Category Archives: Contemporary Life

    When is a ceiling not a ceiling ? When it’s the debt ceiling and so the sky’s the limit.

     By never submitting a meaningful budget and waiting until just before the default deadline to demand action on the debt ceiling, President Obama has very cleverly maneuvered the Republicans into violating the party’s reason for
existence – at least, in theory – fiscal sanity. He is insisting that Republicans increase taxes as part of any deficit-reduction plan. True, Republicans historically have been as guilty as Democrats in running up deficits (except for the Gingrich-led Congress in the late 1990s), but Obama’s infamous recklessness has led to the current imbroglio.

   How reckless ? The smallest Bush II deficit (until the fiscal year that followed his presidency that included the rash bailout) was in the $400 billion range, nothing to boast about, but commensurate with a typical debt to GDP ratio. But Obama’s deficits are literally off the charts – averaging $1.3 trillion per year. In his (almost) three years, Obama’s deficits are roughly equivalent to those of all
previous presidents combined. It is rank irresponsibility raised to an exponential power. And he is doing it for a good reason.

     Some may remember that Obama was criticized during the 2008 campaign for praising President Reagan as a transformational president. It is not that he agreed with Reagan’s policies, but rather he perceived that Reagan had re-shaped governance in America – and Obama has aspired to do the same. Reagan transformed government by “starving the beast,” by slashing taxes and non-defense spending so that government programs would diminish and ultimately dry up for lack of funding. It was a revolution – revenues increased as a result of lower tax rates and non-defense spending was dramatically cut. This paved the way for the reversal of the welfare state, culminating in the great changes to welfare in the 1990s under President Clinton.

   Obama is the anti-Reagan, in the sense that he wants to enlarge and enshrine the role of government in almost every aspect of life. Obama’s theory is that an entitlement once implanted cannot easily be uprooted. Obama’s spending – in the trillions – has created millions of dependents on government largesse, such that the only realistic option, as he sees it, is to continue spending and supporting his many wards. He has endeavored to make tens of millions of people utterly dependent on government for jobs, health care, retirement, food, welfare, energy, education, etc. His contempt for private business is such that the wealthy that create jobs are demonized, investment has petered out, energy exploration has about ceased, employment has stagnated, productivity has plummeted, and consumer confidence is lower than ever. It is quite a record.

     Obama can blame Bush, as churlish and childish as that is, but he has not begun to address the feasibility of the United States borrowing forty cents of every dollar spent by his government. It is already unsustainable – either the currency has to be inflated or the government has to default. The howls from official Washington as to the nation’s fate if the debt ceiling is not raised before August 2 are both ironic and vapid: an economy that needs to borrow 40% of its revenue to meet its obligations has already collapsed; it is just awaiting the official day of reckoning.

    This is readily understandable to anyone with the slightest comprehension of home economics – meaning, almost everyone. A family that annually earns $60,000 but spends $100,000 cannot long endure their fiscal position. Something has to give –income has to be raised, spending has to be reduced, or default (personal bankruptcy) ensues. The average family cannot resort to the fiction of “raising their debt limit.” Their limit is what they can rationally afford. But government operates on different premises (even in a different universe), and the levers of government have too long been used by those (i.e., politicians) who see their primary role as taking money from one group of people and handing it over to another group of people. It is a bi-partisan disgrace that Obama has perfected. He might even win re-election, Heaven forefend, because he has created an entire class of people – recipients of government money (or said another way, people given money that others worked for) who now constitute a majority of the nation. That’s right – more than half the society receives some form of money from the government, and they will undoubtedly vote for the candidate who promises to keep OPM’s money flowing towards them by seizing it from the productive and the successful. That is scandalous.

    Note how the ruling class is petrified by the prospect of the debt ceiling not being raised. The fear-mongering has naturally evolved into outright lies – that government will default on August 3, the bond market will collapse, the world economy will collapse, etc. But the government will take in $172 billion in August – so the debt service of $29 billion can easily be paid, Social Security and Medicare in the amount of $70 billion can easily be paid, and even funding the military can continue. Vital services will continue. But faced with the prospect of living within our means, government has to do what every family has to do: prioritize its spending. So, quickly, eliminate funding for public broadcasting and the arts, close down the Departments of Energy, Commerce, Agriculture, Education, HHS and Interior (and see who notices), impound congressional and executive branch salaries (their mismanagement does not warrant what they are being paid anyway), end that August staple – Congressional trips abroad, and cease the funding of the myriad research projects that are unnecessary boondoggles. Prioritize !  Whatever cannot be afforded should not be spent with borrowed money. Perhaps the bond markets will respond favorably to fiscal sanity and stability, and perhaps the “experts” who predict doom are as wrong about this as they have been about the other fiscal crises of the last decade. Yes – keep the national parks and museums open. In any event, they generate revenue and can pay for themselves, and they always become the only symbol of personal hardship to the citizen so the vampires in DC can continue to suction their life blood from the people.

    The rebellion brewing in American is a real one, and the Tea Party just scratches the surface. Obama and his minions have made America into a nation of invalids, whiners, children, and schemers, all hogs at the national trough, all dependent on Big Government for their every need and want. And they see the role of government as wealth re-distribution; hence the disgust for the “rich” who don’t pay their “fair share” in taxes. But the peril of democracy is that 51% of the population can vote to commandeer the income of the other 49% – legally – and that is the election that is before us.

    Well, what is “fair”? The Democrats focus on one aspect of taxation – federal income tax – where in fact less than 10% of the population generates 90% of the revenue. But, we should broaden our analysis. I did a little calculation – as should you. If we add together federal income taxes, state income taxes, Social Security and Medicare payroll deductions, real property taxes, sales taxes, gasoline taxes ($.14 per gallon in New Jersey, a bargain compared to New York’s $.50 per gallon) and miscellaneous other taxes, I am likely paying more than 60% of every dollar earned to the government. Is it “fair” to have government confiscate roughly 2/3 of my income? When what we have confiscated exceeds what we keep from the fruit of our labor, we have crossed the line from citizen to slave. The colonists rebelled against Britain when the tax rate reached 20%; Yosef in Egypt lost the favor of the Egyptian population when he imposed a 20% tax on their crops. The American welfare state has tripled that snatch, and Obama’s drive to transform the United States into a European, socialist, cradle-to-grave entitlement society (yes, as his father dreamed) is proceeding apace.

    If the Republicans cave in and agree to raise taxes, not only will Obama win re-election but the Republican Party also would have proven themselves – again – to be craven, purposeless “tax collectors for the welfare state,” and would no longer have any reason to exist. They do not control the levers of government, but they do have veto power over any action. Obama thinks he has the Republicans at the brink – but in fact the precipice goes both ways. The government this year will spend $3.6 billion and take in only $2.4 billion. That cannot endure. The spending from the year of the vaunted “stimulus” (really just money paid out to keep union employees, Democrat voters all, paid) has not diminished measurably. It is as if that bloated figure became the new baseline. If every dollar was seized from every billionaire in American, it would not run the government for more than a month.

   The pressure will be intense to return to business as usual, and the invective heaped already on Eric Cantor has been vociferous and scurrilous. But he and his colleagues, if they hold firm, will reap the rewards of pulling the US back from the brink of financial ruin. Short-term pain will reap long-term gain, and the American dream can be reborn again.

Anyone with an interest in history will enjoy President George W. Bush’s account of his life and presidency (“Decision Points”), except for those whose minds are closed and blame Bush for all the world’s ills. It is different from the traditional memoir in two key respects: it is not a purely autobiographical narrative of his life and does
not generally follow the cycle of his life, nor does it comply with the common
purpose of a memoir: the justification of every act, decision, and move made by
the protagonist. For the latter reason, especially, it is more interesting than
most autobiographies. President Bush does not try to rationalize every
decision; instead, he endeavors to explain why he thought each decision was
correct in its time and place, and how subsequent events – some that could not
have been anticipated and some that might have been anticipated – impacted on
every decision. Indeed, he often seems tougher on himself than he needs to be.

For example, Hurricane Katrina in September 2005 became Bush’s Waterloo and the costliest natural disaster in American history. Coincidentally, I had visited New Orleans just two months earlier and experienced another hurricane alert during which thousands of residents clogged the highways to leave town. Nothing happened, and I noted then that it is hard to imagine that people would uproot themselves every time there is a hurricane warning. When Katrina blew in, it was not the hurricane that did the damage but the shattering of the old levees that inundated a city that, bowl-shaped, largely rests below sea level, a disaster waiting to happen. But generations of New Orleans politicians had garnered federal funds to reinforce the levees – and just spent the money elsewhere and sometimes pocketed it themselves. So what could have been done differently ?

The untold story of Katrina was the bickering between the female governor of Louisiana and the black mayor of New Orleans (each from one of the liberal media’ protected classes, with job performances graded on a curve – the governor left office when her term expired; the mayor, of course, has since been re-elected despite his abject failures). For five days, the governor refused to permit the dispatch of the National Guard for either relief or security efforts, and a law dating from after the Civil War prohibits a president from sending federal
troops to a state without explicit authorization. No one was in charge, literally. Bush’s main error was perception, what he called the “fly-over” of New Orleans that generated the infamous photograph of the President looking out the window of Air Force One “removed” from the scene and literally “above it all.” (As soon as the pictures were released, he knew it was a mistake. He had wanted to land but did not want to divert security forces that would be needed for his protection.)

By contrast, he notes, LBJ had descended on New Orleans during another hurricane in 1965, even barging into a shelter and announcing “This is your President. I’m here to help you.” Of course, he couldn’t – but the perception was, at least, that he was there. President Bush inadvertently created the opposite impression, not helped when he said to the FEMA head, “Heckuva job, Brownie” in order to boost his morale. But Bush spent the first ten days after the catastrophe alternately frustrated and furious – receiving incomplete and often inaccurate reports from the scene and incapable of getting the local politicians (all Democrats) to do anything but whine. It was an immense failure that was unfairly traced to Bush, when the problems were caused primarily by a failure of local leadership that resulted in the incapability to execute the rescue plans. A president can decide, order, and dispatch; that does not necessarily mean that what he decides, orders or dispatches will be executed properly.

Of course, Bush is too much the gentleman to blame the governor, the mayor or indeed anyone else for any of the decisions he made and their consequences, a marked distinction from his successor who has built his career and is hinging his re-election campaign on the notion that others are at fault for everything that has gone wrong in his administration. Bush accepts blame for the failed response to Katrina; contrast that with Obama’s response to the BP explosion in the Gulf of Mexico (blaming BP, filing lawsuits, shaking them down for money, prohibiting drilling, etc.) and the cleanup that was inordinately slow to begin. One can easily see how, if Bush had been in office, the liberal pundits would have
castigated him for every blackened bird.

Indeed, Bush does not comment at all on President Obama and the decisions he has made. But what he does – eloquently and sometimes poignantly – is take the reader into his confidence, and weigh the factors the led invariably to a particular decision: abstinence from alcohol, his various political campaigns (his mother, a forceful personality, told him not to run for governor of Texas because he could not win), Afghanistan, the WMD’s and Iraq, the surge and the formation of the Bush Doctrine that encourages the spread of democracy across the world, Guantanamo and the use of enhanced interrogation measures, and the response to the financial crisis of 2008. Agree or disagree with the outcomes of these decisions, it is difficult to argue that one in possession of the facts as
President Bush saw them at the time could have reasonably made a different
decision, or that had another course been chosen that it would have yielded a
different or better result. (It easily might have been worse.) The greatest
proof of this has been the Obama presidency –for all his snarky dismissal of
the Bush policies during his campaign, he has essentially continued almost all
of them  – Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, the military tribunals, the Freedom Agenda (Obama was a late convert to that), the surge, the bailouts, etc. Even the enhanced interrogation procedures yielded valuable intelligence that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

There are moments of great poignancy: Laura Bush had difficulty conceiving, and the couple was preparing to adopt when they suddenly learned that she was pregnant, and carrying twins; the Arab-terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center which found Bush criticized for calmly continuing to read children’s stories to second-graders in Sarasota as it happened, rather than – as his critics insisted – he dash out and panic the children and the entire country; the initial
attacks on Afghanistan with the knowledge – that every president lives with –
that some soldiers sent will not return and some families will forever be torn
asunder; the analysis of the intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction, with which all intelligence agencies across the world (including
Britain’s and Israel’s) acceded, and which Saddam Hussein had himself boasted
about (later, Hussein told FBI interrogators that he never thought the US would
attack, and that he had to remain strong in the eyes of his neighbors), and the
threats that accompanied the financial collapse in 2008 in which he was told
that he would preside over another depression unless he agreed to the advice of
Bernanke, Paulson, et al. The housing and market collapses of 2008 are classic
examples of crises that do not originate with the president, in which the
president’s true role is very limited, are foreseeable only in hindsight, and
yet color his entire tenure.

Throughout the book, several themes emerge. President Bush is a man of unique sensitivity, almost preternaturally disposed to making friends, making acquaintances and strangers feel comfortable in his presence, and given to moments of tears and, more frequently, prayer. He personally wrote letters to each of the several thousand families that had suffered a battlefield loss. Yet, he possesses a steely determination that is apparent in the personal – giving up alcohol cold turkey and never again touching another drop –and in the national – what he calls the greatest success of his presidency, the commitment that American on his watch would not be attacked again by Arab terrorists. Every decision made in the realm of national security was rooted in that one simple resolution – would it make America safer? It worked. And although awkward in his use of the English language, Bush turned out to be a better presidential speaker than Obama, although Obama is a better campaign speaker than most presidents. (Reagan was a master of both.) He also has something nice to say about almost everyone he mentions in the book, and his criticisms of a few (Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, for one) are hesitant and muted.

Bush had the strength of character to lead – to goad Iraq into a nascent democracy, to defy his European allies and banish Yasser Arafat from civilized society – and uphold Israel’s right of self-defense, even drafting a letter committing the United States (since repudiated by Obama) to support Israel’s claim to retain settlement blocs in any future negotiations. His “vision” of a two-state solution was lost because of his call for new leadership to replace Arafat and for a sincere commitment by the Arabs to a peaceful solution. (His mother was not amused, sarcastically calling him “the first Jewish president.”) It was not
the only time he disagreed with and rejected his father’s advice. It took leadership to lower taxes when the late 1990s internet boom produced a revenue surplus for the government. (After all, the government has the people’s money, not its own money. Novel concept, that.) Bush is an unabashed supporter of the free market, and therefore quite abashed that he was prodded to intervene through a massive infusion of government money – even having the government choose winners and losers in the marketplace, which Obama has taken to new heights, or depths. Bush is man enough to admit that he had to deviate from his principles because of the financial crisis, his regrets at not capturing bin Laden, and his inability to formulate any policy or strategy that would thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

That type of leadership, and the personal accountability that accompanies it, is sorely missed. This excellent book, worth reading, reminds us that not only are there many factors that influence a particular decision before it is made, but also
that there are many more factors that will shape the success or failure of a
decision, long after it is made. My sense is that history will judge President Bush
more favorably than many of his contemporaries did – for the quality of his
decisions, for the strength of his character, and for his essential goodness as
a human being.