John Tamny

In the near week since President
Obama’s State of the Union speech, commentators from all sides of the
political spectrum have weighed in on the
good, bad and innocuous of Obama’s vision for the country’s future. What’s perhaps not been commented on enough
is how unfortunate it is that Obama’s policies – or those of any President for that matter – concern us so much such that we’re compelled to watch, comment, and worry about the implications of State
of the Union speeches at all. For background, it’s fair to suggest that every reader of this column has
approached Presidential elections at one
time or another with a great deal of
excitement, dread, or a combination
of both depending on what pre-election
polling data suggests. Possessed with strong views about what should be the
future direction of the country, elections
are important to all of us; so important
that sometimes we stay up all night to
catch the returns on the way to forming
an optimistic or negative view of the policy landscape going forward. At first glance this speaks to the wonders
of American democracy, and our ability
to participate in it. But given a second
pass, the American obsession with
national politics and policy speaks to a
hugely negative trampling on the Constitution by both political parties. To put it simply, national elections
shouldn’t matter that much, and if the Constitution even remotely informed the
policy directions of politicians, the vast
majority of Americans could with good
conscience ignore national elections
along with much of what’s going on in Washington. That’s the case because as any cursory reading of the Constitution
makes very plain, the document first
authorizes the federal government, and
then it severely limits its power. The various amendments in the
Constitution are for the most part not
meant to limit our infinite rights as
American citizens, but instead they
exist to explicitly constrain the activities
of our elected officials in Washington. The amendments clearly list the powers
of the federal government, and any not
listed quite simply do not exist. But just to ensure that there be no
confusion as to what they meant in
writing the Constitution, the Founders
made sure to insert the 10th
Amendment. Some call the latter “the Amendment for Dummies”, as it makes very clear that any power not
enumerated to the federal government
once again does not exist. Back to national elections, they shouldn’t matter because assuming a government
operating under the strict constraints laid
out in the Constitution, there’s not much the federal government could do to
profoundly alter our lives. Basically
Washington is empowered to provide a
military to defend us, a stable currency,
protection of our property from
unreasonable search and seizure, plus it must secure our right to live as we want
so long as our actions don’t encroach on the rights of others. So when we consider elections and
major Presidential speeches, much of
what our leaders promise us goes well
beyond clearly set constitutional limits.
President Obama spoke of our “Sputnik Moment”, and the need for government to promote growth through various
assaults on taxpayer wallets, yet in his
defense, he’s no different from Republican presidents promising
“Ownership Societies”, targeted business/research tax breaks meant to
“create jobs”, and other government- driven concepts that ultimately trample
on our freedoms. The problem for both political parties is
that there’s no mention of economic growth in the Constitution; instead, it
was correctly assumed that a free people
would grow in all ways, including
economically. Again, the federal
government merely exists to secure our
freedoms, after which we as individuals are supposed to find individual happiness
on our own. Of course, politicians wouldn’t be politicians if they were actually willing to
abide by the document that they all
swear to, so Democrats promise
universal healthcare, investment in “solar shingles” and education all paid for by others, while Republicans offer “faith- based initiatives” to “strengthen” families, bailouts of failed economic
concepts that are well-connected in
Washington, and devalued dollars on the
wholly false premise that U.S. exporters
will prosper. To pay for all of this they tax us at
nosebleed rates, despite the vision at our
nation’s founding that we would pay the vast majority of our taxes to our local
governments; how much we pay a
function of how much government we
want. With the federal government’s powers very limited, there wouldn’t be a huge need for revenues. More modernly we’ve reversed the above, so rather than choosing how we’ll be taxed based on the city/state we live
in, now we pay the biggest tribute to
Washington, and that
reality unquestionably makes us captive
to tax rates that have long been way too
high no matter the party in power. That our productivity has thrown off trillions in
revenues to the U.S. Treasury makes
things worse, and makes potent a
Washington political class that was
largely meant to be impotent. Is it any
wonder that Congresses and Presidents ignore the Constitution’s limits when they have so many trillions at their disposal? To justify their constitutional
eviscerations, both parties to varying
degrees trot out the Constitution’s General Welfare Clause along with the
Commerce Clause as their defense. The
problem there is that the mention of
either one is a total perversion of the
Founders’ intentions with both. The Commerce Clause was written to
make sure that states within the U.S. did
not protect nascent industries through
tariffs. In short, the purpose of the
Clause was not to regulate trade, or
enforce the purchase of something the citizens otherwise wouldn’t buy; instead it was meant to make trade within the
states regular. Translated, states could
not put up barriers to goods coming from
other states. As for the Welfare Clause, far from
some ambiguous insertion meant to
allow politicians to do whatever they
wanted with our general welfare in mind,
the Welfare Clause was written to
ensure that any actions taken by the federal government that fell within its
enumerated powers had to be
considered with the general welfare of
the citizenry in mind. To suggest
otherwise – as many do – would be to turn the Constitution itself on its head,
not to mention that the document would
never have been ratified. Some politicians claim that the
Constitution is a “living, breathing document” meant to be read with changing times in mind. This too is false.
Far from a malleable document, the
Constitution was created to establish a
limiting framework on government, all
the while enabling legislators to amend it
through the amendment process. The latter has largely been forgotten, and
now Washington, extremely bold given
all the dollars at its disposal, simply does
what it wants, constitutional limits be
damned. And there lies the problem today. It’s not so much that we should ignore what
President Obama or congressional
leaders have to say, as much as what
they say and do shouldn’t concern us that much. Limited by a very clear
document, their actions shouldn’t impact how we live to a very high degree. But with the Constitution largely
irrelevant in the eyes of our leaders in
Washington, we’re sadly forced to care. Washington has too much power, and
the result is that elections, speeches and
legislation matter much more than they
should. In short, the state of our union is
an excessive amount of state.

Everything starts with repeal

Everything starts with repeal

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 21, 2011;

Suppose someone - say, the president of United States - proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I've got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion.

He'd be laughed out of town. And yet, this is precisely what the Democrats are claiming as a virtue of Obamacare. During the debate over Republican attempts to repeal it, one of the Democrats' major talking points has been that Obamacare reduces the deficit - and therefore repeal raises it - by $230 billion. Why, the Congressional Budget Office says exactly that.

Very true. And very convincing. Until you realize where that number comes from. Explains CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf in his "preliminary analysis of H.R. 2" (the Republican health-care repeal): "CBO anticipates that enacting H.R. 2 would probably yield, for the 2012-2021 period, a reduction in revenues in the neighborhood of $770 billion and a reduction in outlays in the vicinity of $540 billion."

As National Affairs editor Yuval Levin pointed out when mining this remarkable nugget, this is a hell of a way to do deficit reduction: a radical increase in spending, topped by an even more radical increase in taxes.

Of course, the very numbers that yield this $230 billion "deficit reduction" are phony to begin with. The CBO is required to accept every assumption, promise (of future spending cuts, for example) and chronological gimmick that Congress gives it. All the CBO then does is perform the calculation and spit out the result.

In fact, the whole Obamacare bill was gamed to produce a favorable CBO number. Most glaringly, the entitlement it creates - government-subsidized health insurance for 32 million Americans - doesn't kick in until 2014. That was deliberately designed so any projection for this decade would cover only six years of expenditures - while that same 10-year projection would capture 10 years of revenue. With 10 years of money inflow vs. six years of outflow, the result is a positive - i.e., deficit-reducing - number. Surprise.

If you think that's audacious, consider this: Obamacare does not create just one new entitlement (health insurance for everyone); it actually creates a second - long-term care insurance. With an aging population, and with long-term care becoming extraordinarily expensive, this promises to be the biggest budget buster in the history of the welfare state.

And yet, in the CBO calculation, this new entitlement to long-term care reduces the deficit over the next 10 years. By $70 billion, no less. How is this possible? By collecting premiums now, and paying out no benefits for the first 10 years. Presto: a (temporary) surplus. As former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin and scholars Joseph Antos and James Capretta note, "Only in Washington could the creation of a reckless entitlement program be used as 'offset' to grease the way for another entitlement." I would note additionally that only in Washington could such a neat little swindle be titled the "CLASS Act" (for the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act).

That a health-care reform law of such enormous size and consequence, revolutionizing one-sixth of the U.S. economy, could be sold on such flimflammery is astonishing, even by Washington standards. What should Republicans do?

Make the case. Explain the phony numbers, boring as the exercise may be. Better still, hold hearings and let the CBO director, whose integrity is beyond reproach, explain the numbers himself.

To be sure, the effect on the deficit is not the only criterion by which to judge Obamacare. But the tossing around of such clearly misleading bumper-sticker numbers calls into question the trustworthiness of other happy claims about Obamacare. Such as the repeated promise that everyone who likes his current health insurance will be able to keep it. Sure, but only if your employer continues to offer it. In fact, millions of workers will find themselves adrift because their employers will have every incentive to dump them onto the public rolls.

This does not absolve the Republicans from producing a health-care replacement. They will and should be judged by how well their alternative addresses the needs of the uninsured and the anxieties of the currently insured. But amending an insanely complicated, contradictory, incoherent and arbitrary 2,000-page bill that will generate tens of thousands of pages of regulations is a complete non-starter. Everything begins with repeal.

The charlatans' response to the Tucson tragedy

The charlatans' response to the Tucson tragedy

By George F. Will
Tuesday, January 11, 2011;

It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson's occur, there were a moratorium on sociology. But respites from half-baked explanations, often serving political opportunism, are impossible because of a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds.

The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience. Time was, the gods were useful. What is thunder? The gods are angry. Polytheism was explanatory. People postulated causations.

And still do. Hence: The Tucson shooter was (pick your verb) provoked, triggered, unhinged by today's (pick your noun) rhetoric, vitriol, extremism, "climate of hate."

Demystification of the world opened the way for real science, including the social sciences. And for a modern characteristic. And for charlatans.

A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first.

Instead, imagine a continuum from the rampages at Columbine and Virginia Tech - the results of individuals' insanities - to the assassinations of Lincoln and the Kennedy brothers, which were clearly connected to the politics of John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, respectively. The two other presidential assassinations also had political colorations.

On July 2, 1881, after four months in office, President James Garfield, who had survived the Civil War battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga, needed a vacation. He was vexed by warring Republican factions - the Stalwarts, who waved the bloody shirt of Civil War memories, and the Half-Breeds, who stressed the emerging issues of industrialization. Walking to Washington's train station, Garfield by chance encountered a disappointed job-seeker. Charles Guiteau drew a pistol, fired two shots and shouted, "I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be president!" On Sept. 19, Garfield died, making Vice President Chester Arthur president. Guiteau was executed, not explained.

On Sept. 6, 1901, President William McKinley, who had survived the battle of Antietam, was shaking hands at a Buffalo exposition when Leon Czolgosz approached, a handkerchief wrapped around his right hand, concealing a gun. Czolgosz, an anarchist, fired two shots. Czolgosz ("I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people - the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.") was executed, not explained.

Now we have explainers. They came into vogue with the murder of President Kennedy. They explained why the "real" culprit was not a self-described Marxist who had moved to Moscow, then returned to support Castro. No, the culprit was a "climate of hate" in conservative Dallas, the "paranoid style" of American (conservative) politics or some other national sickness resulting from insufficient liberalism.

Last year, New York Times columnist Charles Blow explained that "the optics must be irritating" to conservatives: Barack Obama is black, Nancy Pelosi is female, Rep. Barney Frank is gay, Rep. Anthony Weiner (an unimportant Democrat, listed to serve Blow's purposes) is Jewish. "It's enough," Blow said, "to make a good old boy go crazy." The Times, which after the Tucson shooting said that "many on the right" are guilty of "demonizing" people and of exploiting "arguments of division," apparently was comfortable with Blow's insinuation that conservatives are misogynistic, homophobic, racist anti-Semites.

On Sunday, the Times explained Tucson: "It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman's act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But . . ." The "directly" is priceless.

Three days before Tucson, Howard Dean explained that the Tea Party movement is "the last gasp of the generation that has trouble with diversity." Rising to the challenge of lowering his reputation and the tone of public discourse, Dean smeared Tea Partyers as racists: They oppose Obama's agenda, Obama is African American, ergo . . .

Let us hope that Dean is the last gasp of the generation of liberals whose default position in any argument is to indict opponents as racists. This McCarthyism of the left - devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data - is a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas. It expresses limitless contempt for the American people, who have reciprocated by reducing liberalism to its current characteristics of electoral weakness and bad sociology.

Massacre, followed by libel

Massacre, followed by libel

By Charles Krauthammer
Wednesday, January 12, 2011;

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the "climate of hate" created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.

The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.

As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos and other ravings - and in all the testimony from all the people who knew him - there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. "His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world," said the teacher of Loughner's philosophy class at Pima Community College. "He was very disconnected from reality," said classmate Lydian Ali. "You know how it is when you talk to someone who's mentally ill and they're just not there?" said neighbor Jason Johnson. "It was like he was in his own world."

His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with "unnerving, long stupors of silence" during which he would "stare fixedly at his buddies," reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through "grammar." He was obsessed with "conscious dreaming," a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.

This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder - ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.

These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic. And a dangerous one. A classmate found him so terrifyingly mentally disturbed that, she e-mailed friends and family, she expected to find his picture on TV after his perpetrating a mass murder. This was no idle speculation: In class "I sit by the door with my purse handy" so that she could get out fast when the shooting began.

Furthermore, the available evidence dates Loughner's fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to at least 2007, when he attended a town hall of hers and felt slighted by her response. In 2007, no one had heard of Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck was still toiling on Headline News. There was no Tea Party or health-care reform. The only climate of hate was the pervasive post-Iraq campaign of vilification of George W. Bush, nicely captured by a New Republic editor who had begun an article thus: "I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it."

Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," he was hardly inciting violence.

Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power - military conquest. That's why the language persists. That's why we say without any self-consciousness such things as "battleground states" or "targeting" opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest - "campaign" - is an appropriation from warfare.

When profiles of Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive - and creative - political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill - while intoning, "I'll take dead aim at [it]" - he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.

Did Manchin push Loughner over the top? Did Emanuel's little Mafia imitation create a climate for political violence? The very questions are absurd - unless you're the New York Times and you substitute the name Sarah Palin.

The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?

John Stossel

Please Stop 'Helping' Us

Last year, Congress passed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act. It was supposed to really end the alleged abuses perpetrated by the credit card companies. The law forbids some penalties and interest-rate increases on existing balances.

It is one of President Obama's proudest achievements.

"Enough's enough," he said. "It's time for strong, reliable protection for our consumers."

Reform, he said, would not come at the expense of honest businesses. "Unless your business model depends on cutting corners or bilking your customers, you've got nothing to fear."

Finally! Protection! A new bureaucracy will stop greedy credit card companies from unfairly penalizing you. And it won't threaten the credit business. Yippie!

How has it worked out?

Not so well. George Mason University Law Professor Todd Zywicki points out that the new restrictions hurt more consumers than they help.

Since the Card Act passed, mortgage and Treasury bill rates have dropped a little, but credit card interest went up -- from 13 percent to nearly 15 percent. Some banks also stopped offering credit to some people. JPMorgan Chase cut off 15 percent of its customers.

So the real result of this "consumer" regulation? "Hundreds of thousands of people can't get cards who used to be able to have cards, and all the rest of us now have to pay more," Zywicki said.

But maybe the people who can't get credit cards are better off because they couldn't handle credit wisely?

"Just to say they don't have a credit card doesn't mean that they don't have credit," Zywicki retorts. "They'll just go to more expensive places -- the local payday lender or the local pawn shop."

And pay a lot for credit. Payday lenders make small short-term loans, sometimes just till payday. But the annual interest is nasty -- often more than 500 percent. Several states have outlawed payday lenders. The politicians say they do it to help low-income people. But again, their "help" harms. The lenders' former customers complain that the payday lenders were their only way to avoid missing a bill payment -- and maybe having the lights shut off.

"It's not just a matter sometimes of saving money," one borrower told us. "It's a matter of saving yourself grief."

Maybe they should get a credit card. Then they'd have lower interest payments. But of course Congress just made that tougher.

"People who have limited choices when it comes to credit are not likely to have their situations improved by taking away some of those limited options that they have," Zywicki says.

This is a lesson the elitist reformers are determined never to learn. Or maybe the elite like creating new problems. It gives them new chances to ride to the rescue and pose as great humanitarians. Someone likened this to breaking people's kneecaps, then compassionately providing crutches.

Without regulation, wouldn't banks charge monster fees and high interest?

"Certainly they would," Zywicki said. "The problem is they can't. I've got four credit cards in my wallet. As I sit here talking to you, my credit cards are competing for my business. If one tries to rip me off, or charge me too much, I'll switch to another."

The law of unintended consequences is never more clear than in the capping of interest -- so-called usury laws. Arkansas once capped interest rates at 10 percent.

"Very few people could get a credit card in Arkansas as a result," Zywicki said.

Arkansas then became known as the pawn shop capital of America. Pawn shop interest can be 250 percent.

To Sen. Chris Dodd, President Obama and all the credit "reformers," Zywicki says this:

"In the 1960s, the second biggest revenue source of organized crime was illegal lending. Is that the world we want to go back to, where we get rid of payday lending, and we're so morally outraged that we're going to put people in the hands of the leg-breakers and the loan sharks? They charged an interest rate that was well over 1,000 percent, and their collection techniques were a lot tougher than your local pawn shops."

When will the political do-gooders realize that the most vulnerable people in society can't take any more of their kindness?

The irrelevance of START

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, November 26, 2010

It's a lame-duck session. Time is running out. Unemployment is high, the economy is dangerously weak and, with five weeks to go, no one knows what tax anyone will be paying on everything from income to dividends to death when the current rates expire Jan. 1. And what is the president demanding that Congress pass as "a top priority"? To what did he devote his latestweekly radio address? Ratification of his New START treaty.

Good grief. Even among national security concerns, New START is way down at the bottom of the list. From the naval treaties of the 1920s to this day, arms control has oscillated between mere symbolism at its best to major harm at its worst, with general uselessness being the norm.

The reason is obvious. The problem is never the weapon; it is the nature of the regime controlling the weapon. That's why no one stays up nights worrying about British nukes, while everyone worries about Iranian nukes.

But in post-Soviet days? The Russians are no longer an existential threat. A nuclear exchange between Washington and Moscow is inconceivable. What difference does it make how many nukes Russia builds? If they want to spend themselves into penury creating a bloated nuclear arsenal, be our guest.In Soviet days, arms control at least could be justified as giving us something to talk about when there was nothing else to talk about, symbolically relieving tensions between mortal enemies. It could be argued that it at least had a soporific and therapeutic effect in the age of "the balance of terror."

President Obama insists that New START is important as a step toward his dream of a nuclear-free world. Where does one begin? A world without nukes would be the ultimate nightmare. We voluntarily disarm while the world's rogues and psychopaths develop nukes in secret. Just last week we found out about a hidden, unknown, highly advanced North Korean uranium enrichment facility. An ostensibly nuclear-free world would place these weapons in the hands of radical regimes that would not hesitate to use them - against a civilized world that would have given up its deterrent.

Moreover, Obama's idea that the great powers must reduce their weapons to set a moral example for the rest of the world to disarm is simply childish. Does anyone seriously believe that the mullahs in Iran or the thugs in Pyongyang will in any way be deflected from their pursuit of nukes by a reduction in the U.S. arsenal?

Obama's New START treaty is 90 percent useless and 10 percent problematic. One difficulty is that it restricts the number of delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons. But because some of these are dual-use, our ability to deliver long-range conventionalweapons, a major U.S. strategic advantage, is constrained.

The second problem is the recurrence of language in the treaty preamble linking offensive to defensive nuclear weaponry. We have a huge lead over the rest of the world in missile defenses. Ever since the Reagan days, the Russians have been determined to undo this advantage. The New START treaty affirms the "interrelationship" between offense and defense. And Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has insisted that "the unchangeability of circumstances" - translation: no major advances in U.S. anti-missile deployment - is a condition of the entire treaty.

The worst thing about this treaty, however, is that it is simply a distraction. It gives the illusion of doing something about nuclear danger by addressing a non-problem, Russia, while doing nothing about the real problem - Iran and North Korea. The utter irrelevance of New START to nuclear safety was dramatically underscored last week by the revelation of that North Korean uranium enrichment plant, built with such sophistication that it left the former head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory "stunned." It could become the ultimate proliferation factory. Pyongyang is already a serial proliferator. It has nothing else to sell. Iran, Syria and al-Qaeda have the money to buy.

Iran's Islamic Republic lives to bring down the Great Satan. North Korea, nuclear-armed and in a succession crisis, has just shelled South Korean territory for the first time since the Korean armistice. Obama peddling New START is the guy looking for his wallet under the lamppost because that's where the light is good - even though he lost the wallet on the other side of town.

What's driving Obama's subsidies of Chevy's Volt?

By George F. Will

Sunday, November 14, 2010

"Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive"

- Joe Biden, Oct. 26

General Motors, an appendage of the government,which owns 61 percent of it, is spending some of your money, dear reader, on full-page newspaper ads praising a government brainstorm - the Volt, Chevrolet's highly anticipated and prematurely celebrated (sort of) electric car. Although the situation is murky - GM and its government masters probably prefer it that way - it is unclear in what sense GM hasany money that is truly its own. And the Volt is not quite an electric car, or not the sort GM deliberately misled Americans into expecting.

It is another hybrid. GM said the Volt would be an "all electrically driven vehicle" whose gas engine would be a mere range-extender, powering the Volt's generator, not its wheels: The engine would just maintain the charge as the battery ran down. Now GM says that at some point when the battery's charge declines, or when the car is moving near 70 mph, the gas engine will power the wheels.

The newspaper ads proclaim, "Chevrolet Runs Deep." Whatever that means, if anything, it does not mean the Volt runs deep into a commute or the countryside just on electricity. At the bottom of the ads, there is this, in microscopic print: "Volt available in CA, TX, MI, NY, NJ, CT and Washington, DC, at the end of 2010. Quantities limited." Well.

Mark Reuss, president of GM North America, said in a letter to the Wall Street Journal: "The early enthusiastic consumer response - more than 120,000 potential Volt customers have already signaled interest in the car, and orders have flowed since the summer - give us confidence that the Volt will succeed on its merits." Disregard the slipperiness ("signaled interest" how?) and telltale reticence (how many orders have "flowed"?). But "on its merits"? Why, then, the tax credits and other subsidies?Quantities of everything - except perhaps God's mercy, which is said to be infinite - are limited. But quantities of the Volt are going to be so limited that 44 states can only pine for Volts from afar. Good, because the federal government, which evidently is feeling flush, will give tax credits of up to $7,500 to every Volt purchaser. The Volt was conceived to appease the automotive engineers in Congress, which knows that people will have to be bribed, with other people's money, to buy this $41,000 car that seats only four people (the 435-pound battery eats up space).

The Automotive Engineer in Chief - our polymathic president - says there will be a million plug-in cars in America by 2015. This will require much higher gasoline prices (perhaps $9 a gallon) and much bigger bribes: GM, which originally was expected to produce as many as 60,000 next year, now says 10,000 for all of North America.

GM says that, battery-powered, the Volt has a 40-mile range. Popular Mechanics says 33. Thomas R. Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association of the electric utility industry, is, understandably, a Volt enthusiast: This supposedly "green" vehicle will store electric energy - 10 to 12 hours of charging on household current - produced by coal- and gas-fired power plants.

The federal government, although waist-deep in red ink, offers another bribe: Any purchaser can get a tax credit of up to 50 percent of the cost (up to $2,000) of an extra-powerful (240-volt) charger. California, although so strapped it recently issued IOUs to vendors, offers a $5,000 cash rebate for which Volt buyers are not eligible but purchasers of Nissan's electric Leaf are. Go figure.

In April, in a television commercial and a Wall Street Journal column headlined "The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full," GM's then-CEO Ed Whitacre said "we have repaid our government loan, in full, with interest, five years ahead of the original schedule." Rubbish.

GM, which has received almost $50 billion in government subventions, repaid a $6.7 billion loan using other federal funds, a TARP-funded escrow account. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) called this a "TARP money shuffle." A commentator compared it to "paying off your Visa credit card with your MasterCard."

Meretricious accounting and deceptive marketing are inevitable when government and its misnamed "private sector" accomplices foist state capitalism on an appalled country. But those who thought the ethanol debacle defined outer limits of government foolishness pertaining to automobiles were, alas, mistaken.

Debt Commission

So it's been a while since I posted here. If anyone's still out there, here's a fresh article. I am really impressed by this commission. I thought they would either propose a bunch of radical changes like a value added tax or avoid anything controversial, rendering the entire exercise worthless. Kudos to the chairmen for looking for savings everywhere. These changes are unavoidable - either we make significant changes now or truly painful, drastic cuts later.

Commission Offers Controversial Solutions to Axe Deficit -- Members Balk

by Trish Turner | November 10, 2010

AP Photo

The top Republican and Democrat on President Obama's bipartisan deficit reduction commission introduced an ambitious draft proposal Wednesday to slash the nation's deficit by by $4 trillion over ten years, but both chairmen conceded that the focus is more on starting a national debate rather than actually accomplishing legislative action this year.

The draft, laid out in detail to commission members during two closed-door, hours-long sessions, spares virtually no "sacred cow" programs, proposing dramatic changes to Social Security, once called the "third rail" of politics, pushes for limits to Medicare, axes the popular mortgage interest deduction in favor of lower income tax rates for all, freezes Defense Department salaries and bonuses for three years and noncombat pay at 2011 levels for the same period, and the list goes on.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-ND, a commission member, did not sound confident that 14 of the 18 members could agree on any proposal in order to move it to a vote in Congress. "We've had trouble getting 14 people to agree on what time of the day to meet," the Budget Committee Chairman said.

The often-comedic co-chairman Alan Simpson sheepishly exited the meeting, telling reporters, "We're entering the witness protection program," referring to his fellow co-chairman and proposal author Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

Commissioners mostly commended the chairmen for attacking the problem and offering real, detailed solutions, but to a letter, not one member embraced the proposal, though Simpson and Bowles said they did not expect that. Still another member, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., called the Social Security changes "a nonstarter."

Schakowsky questioned the equity in the cuts, noted the "growing gap between rich and poor in this country," and said, "This is not at all something I could support."

Outside the bipartisan group, members slung arrows at the draft proposal, as well. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., decried the plan as "extremely disappointing and something that should be vigorously opposed by the American people. The huge increase in the national debt in recent years was caused by two unpaid wars, tax breaks for the wealthy, a Medicare prescription drug bill written by the pharmaceutical industry, and the Wall Street bailout."

But some members cautioned against snap judgments. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a member of the panel, said, "The greatest national security threat facing America today is our national debt and a Congress that has avoided tough choices for decades. The discussion draft describes some of the tough choices facing Congress and the nation," and warned, "I would encourage taxpayers to view with great suspicion the beltway, interest group culture that often prefers demagoguery over honest debate. In the real world, no family facing tough economic times has the luxury of treating portions of their budget as sacrosanct. Neither should Congress."

Simpson encouraged people to read the proposal and said there is more than enough time for Congressional action, saying he and Bowles "laid it all out on the table. Let the American people start to chew on it..As I say, we didn't leave anybody out of the crosshairs."

But Sanders was having no part of that, particularly the Simpson-Bowles proposal for Social Security that gradually increases the retirement age for benefits, possibly to 69 by 2075. Sanders blasted, "It is reprehensible to ask working people, including many who do physically-demanding labor, to work until they are 69 years of age. It also is totally impractical. As they compete for jobs with 25-year-olds, many older workers will go unemployed and have virtually no income. Frankly, there will not be too much demand within the construction industry for 69-year-old bricklayers."Commission Executive Vice President Bruce Reed told reporters that the panel intends to reconvene next week to get down into the details of the draft document and offer alternative proposals. And though he said members are still aiming to have a plan released on December 1, Reed did acknowledge that if members do not agree, the co-chairmen will certainly promote their own product separately to the American people.

Bean-Counters and Baloney

Thomas Sowell

Bean-Counters and Baloney

The bean-counters have struck again-- this time in the sports pages. Two New York Times sport writers have discovered that baseball coaches from minority groups are found more often coaching at first base than at third base. Moreover, third-base coaches become managers more often than first-base coaches.

This may seem to be just another passing piece of silliness. But it is part of a more general bean-counting mentality that turns statistical differences into grievances. The time is long overdue to throw this race card out of the deck and start seeing it for the gross fallacy that it is.

At the heart of such statistics is the implicit assumption that different races, sexes and other subdivisions of the human species would be proportionately represented in institutions, occupations and income brackets if there was not something strange or sinister going on.

Although this notion has been repeated by all sorts of people, from local loudmouths on the street to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States, there is not one speck of evidence behind it and a mountain of evidence against it.

Ask the bean-counters where in this wide world have different groups been proportionally represented. They can't tell you. In other words, something that nobody can demonstrate is taken as a norm, and any deviation from that norm is somebody's fault!

Anyone who has watched football over the years has probably seen at least a hundred black players score touchdowns-- and not one black player kick the extra point. Is this because of some twisted racist who doesn't mind black players scoring touchdowns but hates to see them kicking the extra points?

At our leading engineering schools-- M.I.T., CalTech, etc.-- whites are under-represented and Asians over-represented. Is this anti-white racism or pro-Asian racism? Or are different groups just different?

As for baseball, I have long noticed that there are more blacks playing centerfield than third-base. Since the same people hire centerfielders and third-basemen, it is hard to argue that racism explains the difference.

No one says it is racism that explains why blacks are over-represented and whites under-represented in basketball. Bean-counters only make a fuss when there is a disparity that fits their vision or their agenda.

Years ago, a study was made of the ethnic make-up of military forces in countries around the world. Nowhere was the ethnic make-up of the military the same as the ethnic make-up of the population, or even close to the same.

Nearly half the pilots in the Malaysia's air force were from the Chinese minority, rather than the Malay majority. In Nigeria, most of the officers were from the southern tribes and most of the enlisted men were from the northern tribes. Similar disparities have been common among various groups in many places.

In countries around the world, all sorts of groups differ from each other in all sorts of ways, from rates of alcoholism to infant mortality, education and virtually everything that can be measured, as well as in some things that cannot be quantified. If black and white Americans were the same, they would be the only two groups on this planet who are the same.

One of the things that got us started on heavy-handed government regulation of the housing market were statistics showing that blacks were turned down for mortgage loans more often than whites. The bean-counters in the media went ballistic. It had to be racism, to hear them tell it.

What they didn't tell you was that whites were turned down more often than Asians. What they also didn't tell you was that black-owned banks also turned down blacks more often than whites. Nor did they tell you that credit scores differed from group to group. Instead, the media, the politicians and the regulators grabbed some statistics and ran with them.

The bean-counters are everywhere, pushing the idea that differences show injustices committed by society. As long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it-- and the polarization they create will sell this country down the river.

Judicial Inconsistency

Jacob Sullum

Gun Shy: Four Supreme Court Justices Make Case Against Constitutional Rights

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to states and cities as well as the federal government. Judging from their objections, the four dissenters were still reeling from the court's landmark 2008 decision recognizing that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.

In their dissenting opinions, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer (joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor) worry that overturning gun control laws undermines democracy. If "the people" want to ban handguns, they say, "the people" should be allowed to implement that desire through their elected representatives.

What if the people want to ban books that offend them, establish an official church or authorize police to conduct warrantless searches at will? Those options are also foreclosed by constitutional provisions that apply to the states by way of the 14th Amendment. The crucial difference between a pure democracy and a constitutional democracy like ours is that sometimes the majority does not decide.

Likewise, Stevens defends "state and local legislatures' right to experiment," while Breyer is loath to interfere with "the ability of states to reflect local preferences and conditions -- both key virtues of federalism." Coming from justices who think Congress can disregard state decisions about the medical use of marijuana because a plant on the windowsill of a cancer patient qualifies as interstate commerce, this sudden concern about federalism is hard to take seriously.

Another reason to doubt the dissenters' sincerity: They would never accept federalism as a rationale for letting states "experiment" with freedom of speech, freedom of religion or due process protections. Much of their job, as they themselves see it, involves overriding "local preferences" that give short shrift to constitutional rights.

Second Amendment rights are different, Breyer says, because "determining the constitutionality of a particular state gun law requires finding answers to complex empirically based questions." So does weighing the claims in favor of banning child pornography or depictions of animal cruelty, relaxing the Miranda rule, admitting illegally obtained evidence or allowing warrantless pat-downs, dog sniffs or infrared surveillance.

When they decide whether a law or practice violates a constitutional right, courts cannot avoid empirical questions. In cases involving racial discrimination or content-based speech restrictions, for example, they ask whether the challenged law is "narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest" and is the "least restrictive means" of doing so.

But unlike equal protection or freedom of speech, Stevens says, "firearms have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty." How so? "Just as they can help homeowners defend their families and property from intruders," he explains, "they can help thugs and insurrectionists murder innocent victims."

Every right can be abused, with results that are immoral, illegal or both. Freedom of speech can be used to spread hateful ideas, promote pernicious political philosophies, slander the innocent or engage in criminal conspiracies. If there were no potential for harm from exercising a right, there would be no need to protect it, because no one would try to restrict it.

The dissenters' most frivolous objection is that making states obey the Second Amendment "invites an avalanche of litigation," as Stevens puts it. Every day we hear about cases in which people argue that the government has violated their rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth or Eighth amendment. Neither Stevens nor Breyer wants to stop this "avalanche." Only when the Second Amendment is added to the mix do they recoil in horror at the prospect that Americans will use the courts to vindicate their rights.

Stevens warns that "the practical significance of the proposition that 'the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the states' remains to be worked out by this court over many, many years." But that's because the court for many, many years ignored the Second Amendment while gradually defining the contours of its neighbors in the Bill of Rights. There is a lot of catching up to do.

Do laws even matter today?

Do laws even matter today?

As soon as Arizona passed its recent immigration law, some reporters and commentators were quick to cast the story with the usual actors: "Tea Partiers," race activists, conservatives and liberals. Like our politics, much of our news media coverage has become a clash of caricatures — easily categorized groups with one-dimensional motives for mass consumption. Some commentary even suggested that supporters of the law are either open or closeted racists. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., recently called the law both "fascist" and "racist."By Jonathan Turley

Though I am a critic of the Arizona law, I do not view its supporters in such one-dimensional terms. Indeed, I do not view the public response in purely immigration terms. Whether it is illegal immigration or the mortgage crisis or corporate bailouts, there seems to be a growing sense among many citizens that they are expected to play by the rules while others are exempt.

With polls showing about 60% of people supporting the Arizona law and almost half supporting similar laws in their states, it is implausible to suggest that all these people are racists or extremists — let alone fascists. Notably, a majority of Americans also opposed the bank bailouts and mortgage forgiveness. In each of these controversies, there is a sense that the government was stepping in to protect people from the consequences of their actions.

In the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people accepted high-risk, low-interest loans while other citizens either declined to buy homes or agreed to higher monthly payments to avoid such deals. When Congress intervened with mortgage relief, some of those who had acted responsibly wondered whether they acted stupidly by rejecting low rates and later federal support.

Bailouts and immigration

Then there were the corporate bailouts. For citizens to secure a loan, they have to meet exacting terms and disclosures. Yet, when banks and firms concealed risks or engaged in financial wrongdoing, Congress bailed them out and allowed their executives to reap fat bonuses. The laws on fraud and deceptive practices simply did not seem to apply to them. Just as several companies were declared "too big to fail," many of their executives appeared too big to lose money — unlike the millions of citizens burned by their business practices.

Those prior controversies coalesced with the immigration debate. The last time Congress granted amnesty to illegal immigrants was 1986 — and it was criticized at the time for rewarding those who had evaded deportation. Complaints over the lack of federal enforcement had been percolating for years but exploded along Arizona's long desert border. When a law mandated state enforcement of federal laws, the Obama administration moved to block it.

Indeed, high-ranking Obama officials such as John Morton, head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have suggested that they might refuse to deport those arrested under the Arizona law. While we continue to tell millions around the world that they must wait for years to immigrate legally, Congress and the White House are considering a new amnesty proposal to benefit an additional 11 million illegal immigrants.

In each of these areas, the perception is that the law says one thing but actually means different things for different people. It is a dangerous perception, and it is not entirely unfounded. Such double-standards have become common as Congress and presidents seek to avoid unpopular legal problems.

•Torture: While acknowledging that waterboarding is torture and that torture violates domestic and international law, President Obama and members of Congress have barred any investigation or prosecution of those crimes.

•Pollution: While citizens are subject to pay for the full damage they cause to their neighbors and are routinely fined for their environmental damage for everything from dumping in rivers to leaf burning, Congress capped the liability for massive corporations such as BP and Exxon at a ridiculous $75 million. Though BP is likely to spend much more in litigation (particularly if prosecuted criminally), the current law requires citizens to pay the full cost of their environmental damage while capping the costs for companies producing massive destruction.

•Privacy: When the telecommunications companies found themselves on the losing end of citizen suits over the violation of privacy laws, Congress (including then-Sen. Obama) and President Bush simply changed the law to legislatively kill the citizen suits and protect the companies.

An arbitrary system

The message across these areas is troubling. To paraphrase Animal Farm, all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others.

A legal system cannot demand the faith and fealty of the governed when rules are seen as arbitrary and deceptive. Our leaders have led us not to an economic crisis or an immigration crisis or an environmental crisis or a civil liberties crisis. They have led us to a crisis of faith where citizens no longer believe that laws have any determinant meaning. It is politics, not the law, that appears to drive outcomes — a self-destructive trend for a nation supposedly defined by the rule of law.

Self-Esteem, Self-Destruction

Self-Esteem, Self-Destruction

By George Will

WASHINGTON -- Memo to that Massachusetts school where children in physical education classes jump rope without using ropes: Get some ropes. And you -- you are about 85 percent of all parents -- who are constantly telling your children how intelligent they are: Do your children a favor and pipe down.

These are nuggets from "NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children" by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. It is another book to torment modern parents who are determined to bring to bear on their offspring the accumulated science of child-rearing. Modern parents want to nurture so skillfully that Mother Nature will gasp in admiration at the marvels their parenting produces from the soft clay of children.

Those Massachusetts children are jumping rope without ropes because of a self-esteem obsession. The assumption is that thinking highly of oneself is a prerequisite for high achievement. That is why some children's soccer teams stopped counting goals (think of the damaged psyches of children who rarely scored) and shower trophies on everyone. No child at that Massachusetts school suffers damaged self-esteem by tripping on the jump rope.

But the theory that praise, self-esteem and accomplishment increase in tandem is false. Children incessantly praised for their intelligence (often by parents who are really praising themselves) often underrate the importance of effort. Children who open their lunchboxes and find mothers' handwritten notes telling them how amazingly bright they are tend to falter when they encounter academic difficulties. Also, Bronson and Merryman say that overpraised children are prone to cheating because they have not developed strategies for coping with failure.

"We put our children in high-pressure environments," Bronson and Merryman write, "seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments." But children excessively praised for their intelligence become risk averse in order to preserve their reputations. Instead, Bronson and Merryman say, praise effort ("I like how you keep trying"): It is a variable children can control.

They often cannot control cars. In 1999, a Johns Hopkins University study found that some school districts that abolished driver's education courses experienced a 27 percent decrease in auto accidents among 16- and 17-year-olds. Odd.

Not really. Bronson and Merryman say driver's ed teaches the rules of the road and mechanics of driving, but teenagers are in fatal crashes at twice the rate of other drivers because of poor decisions, not poor skills. The wiring in the frontal lobe of the teenage brain is not fully formed. Driver's ed courses make getting a license easy, thereby increasing the supply of young drivers who actually have holes in their heads.

Their unfinished heads should spend more time on pillows. Only 5 percent of high school seniors get eight hours of sleep a night. Children get a hour less than they did 30 years ago, which subtracts IQ points and adds body weight.

Until age 21, the circuitry of a child's brain is being completed. Bronson and Merryman report research on grade schoolers showing that "the performance gap caused by an hour's difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader." In high school there is a steep decline in sleep hours, and a striking correlation of sleep and grades.

Tired children have trouble retaining learning "because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory. ... The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night."

The school day starts too early because that is convenient for parents and teachers. Awakened at dawn, teenage brains are still releasing melatonin, which makes them sleepy. This is one reason why young adults are responsible for half the 100,000 annual "fall asleep" automobile crashes. When Edina, Minn., changed its high school start from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., math/verbal SAT scores rose substantially.

Furthermore, sleep loss increases the hormone that stimulates hunger and decreases the one that suppresses appetite. Hence the correlation between less sleep and more obesity.

Bronson and Merryman slay a slew of myths. But perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people. Only recently -- about five minutes ago, relative to the long-running human comedy -- have parents been driving themselves to distraction by taking too seriously the idea that "as the twig is bent the tree's inclined." Twigs are not limitlessly bendable; trees will be what they will be.