . .The authors assert that American government and institutions create advantages that "channel wealth and power to white people," that color-blindness will not end racism and that educators should "take action for social justice."The book says that teachers should acknowledge historical systemic oppression in schools, including racism, sexism, homophobia and "ableism," defined by the authors as discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities. . . .The Omaha school board approved buying 8,000 copies of the book--one for every employee, including members of the custodial staff--in April. Your tax dollars at work! Or rather, your tax dollars will be at work for years paying the interest on the money the federal government borrowed from the Chinese to pay Omaha's diversity-manual bill.
Associated Press
'We were largely successful.'
Now, one might reasonably object that this is but an anecdote. The law of averages makes it a certainty that some of the stimulus money found its way to less utterly appalling uses than this one. What it didn't do, however, was accomplish its stated objective: keeping unemployment from rising above 8%.
Here is how Obama, in a press conference this morning, described this failure: "We took very aggressive steps when I first came into office to yank the economy out of a potential Great Depression and stabilize it. And we were largely successful in stabilizing it. But we stabilized it at a level where unemployment is still too high and the economy is not growing fast enough to make up for all the jobs that were lost before I took office and the few months after I took office."
And Yasser Arafat is in stable condition.
One school of thought is that the so-called stimulus failed because it was, as former Enron adviser Paul Krugman puts it, "woefully inadequate." This is the economic analogue of the Kagan Principle, which liberal Supreme Court justices would use to limit freedom of speech: The more stubbornly corrupt the government is, the more justified it is in curtailing fundamental liberties in the name of preventing corruption.
It's a common refrain among those who lust to increase government's size and power: Every failed measure justifies more of the same. Poverty programs make it harder to escape poverty? We need more poverty programs! Racial preferences heighten racial division? We need more racial preferences! And a diversity manual for every janitor in the country! When ObamaCare ends up driving the costs of medicine up and the quality and availability down, you can bet the people who created that monstrosity will claim it failed only because it didn't go far enough.
Let's generalize this into the First Rule of Liberalism: Government failure always justifies more government. As Obama said today, complaining about Republican pressure to cut spending: "I'd rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes--like new programs." Fortunately for the country, the voters don't always agree.Enronomics
One more funny Krugman bit--this from his blog at the New York Times website:
The truth about our slump--that we know how to fix it, that we could fix it in a year if we had the political will, but that bad ideas and worse politicians are standing in the way--makes people uncomfortable. They want to believe that we have a deep problem, and that's why we're in such a mess.The truth is that the fault lies not in our structure, but in ourselves.We're uncomfortable because we know how to "fix" the slump within a year? That's the problem? Getting that kind of advice, it's a wonder Enron didn't go bankrupt. Oh wait, it did.
Great Moments in Political Analysis
Rather audaciously, President Obama is trying to use the current talks over the debt limit as a way of pushing through another huge tax increase. House Republicans, thus far at least, are holding the line. Writing on the Fox Business website, economist Peter Morici argues that they're making a mistake:
Saturday evening, Speaker [John] Boehner pronounced that a grand deal on deficit--slashing it by $4 trillion dollars over 10 years--was not possible, because the President insists on higher taxes as part of the package. He was giving in to pressure from his right wing, led by Majority Leader Cantor.The hard reality is that Cantor is politically tone deaf, Barack Obama is not, which explains why the former is a Congressman and the latter is a President, and the 2012 elections are not like [sic] to change that.Just as President Obama and Speaker Pelosi mistook their 2008 victory as a mandate for a hard left agenda and got shellacked in 2010, Cantor & Company, with their severe conservative agenda, are taking Republicans down the same well trod path of hubris and defeat.So to sum up those last two paragraphs: Unlike Obama, Cantor is tone-deaf, just like Obama.
Anything I Can Do, You Can Do Better?
"We men just make bad decisions. We can't help it. We're men. Women, on the other hand, do almost everything better."--David Weidner, MarketWatch.com, June 14
"At Thursday's White House meeting between President Obama and congressional leaders, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner laid out in stark terms the awful economic repercussions of allowing the debt ceiling to lapse. Everyone in the room agreed that defaulting on U.S. debt would be disastrous and that something must be done. At that point, Nancy Pelosi asked: Why couldn't the debt ceiling be decoupled from deficit reduction? Her query, after so many weeks of reports and talks centered on deficit reduction tied to a debt ceiling deal, visibly surprised some leaders in the room, several Republican and Democratic sources say. Obama politely informed the House Minority Leader, those same sources say, that that train had left the station weeks ago."--Time.com, July 8
Was the Prof Pickled?
Two years ago liberals were outraged when angry constituents confronted Democratic congressmen at public "town hall" meetings to object to ObamaCare and other liberal policies. Now the left has come up with a way of striking back: by confronting other people's congressmen at nonpublic gatherings.
Susan Crabtree of TalkingPointsMemo.com reports that last week Susan Feinberg, a professor at Rutgers Business School in Newark, N.J., was dining at "the swanky Capitol Hill eatery Bistro Bis" when she spotted Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, at a nearby table.
Feinberg, whose website identifies her as an adviser to the 2004 Kedwards campaign, became "appalled" (TPM's word), "stunned" (her own word) and "outraged" (TPM's again). "She approached the table and asked Ryan 'how he could live with himself' sipping expensive wine while advocating for cuts to programs for seniors and the poor," according to TPM. Feinberg snapped some pictures of the wine bottle at Ryan's table. Then "the manager and a waiter came over and Feinberg decided she had said her piece and it was time to leave."
It turned out Ryan's friend had ordered the wine, which sold for $350, but congressional ethics rules meant Ryan got stuck with the tab, which he helpfully provided TPM. It also turns out Feinberg had been tippling as well:
"It was my birthday, and I'd had half a bottle of great wine with dinner," she wrote in an e-mail to TPM. "I wasn't drunk, but I was certainly emboldened to speak my mind."Was she drunk? "We've all had birthdays like that," notes blogress Ann Althouse. "How much does Prof. Feinberg weigh? I'd like to calculate her level of intoxication." She is not obese, to judge by the photo on her website and the line that says she ran a marathon in 2002--though there is no indication of her height.
Another relevant question is whether she drinks habitually. Here she might have revealed more than she intended. Consider that quote: "It was my birthday, and I'd had half a bottle of great wine with dinner." At the very least, there is a tension between her subsequent protestation that "I wasn't drunk" and her seeming compulsion to justify what she drank.
It seems to us Feinberg doesn't want people to think she is a frequent heavy drinker. And she probably isn't one--in which case she would have a low tolerance for alcohol. That would help explain her wild behavior after half a bottle of wine, a quantity that might not have much effect on a more experienced drinker.
Another Glass of Whine, Please, Garçon
President Obama's views on same-sex marriage are "evolving," which means that he's for it but is waiting to say so publicly until he's sure he won't pay a political price for it. That prompts a defense in the Boston Globe from another evolver, John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking former junior senator who by the way served in Vietnam. From his op-ed we learn that Kerry is still ticked off about not being president:
Pundits ask whether President Obama can afford to "change" his position on gay marriage. It's a phony debate about a real issue.Marriage is deeply personal - our positions are based on unique combinations of reason, belief, and experience, not polling and politics. Everyone is entitled to his own view, in his own time, including the president.Can gay marriage be a political weapon? Surely it once was. In 2004, a flyer produced by Republicans proclaimed that if I were elected president, men would marry each other. It was a political season in which the Senate calendar was hijacked to debate a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, an amendment I opposed. At our national convention in Boston that summer, I said, "Let's never misuse for political purposes . . . the Constitution of the United States. The high road may be harder, but it leads to a better place." In these last seven years we have come closer to that "better place."Poor Kerry. Men are marrying men anyway, yet he never got to be president. Or, to put it another way: They told Glenn Reynolds that if George W. Bush was elected, men would only be able to marry women. And for once they were wrong.
Leading by Example
