Views on the News
June
5, 2010
Views on the News*
Americans are not getting
leadership today that is delivering a vision that captures their sense of what
this country is about. Obama has been compared to
Jimmy Carter (in his misguided notions about the world), to Richard Nixon (in
his sleazy backroom dealing and lack of transparency) and to LBJ (in his
infatuation with government). Unfortunately,
it appears that he embodies the worst of three unsuccessful presidents, and
like all three, he may manage to drag his party down with him. Our current political leadership is out of
touch with public sentiment. A political
leader needs to know who we are as well as who we are not. Recent polling by Rasmussen shows the
percentage saying they “strongly disapprove”
of President Obama’s performance 22 points higher than those who “strongly approve,” the worst showing yet
of his Presidency. Obama is among the most
thin-skinned Presidents we have had, and we see evidence of it in every
possible venue imaginable, from one-on-one interviews to press conferences,
from extemporaneous remarks to set speeches.
The President is constantly complaining about what others are saying
about him, as if he is above criticism. Americans
tend to tire of those who are look back rather than ahead and are always
blaming others for the problems they face.
The latest political chicanery surrounding Pennsylvania’s Joe Sestak and Colorado’s Andrew Romanoff appears to be yet another in
a long line of sleazy, Chicago backroom deals being covered up by the White
House. President Obama's more unattractive personal
qualities probably won't wear well with the electorate. Governing is not campaigning, and making
promises is quite different from keeping them, especially when the details are
revealed. Barack Obama, a man who was as
unprepared to be President as any man in our lifetime, has over the last 16
months shown that he is overmatched by events.
Americans are looking for leaders whose
understanding about American exceptionalism is not,
in the words of our President, the same way “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism
and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Americans are looking
today for political leaders that understand that this is not just another
country… Americans want to become “American”
again!
(“Obama, the Thin-Skinned
President” by Peter Wehner dated May 27, 2010
published by Politics Daily at http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/05/27/obama-the-thin-skinned-president/
“Today’s Political Mandate –
Become America Again” by Star Parker dated May 31, 2010 published by Town
Hall at http://townhall.com/columnists/StarParker/2010/05/31/todays_political_mandate_-_become_america_again
)
America faces a new culture war:
·
a new struggle between two competing visions of the country's
future as an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free
enterprise with limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards
determined by market forces vs. a European-style statism
grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income
redistribution. These visions are not
reconcilable, so we must choose, and it is not at all clear which side will
prevail. The forces of big government
are entrenched and enjoy the full arsenal of the administration's money and
influence. Our leaders in Washington,
aided by the unprecedented economic crisis of recent years and the panic it
induced, have seized the moment to introduce breathtaking expansions of state
power in huge swaths of the economy, from the health-care takeover to the
financial regulatory bill that the Senate approved Thursday. President Obama has repeatedly demonstrated
his willingness to use manufactured crises to enhance his own power and
prestige at the expense of the Constitution. Positioning himself through the use of his own
engineered economic meltdown, Obama has fired the executives of private
companies, claimed the power to set pay, nationalized health care, and nationalized
manufacturing. Obama has even gone as
far as using the mistakes of some banks in over-leveraging as a door to
threaten banks with "pitchforks,"
echoing Leninist populism. Additionally,
he orders
banks to lend despite the serious drop in deposits, a ludicrous directive that
demonstrates his extreme ignorance. If
these forces continue to prevail, America will cease to be a free enterprise
nation. Entrepreneurship can flourish
only in a culture where individuals are willing to innovate and exert
leadership; where people enjoy the rewards and face the consequences of their
decisions; and where we can gamble the security of the status quo for a chance
of future success.
Americans
support free enterprise by a wide margin. A Gallup poll found that 86% of Americans have
a positive image of "free enterprise,"
with only 10% viewing it negatively. A Pew
Research study found almost 70% of respondents agreed that they are better off
in a free-market economy, while only 20% disagreed. The George W. Bush administration began the
huge Wall Street and Detroit bailouts, and for years before the economic
crisis, the GOP talked about free enterprise while simultaneously expanding the
government with borrowed money and increasing the percentage of citizens with
no income tax liability. But the real
tipping point was the financial crisis, which began in 2008. The meltdown presented a golden opportunity
for the 30% coalition to attack free enterprise openly and remake America in
its own image, and it seized that opportunity. While Republicans had no convincing
explanation for the crisis, seemed responsible for it and had no obvious plans
to fix it, the statists offered a full and compelling narrative. For a lot of panicky Americans, the prospect
of a paternalistic government rescuing the nation from crisis seemed appealing
as stock markets and home prices spiraled downward. In reality, it was government housing policy
that was at the root of the crisis. Moreover,
the financial sector, where the crisis began and where it has had the most
serious impact, is already one of the most regulated parts
of our economy. The chaos happened
despite an extensive, intrusive regulatory framework, not because such a
framework didn't exist. Using a
falsified tale of economic malfeasance, Obama asks us to accept government by
councils of wise men. As part of his
financial regulatory plan, Obama would create a select group, i.e. the
Financial Oversight Council, charged with formulating the regulations that
govern the entire financial sector. On
the contrary, such changes would give us a false sense of security, especially
when Washington, a primary culprit in the crisis, is creating and implementing
the new rules.
Recessions
can and do end without the kind of stimulus we experienced, and attempts to
shore up the economy with huge public spending often do little to improve
matters and instead chain future generations with debt. If we reject the administration's narrative,
the 70-30 nation will remain strong. If
we accept it, and base our nation's policies on it, we will be well on our way
to a European-style social democracy. The
new statism in America, made possible by years of
drift and accelerated by the panic over the economic crisis, threatens to make
us permanently poorer. The real risk is
that in the new culture war, we will forsake the third unalienable right set
out in our Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness. Free enterprise brings happiness;
redistribution does not. The reason is
that only free enterprise brings earned success.
·
Earned
success is the creation of value in our lives or in the lives of others.
·
Earned
success is the stuff of entrepreneurs who seek value through innovation, hard
work and passion.
·
Earned
success is what parents feel when their children do wonderful things; what
social innovators feel when they change lives; what artists feel when they
create beauty.
Not
surprisingly, unearned money, while it may help alleviate suffering, carries
with it no personal satisfaction. The
same results emerge with other kinds of unearned income such as welfare
payments. Studies show that recipients
are far unhappier than equally poor people who do not receive such government
benefits. If unearned money does not
bring happiness, redistributing money by force won't make for a happier America,
and the redistributionists' theory of a better
society through income equality falls apart. The goal of our system should be to give all
Americans the greatest opportunities possible to succeed based on their work
and merit. That's exactly what the free
enterprise system does: It makes earned success possible for the most people. This is the liberty that enables the true
pursuit of happiness.
President
Obama's financial "reform"
is nothing less than the destruction of individual freedom in America. If government controls both the means of
credit and the object on which it will be spent, it controls people. "We
the people" must resist this despotic turn of events while we still
can. Protests against the new statism have flared around the nation for more than a year.
While some have tried to dismiss the
"tea party" demonstrations
and the town hall protests of last summer as the work of extremists, ignorant
backwoodsmen or agents of the health-care industry, these movements reveal much
about the culture war that is underway. To win, the 70% majority must come together around core
principles: that the purpose of free enterprise is human flourishing, not
materialism; that we stand for equality of opportunity, not equality of income
(“America’s new culture war: Free
enterprise vs. government control” by Arthur C. Brooks dated May 23, 2010
published by The Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/21/AR2010052101854.html
“Wise Guys: The End of Free-Market
Capitalism” by John Griffing dated May 30, 2010
published by American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/wise_guys_the_end_of_free_mark.html
)
Arguably the most crucial, and underappreciated, reason behind
the financial sector collapse has been excessive federal intervention and
social intervention. The 1970s brought the
Community Reinvestment Act, followed by the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and
the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. These
laws were then used by socio-political activists to pressure banking and
lending institutions into making bad loans, which these institutions probably
would not have made without the new laws in place. In the name of social justice, the FDIC was
further empowered to audit lenders for redlining practices and pressured regulated
private lending institutions to make marginal and bad loans. Starting in 1993,
pursuant to new federal statutes, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s regulator, the
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Federal Housing
Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), established new “affordable housing” goals. Each
GSE now would have to expand their purchases of mortgages made to low- and
moderate-income households, especially members of racial minority groups. In 1999, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo announced
a historic “agreement”: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would buy $2.4 trillion in
mortgages over the next 10 years to create affordable housing for 28.1 million
low- and moderate-income households. By
2007 HUD stipulated that at least 55% of loans acquired by Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac had to meet low- and moderate-income affordability standards. The two GSEs complied rather than lose
advantages contained in their respective congressional charters, such as
exemption from state and local taxes and a $2.25 billion credit line from the
Treasury Department. From within
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, these bad loans were bought and packaged or
securitized as collateralized mortgage obligations (CMO). The bad loans were packaged with a collection
of good loans into multi-year tranches so that the entire loan package could
receive an investment-grade bond rating. With rating institutions giving good ratings
to these volatile, risky CMOs, an artificial, government-created market was
born. After the Glass-Steagall Act was officially repealed in 1999, every
mortgage originator got into the business and legally underwrote marginal loans. These “highly
rated” CMOs began replacing much safer U.S. Treasury notes in the banks'
investment portfolios. These practices
were all legal
and supported by an
artificial, government-created and -regulated market. Basically, our
nation has over-invested in housing, or to put the matter more simply, we’ve
bought more housing than we can afford. With
the absolute failure of their artificial and unsustainable government-mandated
market singlehandedly collapsing the U.S. economy, the government began
fulfilling its traditional role -- throwing good taxpayer money after bad,
casting the net of blame widely, and all the while tactfully avoiding any blame
for itself. The bottom line: There never
would have been a mortgage crisis if it had not been for the government's
creation of the laws and regulations that allowed for the CMO market to be
born. President Obama intends to correct
this mess through more regulation and become the avenging angel of the
progressive party. All that will come
from his intentions is more intrusive and dysfunctional government regulation. As the government continues to force mortgage
modifications, support the sub-prime market, and use taxpayers' money to bail
out failed institutions, we are led farther into economic problems. If the government had
left the housing markets alone in the first place, this system-wide failure
would never have happened, because banks and other financial institutions would
never have made high-risk sub-prime loans.
(“Has the SEC Charged the Right People with Securities Fraud?” by
Larry N. Smith and C. Gary Mondy dated May 28, 2010
published by American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/has_the_sec_charged_the_right.html
“Frank Data: How Federal Policy
Triggered the Mortgage Meltdown” by Carl Horowitz dated may 29, 2010
published by Town Hall at http://townhall.com/columnists/CarlHorowitz/2010/05/29/frank_data_how_federal_policy_triggered_the_mortgage_meltdown
)
For seven weeks, the American Gulf Coast has been threatened by
a gigantic oil spill, caused by the April 21 explosion of a British Petroleum (BP)
deepwater rig, yet unlike five years ago when the media were quick to put the
onus on the Bush administration for its handling of the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina, ABC, CBS and NBC failed to scrutinize the administration’s ineffectual
response to this disaster, now blasted even by such Democratic stalwarts as
ex-Clinton operative James Carville. While the media
fancy themselves as government watchdogs, such criticisms were virtually absent
from the first four weeks of the networks’ oil spill coverage. The
40+ day drama of the uncontrolled oil flow from BP's well, now the largest
spill in U.S. history, has become a public test of Obama’s competence at
handling an unanticipated crisis. In
times of national disaster, the federal government has a role it must perform,
quickly and well. It failed for too many
days during Katrina and is now failing for over six weeks. America is watching the president alternate
between wringing his hands in helplessness and pointing his finger in blame
when he should be solving the most pressing environmental problem America has
faced in the past 50 years. Rather than
ask “how can we fix this?” the President
spent a month painting BP as nothing more than the latest entry in his growing
list of evil corporations. Instead of
facilitating the fix, the President went to war with it. Despite bestowing a safety award upon the rig
in question, Obama has blamed everyone from BP to the Bush administration for a
failure to anticipate this disaster. He’s
halted all deep-sea oil drilling in the gulf for six months, or until a Presidential
Commission completes its investigation. He
also wants new agencies, expanded federal powers, and more funding to deal with
possible future spills. When faced with
a challenge, be it an oil spill, a health care debate, or a financial meltdown,
Obama’s M.O. is now painfully clear: blame someone else, grow the size of
government, and increase taxes. It’s a
plan of attack that will only serve to create greater problems down the road. Everybody is comparing the oil spill to
Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be President Carter’s Iranian
hostage crisis, when the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability
to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. Obama seems not to know what to do and finds
himself consigned to the roles of observer and critic, and America is getting
the point that its President doesn’t have a clue. The question is whether the federal government should be given more power
to regulate energy industries, or is the federal bureaucracy too inefficient to
deliver relief supplies, let alone regulate big chunks of the economy?
(“Media Double Standard on Gulf
Coast Disasters” by Rich Noyes and Kyle Drennan
dated May 26, 2010 published by Media Research Center at http://www.mrc.org/realitycheck/realitycheck/2010/20100526033414.aspx
“The BP spill: Obama’s Katrina?”
by Doyle McManus dated May 30, 2010 published by Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-bp-20100530,0,5554554.column
“It’s time to plug the leadership
hole” by Robert Laurie dated June 1, 2010 published by The Daily Caller at http://dailycaller.com/2010/06/01/its-time-to-plug-the-leadership-hole/
“Obama doesn’t have a clue” by
Dick Morris dated June 1, 2010 published by The Hill at http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/dick-morris/100913-obama-doesnt-have-a-clue
)
Democrat Senators and Representatives comforted
themselves with their own self-created myth that, although ObamaCare
was horribly unpopular as a bill, it would prove to be quite fetching as a law,
but reality has proven just the opposite.
In the two months
since, President Obama has pulled out all the stops, aggressively trying to
sell the overhaul while also rolling out ostensibly popular provisions ahead of
schedule. Unfortunately a steady stream
of revelations of previously undiscovered horrors buried in the bowels of ObamaCare appears to have more than negated any gains that
the administration might otherwise have made. Since passage, reports have
revealed that ObamaCare would cost over $1 trillion
by any standard, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), not
“merely” $940 billion as previously reported (while its total costs in its real
first decade, 2014 to 2023, would continue to be well over $2 trillion); that ObamaCare has prompted major corporations to discuss dropping
their employer-provided health-care plans; that businesses would have to file
1099s not only for every person to whom they pay $600 in wages but for every
vendor with whom they do $600 in business, thereby imposing a paperwork
nightmare and incentivizing companies to avoid doing business with a myriad of
small firms rather than a handful of big ones; that ObamaCare
would create 159 new federal agencies, offices, or programs; that the Obama
administration’s Medicare Chief Actuary says ObamaCare
would raise U.S. health costs by $311 billion in relation to current law and
would shift about 14 million people off of employer-provided insurance — and
some of them onto Medicaid; that ObamaCare’s would discourage
employment, as hiring a 25th worker would cost a business $5,600 in addition to
wages and benefits; that ObamaCare would impose a severe
marriage penalty, offering additional subsidies as high as $10,425 a year if
couples merely avoid marriage; that a lone provision in ObamaCare,
which would penalize employers if their employees spend more than 9.5% of their
household income on insurance premiums, would cut the net income of businesses
like White Castle by more than half; that even though ObamaCare
was supposed to get people out of emergency rooms and into doctors’ offices,
those who build emergency rooms say the effect will be just the opposite and
that they are gearing up for increased business; that doctors shortages are
looming and would be accentuated by ObamaCare, both
because more people would seek care (otherwise, what would the $2 trillion be
buying?) and because fewer people would likely enter a demanding profession
that would now promise greater restrictions and lower pay; and that President
Obama’s nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid under ObamaCare
is an open advocate of the British National Health Services’ NICE (National
Institute of Clinical Excellence) and its methods of rationing care. These revelations appear to have taken a toll,
making a notoriously unpopular law significantly less popular. After
a brief bump, support for Democrat health reform has declined. Another troubling development is that the
administration has missed deadlines for issuing four sets of regulations
specified by the bill and lacks a master time-line for the other required
regulations. According to a recent
Rasmussen poll, 63% of voters support repeal of the law, the highest level
since passage. A Kaiser Family
Foundation health tracking poll shows erosion in the intensity of support, with
only 14% of Americans holding "very favorable" views of the law. The health care
concerns of millions of Americans will ripple through the electorate before
November and will galvanize support
for real health care reform that would empower patients, make prices more
transparent, give patients more opportunity and incentive to shop around, and
thereby lower health costs, all without reducing liberty or lowering the
quality of care, but first we have to get rid of the existing ObamaCare.
(“ObamaCare Taking on Water” by Jeffrey H. Anderson
dated May 28, 2010 published by The weekly Standard at
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-taking-water-0
“Refusing the Entitlement Lollipop”
by Michael Gerson dated May 28, 2010 published by
Real Clear Politics at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/05/28/refusing_the_entitlement_lollipop_105762.html
“GOP aims to revive health care
debate” by Carrie Budoff Brown dated June 1, 2010
published by Politico at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37990.html
“ObamaCare’s Ever-Rising Price Tag” by Karl Rove
dated June 3, 2010 published by The Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604575282482320389198.html
)
There are now 18 states moving forward with a version of
Arizona’s controversial, yet popular immigration law, reflecting widespread
support for immigration enforcement. The metaphor of America as a
“melting pot” is no longer apt. More recently a better metaphor is of America
as a “salad bowl” of mutually
exclusive groups. Today, hyphenated
Americans often put other affiliations first. One poll of Hispanics in America found that 64%
consider themselves “mostly Hispanic,”
while only 15% see themselves as “mostly
American.” Even worse, 27% of the
survey sample had lived in America for more than 25 years, while only 15% lived
here less than six. The current list of
states following Arizona’s lead on immigration enforcement include Arkansas, Idaho,
Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey,
North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas,
and Utah. Numerous scientific and
certified polls indicate 60-81% public support for local police enforcing
immigration law as the Arizona bill does.
Arizona has expressed a lack of confidence in
the federal government who has promised to close the borders since the last
1985 amnesty bill, but know full well that only 34 of the 700 miles of double
layer border fence has ever been completed.
(“North Carolina
Becomes 18th State Pushing Arizona’s New Immigration Law” by ALIPAC dated May 31, 2010 published by Land of the Free at http://www.thelandofthefree.net/conservativeopinion/2010/05/30/north-carolina-becomes-18th-state-pushing-arizonas-new-immigration-law/
“Just Finish the Dang Fence”
by Jeff Lukens dated June 2, 2010 published by American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/just_finish_the_dang_fence.html
)
The most striking feature about President Obama’s new National
Security Strategy (NSS) is that it is just warmed-over liberal internationalism,
and the principal theme in this NSS is burden sharing. This
document concedes the importance of the military but emphasizes the security
imperatives of "affordable health care" and "redeveloping our
infrastructure." Nearly all of the
policy weight of the NSS rests on the project of creating a new international
infrastructure to replace the current one, which is "buckling under the
weight of new threats" such as nuclear proliferation. However the document provides no actual
strategy in this area. The tone of the
NSS is rather different from the Bush administration’s implied preference for
unilateralism, but even that change merely takes U.S. strategy back to the days
of the Clinton administration and most of its predecessors. The United States, the document stresses,
cannot afford to be the world’s sole policeman. Washington needs partners who are willing and
able to meet security challenges and help preserve global peace and prosperity. At best, “burden
sharing” is likely to take the form of the same militarily useless, largely
symbolic force deployments that we have seen from many of the NATO allies in
Afghanistan. Even worse, faux burden
sharing may mean that the U.S. forces do all the security heavy lifting, and
face the bulk of the dangers, while allies perform nonmilitary nation-building
tasks of dubious utility. Nor can the
United States turn to powers other than its supposed allies to share global
security burdens. In short, his NSS is
little more than a pious wish. Matters
will not improve as long as the United States obligingly takes care of the
security needs of all of its allies and clients. They then have every incentive to continue
free riding on the enormous U.S. military exertions and devote their resources
to shoring-up their financially beleaguered social welfare states. Unless Washington changes that incentive
structure by scaling-back commitments to security clients who ought to be doing
far more for their own defense, nothing will change for the better. Given the current
incentive structure and the clueless U.S. policy that makes it possible,
President Obama’s search for willing and capable security partners will prove
even more futile than the famous search by Diogenes for an honest man in
Ancient Greece.
(“Obama’s Security Strategy is
Clueless” by Ted Galen Carpenter dated May 28, 2010 published by The
National Interest at http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=23448
“America’s strategic poker face”
by Michael Gerson dated June 2, 2010 published by The
Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/01/AR2010060102505.html
)
* There is so much published each week that unless
you search for it, you will miss important breaking news. I try to package the best of this information
into my “Views on the News”
each Saturday morning. Updates have been
made this week to the following issue section:
·
Politics at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/intro/politics.php
·
Gun Control at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/dp/guncontrol.php
·
Terrorism at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/fp/terrorism.php
David Coughlin
Hawthorne, NY