You can’t create any jobs. And talking constantly about jobs you can’t create makes you look ineffective — so let’s cut that out before we even get started, OK?
But the private sector, the real economy, can and will create jobs. All you have to do is… sit there. Stop taxing, stop regulating, and stop imposing. Just get out of the way, and, to put it in language you’ll understand, you’ll see a thousand flowers bloom.
Then I suppose you can get back to screwing everything up.
A couple-three weeks ago, Megan McArdle made the very smart point — as she is wont to do — that it doesn’t make much sense for Washington to try and inflate away our debt. After all, much of our obligations consist of Social Security and Medicare payments, which are inflation-indexed. In other words, inflation might be a nice way to effectively repudiate the twelve trillion we already owe, but would do little to alleviate the 50-plus trillion dollars (in today’s value) already legislated into to future Federal spending.
But like a lot of smart points, Megan’s point isn’t quite smart enough.*
Those twelve trillion dollars we’ve already borrowed… well, that debt is out there. We owe it. We’ve got to pay it back. And we will pay it back — with solid greenbacks, or maybe with the Weimar varietal.
But the “structural” debt? Why, Congress could repudiate that tomorrow, with or without inflation. We haven’t borrowed that money… yet. And while I doubt this Congress has the fiscal balls (“fiscal balls,” really? -ed.) to tackle our out-of-control entitlements in a responsible way, there is a cowardly out Congress could take.
All our honorable elected officials need to do is to under-calculate the Consumer Price Index (i.e., predicted future inflation) for the first time ever. And –presto!– problem solved.
At the stroke of a pen, our future, not-yet-borrowed debts would still be tied to inflation — but slightly less so. Social Security and Medicare payments would still increase, making everybody feel all warm and fuzzy, if only temporarily. But the key is, the trick is, that so long as scheduled payments increase less quickly than inflation does, then the structural debt still would magically inflate away.
Typically, Congress has used a CPI calculated in such a way that transfer payments increase faster than inflation. That way, Congress gets to pretend that payments are tied to inflation, while welfare recipients see their real-world benefits increase — all without Congress having to put themselves on the record as having increased payments. In other words, Congress gets to buy votes without having to appear to be buying votes.
To put it more simply, for decades now, Congress has used imaginary CPI numbers to screw tax payers in favor of tax receivers.
Now then. Do you think that a Congress cowardly enough to engage in that sort of behavior, is somehow brave enough to use equally-imaginary CPI numbers to screw us all over, rather than admit that they’ve bankrupted us all?
It’s a very special Thanksgiving edition of “Hair of the Dog” — the only TV show anywhere that plays Monday morning quarterback to the Sunday morning chat shows. This week:
Arlen Specter very personally contributes to global warming.
George Stephanopoulos looks at the guest list and comes up… short.
And the Democrats would rather play The Blame Game than talk about what’s actually in their own Senate health care bill.
Plus, I know we usually keep things light & breezy on HOTD, but I went slightly nuclear on Bob Schieffer, Chuck Schumer, Mary Landrieu, and the entire Government-Media Complex. And that’s what I hope you’ll be thankful for this week.
Well, that’s what approximately 59 Senate Democrats must be wishing right about now. Here’s the WSJ report on Lieberman’s objection to any kind of public option whatsoever:
Probe for a catch or caveat in that opposition, and none is visible. Can he support a public option if states could opt out of the plan, as the current bill provides? “The answer is no,” he says in an interview from his Senate office. “I feel very strongly about this.” How about a trigger, a mechanism for including a public option along with a provision saying it won’t be used unless private insurance plans aren’t spreading coverage far and fast enough? No again.
Is Lieberman taking a stand on principle? Or is he a wholly-owned subsidiary of Connecticut’s insurance industry?
The first of Bill Whittle’s Guantanamo Bay Diaries is up on PJTV. I got to talk to Bill about Gitmo during our weekly Trifecta conference call when he first got back from Cuba, and I’m excited to finally start watching these things.
Motorola’s Droid — the latest in a long line of “iPhone killers” — is now available for almost half off from Dell. This, just weeks after it was introduced.
Is Motorola desperate for market share, or to move units, or both?
Here, for example, is what Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group of budget watchdogs, told me: “The Senate bill is better than the House version, but there’s not much reform in this bill. As of now, it’s basically a big entitlement expansion, plus tax increases.”
Here’s another expert, Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: “While this bill does a better job than the House version at reducing the deficit and controlling costs, it still doesn’t do enough. Given the political system’s aversion to tax increases and spending cuts, I worry about what the final bill will look like.”
These are nonpartisan sources, but Republican budget experts such as former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin amplify the point with specific examples and biting language. Holtz-Eakin cites a long list of Democratic-sponsored “budget gimmicks” that made it possible for the CBO to estimate that Reid’s bill would reduce federal deficits by $130 billion by 2019.
Perhaps the biggest of those maneuvers was Reid’s decision to postpone the start of subsidies to help the uninsured buy policies from mid-2013 to January 2014 — long after taxes and fees levied by the bill would have begun.
Even with that change, there is plenty in the CBO report to suggest that the promised budget savings may not materialize. If you read deep enough, you will find that under the Senate bill, “federal outlays for health care would increase during the 2010-2019 period” — not decline. The gross increase would be almost $1 trillion — $848 billion, to be exact, mainly to subsidize the uninsured. The net increase would be $160 billion.
But this depends on two big gambles. Will future Congresses actually impose the assumed $420 billion in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and other federal health programs? They never have.
As it turns out, as cheap whores go, Mary Landrieu is three times more expensive than first thought. But I’d still put on at least two condoms before getting into a voting booth with her name in it.
Read this classic line:
“I will correct something. It’s not $100 million, it’s $300 million, and I’m proud of it and will keep fighting for it,” Landrieu told reporters after her floor speech.
That’s our political class in action — their votes are for sale and they’re goddamn proud of it.
Is it possible for a lone blogger to host a radio show with his lungs and head stuffed full of what appears to be pimento loaf? Yes! On this week’s big, big PJM Political:
Bill Whittle interviews Charles Stimson, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of defense for Detainee Affairs, now with the Heritage Foundation. They’ll be discussing Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 suspects in New York City.
Roger L. Simon and fellow Motion Picture Academy member Lionel Chetwynd make sense of the byzantine process of how a film gets nominated for an Academy Award.
Dr. Helen Smith interviews Jessica Custer of the Network of Enlightened Women, on their efforts to bring increased intellectual diversity to America’s universities.
Glenn Reynolds interviews the members of the Smart Set, on how the Internet is changing how music is distributed and opening new opportunities for entrepreneurial musicians.
Produced by Ed Driscoll, who, as always, has pirated the Sirius/XM Radio signal and made it available for your downloading or streaming pleasure.
If Israel’s nuclear power plant comes under fire, if Tel Aviv skyscrapers explode from missile attacks, if Hezbollah manages to turn all of Israel into a kill zone where there is no place to run, Israelis will panic like they haven’t since the 1973 Yom Kippur War when it briefly appeared the Egyptian army might overrun the whole country. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere in Lebanon while Israelis are actively fending off that kind of assault. No country can afford to be restrained while fighting for its survival.
Being saturated with missiles isn’t quite the same thing as being overrun by tanks — but would be on less disastrous for the Israeli economy, and perhaps almost as effective at getting Jews to simply quit living in Israel.
Now I’m the first to admit to not having a clue what’s going on. Our eight-year drought seems to have ended a couple years back, we’re enjoying mild summers, October was freezing… and November is warm. Go figure.
But is anthropogenic global warming worse than junk science? Is it fraud science? 62 megabytes of hacked emails and other files would indicate…
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich
And…
From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer
Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.
This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).
Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
***
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***
And…
From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
Well this isn’t looking very good.
What makes me most skeptical, however, isn’t the emails — it’s the proposed solutions to the “crisis.”
Here’s what I mean.
The nature of the crisis changes as needed. It’s getting too hot, it’s getting too cold, free markets are for meanies, TV is too dirty, there are only so many radio stations, this one guy got more stuff than this other guy…
But the solution always remains the same: Give the government more power to tax and regulate and control.
No thanks. Get out. Take a flying leap at your own bottom.
If I don’t like the weather, I’ll adjust the damn thermostat, mmkay?
I’ve been taking a sick day — but I saturated my skull with enough steam (and Dayquil) to get through taping this week’s Hair of the Dog. On the big show:
Obama — will he or won’t he commit to Afghanistan?
So the forceful decision in our War of Necessity is… Afghanistanization. Or something. Anyway, policy reviews going on since, supposedly, February, have resulted in this:
President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.
Obama still is close to announcing his revamped war strategy, most likely shortly after he returns from a trip to Asia that ends on Nov. 19.
The president raised questions at a war council meeting on Wednesday, however, that could alter the dynamic of both how many additional troops are sent to Afghanistan and what the timeline would be for their presence in the war zone, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Obama’s thinking.
Throwing out all the Pentagon recommendations doesn’t bother me, to be quite frank. President Bush did exactly that in September, 2001. Bush’s JCS presented him with what the Pentagon typically comes up with — a big, slow build-up, followed by a great big invasion. The whole thing would have taken six-12 months, by my reckoning — and that’s under ideal circumstances. Instead, Bush told them all to try again.
The JCS responded with a new, “small footprint” plan, that ended Taliban rule in just six weeks. A good leader knows when to tell his subordinates that they’re effing clueless. So don’t fret too much if Obama doesn’t necessarily like the taste of whatever swill the Pentagon is dishing out. The Pentagon has acres of no-good plans, and when the stuff hits the fan, you can guess which plans get pulled off the shelf first.
Then again — Bush did all this in a few days. Obama’s been at it since August. Well, March, actually. And he decided on a new direction back in 2008. Or maybe ‘07. As Jules Crittenden describes the process towards developing a system for reaching a decision to give the matter some considered consideration:
In fairness, even if the president did declare back in 2008 this war was a vital national security interest, and he did signal last spring he was on board with counterinsurgency, and even if he did appoint Gen. Stanley McChrystal to get the job done in May, the general’s recommendations only arrived in August, and the president didn’t look at them until, what, late September, and he’s been really busy this whole time letting Congress bollix his health-care initiative, throwing Eastern Europe under the bus and flying to Copenhagen, that kind of thing, so he’s only been able to squeeze in seven high-level national security meetings, or is it eight? Is it so unreasonable to ask for new options on top of the new options that he asked for on top of the new options that McChrystal gave him? Meanwhile, China’s ass wants kissing and then we’re into the holidays…
Now, I was told back in 2008 by a very smart retired Army guy — who went to work at a pretty high level for the Obama campaign — that four combat brigades were exactly what we needed in Afghanistan, and that that’s exactly what his candidate was promising to send over there. OK, great — mission accomplished. Except that maybe they aren’t enough. Or maybe they’re too much. It all depends on what the definition of “mission” is.
Which, after 18 months of campaigning on the issue and nine months of being the damn CINC, you’d think Obama would know what he wants to do over there. Honestly, the only thing that he ought to still be thinking about is how best to achieve his goals — if we were still living back in March.
But already it’s half past November. And it’s looking more and more like this time we’re really going to see that harsh Afghan winter.
Third and final Trifecta segment for this week. It’s Bill Whittle’s turn to sit in the Paul Lynde Memorial Square — and he has Scott Ott and me look at two American presidents, and how they treat (and are treated by) the soldiers under their command.
