Planet Utah

President Obama: so far, not so good

I am not, and will not be, an Obama-hater. (If anything, I think I'm a bit of a W-hater.) I also realize that events that happen early in a new presidency tend to be blown out of proportion. (Remember in 1993 when Time described Bill Clinton, on its cover no less, as "The Incredible Shrinking President"? Remember in 2001 when there was much hand-wringing over whether President Bush should apologize to China for a collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese jet fighter? By the way, these examples work best if you look off into space for a few seconds and then say, "Oh yeah...") Having said that, I don't think President Obama is off to a particularly promising start. Following are three items in my bill of particulars:

1. The "economic stimulus" bill. This one isn't over yet, so there's still time for improvements. Truth is, I'd rather have no federal stimulus bill at all. But if we're going to have one, it should be designed by economists rather than politicians. I don't even care care if they're Democratic economists. Democrats won the election, so let their economists make policy. If Democratic economists wrote this bill rather than Democratic politicians, there would be much less spending on politicians' pet projects and fewer tax cuts that, while desirable in their own right, are unlikely to provide meaningful, short-term economic stimulus. As it stands, though, this first act by our new, and supposedly different, president looks an awful lot like standard operating procedure in Washington. (On that point, read Peggy Noonan.)

2. Obama's comments about America's relationship with the Islamic world. He said a lot in the Al-Arabiya interview, but this was a key passage:

And my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.

This is the sort of thing you say when you've spent your whole life inside the bubble of polite society. What, exactly, is wrong with what President Obama said? Krauthammer explains it (and everything else) better than I ever could. The one thing Krauthammer fails to mention, however, is that Obama didn't say anything along these lines: "The Muslim world also needs to get its own house in order. To the extent that there is leadership, energy, action, and a call to arms among Muslims today, these things are coming disproportionately from the most radical elements. The great masses of the Islamic world, the billion or so peace-loving people who want the very same things that people want in America, or Brazil, or Poland, or Japan, these people need to stand up, speak up, and take back their religion from the fanatics."

3. Iran. During the election, critics of Obama's "I'll talk to anybody" policy said that some people aren't worth talking to. Why? They are unwilling to negotiate on important principles of policy, and will use the occasion of talks with the American president to score PR points. Right on cue, the Iranians are interpreting even Obama's limited overtures thus far as a sign of American failure. They are also demanding apologies for past transgressions as the price of admission to a more cooperative diplomacy. Obviously, there is much, much more of this story to be written. Still, I remain worried about the very same things that I, and many others more important than I, worried about before the election--Obama's relative inexperience, and his academic/intellectual understanding of world affairs, an understanding that is sometimes at odds with how the real world works.

Has Google been hacked? UPDATED

I tried a bunch of Google searches this morning, and virtually every site that was returned came back with this warning: "This site may harm your computer." These were not porn sites I was looking for, either. We're talking about shopping sites, news sites, blogs...even the Google site itself. And in Firefox, at least (don't know about Internet Explorer), if a site came back with this warning, there was no way of disregarding it and proceeding to the site anyway. If you try to Google a solution to this problem, guess what? All the sites come back with the same warning...

Footnote: Crisis over. Somehow, all of this has been fixed.

UPDATE: Here's a little more on what happened.

Dumb, dumber...dumbest?

In "Dumb and Dumber," LLoyd inadvertently drives himself and Harry a thousand miles in the wrong direction on a road trip to Aspen. When Harry throws a temper tantrum in response, Lloyd says, "We're in a hole! We're just gonna have to dig ourselves out."

Yesterday, President Obama said the following, reflecting on the state of the American economy: "The American people understand that we have got a big hole we have to dig ourselves out of..."

Footnote: For the few of you who don't get the joke, if you want to get out of a hole, you don't keep digging. That just makes the hole bigger.

Anklenote: The rest of Obama's sentence went as follows: "...but they don't like the idea that people are digging a bigger hole." Okay, so the idea is to dig yourself out of the hole without digging a bigger hole...?

Why I'm still a Republican

Not long ago I wrote a post discussing the circumstances under which I might become a Democrat. For now, though, I'm still a Republican. Why? Consider the pending "economic stimulus" bill. No one in their right mind thinks this bill is well-suited to solve our economic problems. The Democrats are going ahead with it anyway, though. Why? Well, let's say that the economy is doing much better in the fall of 2010 than it is now. Democrats can take credit: "We voted for the stimulus package and got the economy out of the ditch." That will be nonsense, of course--the stimulus package will have done no such thing--but the Dems will get credit. If the economy is no better in 2010, or God forbid, worse, the Democrats will go to voters and say, "At least we tried. The Republicans wanted to do nothing. If they had gotten their way, we might be in a depression now rather than just a recession. Until we get out of this, though, at least we've got a bigger, stronger safety net because of the bill we passed in 2009." They'll get selective credit for that, though obviously not as much as if the economy had turned around. The point is, though, they're covered either way, at least as covered as they can be in an unpredictable political and economic climate.

Right there you see the chief problem with contemporary politics--the political asymmetry between doing something, even if it's something stupid, and doing nothing, even if that's the correct course of (in)action. Politicians almost never get punished for doing something, even if it's ineffective--in fact, even if it's counter-productive. (I'm sure you'll be able to count on one hand the number of Fannie- and Freddie-loving Dems who lose their jobs over the sub-prime crisis.) But standing by idly and doing nothing is the unforgivable political sin. This means that when pols lack a real solution to a problem, they feel compelled to propose a fake one. The fake solution won't solve the country's problem, but it will solve the politicians' problem: how to keep their jobs in light of an issue that, if simply ignored, will provide fodder for their next election opponent. That's how you end up with ideas like the ridiculous stimulus bill we are about to be saddled with.

How do you put a stop to this? By persuading the American people of the following points: there are certain things that simply are not appropriate for the federal government to try to address; some problems, we just have to live with, or solve on our own without the help of the feds; sometimes, the feds actually make matters worse.

The Republicans are the only viable political party in America making those points right now--at least from time to time, at least when the stars align. They're losing the argument, but it's an argument worth losing. And that's why I'm still a Republican.

Footnote: Back when scholars could still do extensive interviews with members of Congress, one of my grad school professors did a sit-down with a House member. My prof was reviewing some of this guy's votes when he came across a particularly pork-laden bill that the Congressman had supported. My prof asked, "Do you guys ever do a cost-benefit analysis on this sort of bill?" The Congressman chuckled and answered, "The costs ARE the benefits." That pretty much sums up the politician's mindset.

Another benefit of the surge

Not long ago, one would have thought it unimaginable that George W. Bush would bequeath to his successor a relatively stable, relatively peaceful situation in Iraq. Not long ago, too, one would have thought it unimaginable that in the same year Bush was being reelected, the guy who would succeed him was serving as a state legislator in Illinois. From state legislator to president in four years? No way. But as Wayne Campbell might say, "way."

Anyway, back to Iraq and the surge. Imagine there had been no surge, or that the surge had been unsuccessful, and that we had decided to pull out our troops, essentially conceding defeat. Here's the story you would have heard from the crowd that refers to the invasion of Iraq as an "occupation": "The U.S. tried to invade and occupy a country that hadn't attacked us, or even threatened to attack us. But the population rose up, threw out the occupiers, and took back their country. Serves us right for trying to take what was not ours."

Now, though, that argument won't be available. As the troop withdrawal begins, and progresses--assuming it does begin, and progress, according to the recently negotiated agreement between the U.S. and Iraq--it should become clear to the blame America first crowd that whatever the U.S. was involved in in Iraq, it wasn't an occupation. In fact, if all goes to plan, it will look like the U.S. went into Iraq, took out a brutal dictator, helped establish a fragile but sustainable democratic political system, and then...left the country. And the U.S. did that at great cost in terms of lives, dollars, and reputation.

Twenty-five years from now, I don't think American or Iraqi historians will be referring to these events as an "occupation." In fact, I think there's a chance that the Iraq War will be seen as a highly controversial, unnecessarily costly, but ultimately noble enterprise.

You want interesting times?

Somebody, perhaps a Chinese guy, once offered the following benediction: "May you live in interesting times." As far as that goes, people of my generation really hit the jackpot. Just thinking about politics/domestic affairs/world affairs, we've had terrible race riots, the end of Jim Crow, the first black Supreme Court justice, the rise of the presidential primary system, Roe v. Wade, Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War, the ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher, the Reagan revolution, the first female Supreme Court justice, the end of the Cold War, the birth of militant Islam, the first Gulf War, Ross Perot, the Gingrich revolution, the Oklahoma City bombing, the first female secretary of state, the Clinton scandal and impeachment, the bursting of the tech bubble, the Florida recount, the first black secretary of state, 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the emergence of global warming as a (potentially) existential threat to humanity, a Supreme Court decision affirming the individual right to bear arms (took you long enough!), the first viable female candidate for president, the housing boom/bust and the sub-prime crisis, the first Republican female VP nominee, the first black president, and the first VP with hair plugs.

Wow!

And I didn't even mention developments in technology, media, popular culture, religion, science, medicine, etc. I'd say these are interesting times indeed.

Footnote: If you'd like to add your own items to the list, feel free. There's no way a post like this can be truly comprehensive.

Anklenote: boneless chicken wings.

Against conservative conventional wisdom

Here's some commentary from a guy who: a) is a conservative, but b) doesn't think that tax cuts will get us out of the current period of economic sluggishness. He also says that the economic benefits of the Reagan tax cuts have been overstated, and that the tax increase in the first Clinton term did no obvious damage to the American economy. It all sounds a little crazy to me...

How I could become a Democrat...

Get kicked in the head by a mule? No, something far less painful than that.

Let's imagine that we're now irreversibly, irredeemably in an era of big, activist government. (Many of you will probably say, "Imagine nothin'; we ARE in an era of big, activist government." And perhaps we are by historical American standards, but not by European, social democratic ones.) We're there because that's the way the American people want it. If they wanted small government, I can assure you they'd have it (you know, what with politicians being pandering whores and all).

So, if big government is inevitable, then the question becomes, "Who can better manage a government of this size--Republicans or Democrats? Who has the better ideas for making it work efficiently and effectively, or at least as efficiently and effectively as big government can work? Who has a better framework for managing critical interfaces--e.g., taxation, economic regulation--between government and the private sector? In short, if our government has to be big, who do I want to see running it--Democrats or Republicans?"

It's not at all clear to me that the answer to these questions is "Republicans." I've always supported the GOP because I thought it was the party of small government. But if the era of small government is over, the GOP is going to have to win me over on the basis of its superior ability to craft a big-government policy agenda and manage big-government programs and institutions. Failing that--and assuming the Democrats can make a better case for themselves, rhetorically, intellectually, and through the actual exercise of power--I could imagine becoming a Democrat.

Footnote: Of course, there are a whole bunch of issues I care about--abortion, foremost among them--that don't go out the window even if we ARE in an era of big, activist government. Those issues could, I suppose, keep me in the GOP tent.

Anklenote: Why even bother aligning myself with one of the two major parties? Why not affiliate with one of the minor parties that still believes in small government? Answer: I care too much about politics to pee into the wind like that. Barring some dramatic changes in our political system, the choices are: Democrat, Republican, and irrelevant. If I'm ever content with "irrelevant," that will mean that I've lost all interest in politics.

Doing taxes backwards (versus doing them right)

Arizona is facing a massive budget deficit this year and next: something on the order of 30 percent for the remainder of this year and 35 percent for next year. On the Senate side, at least, they're not contemplating tax increases to close the gap. Here's what Senate President Bob Burns had to say: "If you only have ‘X' dollars and they are spending ‘Y,' then they are clearly overspending." (The "they" here was in specific reference to Arizona public school districts, community colleges, and universities, but it obviously has universal applicability.)

It won't surprise anyone to read that I think Burns gets this exactly right.

When you were a kid, if you wanted to spend more than your allowance, you didn't go to your parents and have this conversation:

You: "Can I get an increase in my allowance?"

Parents: "Why?"

You: "Because right now I don't have enough money to pay for all of the stuff I want."

You didn't have that conversation because you knew what your parents would say next: "Then I guess you'll have to live without some of the stuff you want."

For some reason, though, government tends not to think that way. When governments are facing a deficit, they often look first at tax increases: "We want to spend more money than we're bringing in. I guess we need to bring in more money..." Senate Republicans, on the other hand, are saying, "This is how much money we have to spend. That's less than the amount we want to spend. We'll just have to learn to live without some of the stuff we want...at least until revenues bounce back."

I'm not suggesting that governments can never or should never raise taxes, and of course I recognize that a kid and his allowance is a simplistic analogy. It's a useful one, though, so let's see what a smart kid would do if he wanted an increase in his allowance. He might say this: "My allowance is supposed to cover gas, lunch at school, and general spending money for movies and dates, things like that. But since you set my allowance, gas has gone from two dollars a gallon to four dollars a gallon. That's the main reason I don't have enough money." Or he might say this: "Since you set my allowance, I've started taking on more responsibility around the house. Now that I have my license, I've been driving junior to school every day. Plus, with Dad traveling so much for work, I've been taking the dog for a walk every night, and mowing the lawn when he's away. I think those added responsibilities are worth a little more money."

You'll notice that governments that raise taxes during bad economic times don't make arguments of this sort. They just say, "We don't have enough money to pay for all the stuff we want to buy."  (To be fair, governments do incur additional expenses when times are bad: more people are unemployed, more people go on welfare, etc. But those things are not the cause of the massive deficits in Arizona. During the housing boom, we had lots of revenue, so we spent a lot and we cut taxes. Now that the housing bubble has burst, revenues are way down--as a result of both a shrinking economy and previous tax cuts--and we still have the spending commitments we made during the good times. That's why we are where we are.)

In a perfect world, I'd like to see government and voters have one of two conversations. The first one would go like this: "Okay, let's decide on everything we want government to do. Got it? All right, now let's figure out how much all of that will cost. Got it? Okay, finally, let's put in place a revenue-raising system that ensures we'll be able to pay for all of this in good times and in bad. You know, maybe we could look at historical revenue shortfalls during recessions and see how much we need to set aside in good times to be sure we're covered in the bad times. And if it turns out that the amount of revenue we need to raise to be sure we're covered is more than people are comfortable paying, then we'll have to scale back our list of things we want government to do."

The second conversation would go like this: "Let's decide what an equitable, efficient tax system would look like. Let's decide which things should be taxed and which things should not be taxed. And for each tax, let's decide on what we think is a fair level of taxation. Then let's put that system in place. However much revenue that generates, that's how much we have to spend."

Arizona hasn't had either of these conversations. The result is what you see now: massive deficits brought on by spending increases and tax cuts when times are good (and sometimes, even when they are not so good). If that's where we find ourselves, I think the Senate Republicans' approach is perfectly reasonable: "This is how much money we have to spend, so this is how much money we're going to spend." If voters don't like it, they'll have a chance in about 19 months to throw out the whole crew.

Can we retire "on the backs of"?

I am so, so, SO sick of the intellectually flaccid and utterly meaningless pseudo-rejoinder, "There you go!" (Here's an example. Statement: "I need some time off; I'm going to see if I can find some kind of deal to Cancun at lastminutetravel.com." Well-meaning but intellectually flaccid and utterly meaningless pseudo-rejoinder: "There you go!") The only thing diffusing my angry obsession with this phrase is the sudden proliferation in Arizona political circles of another phrase--a more meaningful one, but one that has already reached maximum accetable concentrations in political discourse: "on the backs of."  Here's an example: "Arizona policymakers should not balance the state's budget on the backs of children and the elderly."

Duly noted. I'm sure lots of people share the sentiment, too. But just because you share the sentiment doesn't mean you have to use the exact same words when you communicate it. For example, you might want to try something along these lines: "The budget cuts being discussed by legislative leaders these days would be a boot to the throat of children and the elderly." Wow! I mean, seriously, SO much better than "...on the backs of children and the elderly."

Footnote: In New York, where they're proposing a "fat tax," I wonder if anyone has said, "The governor should not balance the state's budget on the asses of fat people."

Anklenote: I'm also tiring of "stole my thunder." This is a staple of talk radio: "Well, the guy who just called kinda stole my thunder, but..." I like the idea that "stole my thunder" communicates in three words what otherwise might take as many as many as seven ("said what I was going to say"). But I'm getting sick of hearing those three words in particular. So, as with subtituting "medina" for "mecca," I encourage Planet Utah readers to substitute "bleached my eye teeth" for "stole my thunder."