They were in a political bind to begin with.

Democrats are motivated by a sincere and deep desire to extend coverage to those without it and provide all Americans with much greater health care security. Politically, however, they felt that they could not disturb the employer-provided care with which Americans are generally satisfied. Hence the incessant promise: If you like what you have you can keep it.

But only if it still exists. And the way the Democrats are reshaping the incentives in the health insurance market, it is much less likely that the employer-provided health...]]> Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Is this Barack Obama's economy yet?

Congressional Republicans are trying to make it such. Their constant refrain, and taunt, is: "Where are the jobs?"

The Obama administration set itself up for this with foolish predictions about the effectiveness of its stimulus package. White House economists predicted that, if the stimulus package passed, unemployment wouldn't exceed 8 percent and 3.5 million jobs would be created or saved.

The stimulus package passed in February. The unemployment rate is now 9.8 percent. The economy has lost 2.7 million jobs. Republicans are trying to pin the blame for job losses greater than the predictions of White House economists on Obama's...]]> Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Iran is providing a premature and very high-risk test of President Barack Obama's new approach to American diplomacy.

Simplified, the thesis of the new Obama approach is that if the United States plays nicer with others, others will play nicer with us and be more willing to help do tough things.

I've never held out much hope for the Obama approach. I believe that nations generally act in their self-interest without regard to sentiments about other countries.

On the other hand, the Bush administration's blustery approach only made the rest of the world more hostile and resentful, which wasn't in our self-interest. So, it was worth giving the Obama approach a...]]> Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 While being roundly criticized from all sides, the health care reform advanced by Sen. Max Baucus is widely thought to at least have the virtue of not adding to the deficit. That's because the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorer for such things, says it is so.

But it ain't so. Or, more precisely, it is highly implausible that it would be so.

To understand why, you first have to disregard the ten-year cumulative figures that are the center of the discussion in Washington. All health care reform proposals ramp up over time. So, the only way to assess their fiscal impact is to look at them on an annual basis after they are fully operational.

The last year...]]> Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Now that Barack Obama has lost considerable political altitude, many conservatives are saying that he over read his mandate. This fits the caricature of Obama as an empty suit many on the right subscribe to.

In this view, Obama ran on a vaporous platform of ill-defined "change." He made a nice appearance and sounded good when reading from a teleprompter. And he wasn't Bush, so he got elected. But there wasn't any substance to him or message from the American people in his election.

The extent to which this caricature of Obama by the right resembles the caricature of Ronald Reagan by the left is remarkable. In neither case does the caricature have much grounding in...]]> Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The only fair conclusion from the CIA interrogation documents released last week is that former Vice President Dick Cheney largely won his argument with President Barack Obama about enhanced techniques.

The reports indicate that most of the most valuable information came from high-value detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, including the revelation of numerous plots and terrorists whose names were not previously known to the CIA.

The reports do not clearly say that the information resulted from the enhanced interrogation techniques, but the implication is quite clear. The CIA initially sought approval for EITs because it felt that Abu Zubaydah...]]> Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Health care reform supporters claim they are losing public support because of lies and distortions told by opponents designed to scare people.

There's some of that going on. But the most consequential misrepresentation in the health care debate is actually being told by President Barack Obama and other supporters.

The lie supporters most resent, and with good reason, is that the health care reform bills have death panels or provisions to encourage euthanasia for the old and infirmed. Instead, there was a provision to provide end-of-life counseling services.

There's reason to doubt that government should be paying for or involved in such services, but the country...]]> Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Chief Justice John Roberts came to the U.S. Supreme Court with a mission. He wanted the court to begin deciding cases on the narrowest possible terms and, if possible, with less of a cacophony of squalling voices and intricately nuanced opinions.

The Roberts principle was on full display in the Voting Rights Act decision, written by Roberts himself, the court issued on Monday.

A small utility district in Texas had sued to get out from under the preclearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act. Under the act, the political jurisdictions of some states, including Texas and Arizona, have to submit all changes in election laws and procedures to the federal government for...]]> Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The blame game is in full bray in Washington over enhanced interrogation techniques.

The Bush administration engaged in torture, claim the Democrats. Key Democrats, particularly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, knew about the techniques and condoned them, respond the Republicans.

The CIA lied to Congress, Pelosi complains. Did not, retorts the Obama administration's CIA Director Leon Panetta.

The Obama administration throws fuel on the fire by releasing legal memoranda by Bush lawyers approving the use of the techniques. The Democratic narrative is that the memos constitute a permission slip for the CIA to torture detainees. A reading of the memos doesn't sustain that...]]> Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The country is about to have a very frustrating debate over health care, characterized more by misdirection than an honest discussion of the alternatives.

A good illustration was provided by the confab at the White House Monday, in which health care executives committed to reduce expenditures by $2 trillion over the next decade.

Or did they?

President Obama, in his remarks, said that they did: "they are pledging to cut the rate of growth of national health care spending by 1.5 percentage points each year - an amount that's equal to over $2 trillion."

The actual letter signed by the executives, however, says something importantly different: "we will do our part...]]> Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The proposed end games for General Motors and particularly Chrysler illustrate why government shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place.

It's worthwhile to begin with the broader picture. Americans used to buy about 17 million new cars and trucks a year. Now, we're buying less than 10 million. That, of course, puts considerable stress on manufacturers with weaker products or financial structures.

How many new cars Americans will want to purchase in the future is unknown. But there can be a high degree of confidence in this: however many it is, someone will sell them to us.

Moreover, they are likely to be produced in the United States. A majority of cars sold...]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The pending decision by the Environmental Protection Agency to designate greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, as a threat to human health and welfare probably marks a point of no return. One way or another, the United States is going to regulate greenhouse gases.

To the extent human-caused global warming is a real problem, this can be a step forward. It will, however, expose the lie that a transition to a less carbon-intensive economy will be painless or even enriching.

Despite proclamations about the limited nature of its finding, EPA can hardly designate greenhouse gases as a threat under the Clean Air Act without regulating them under the act. Nor can the...]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Nevertheless, there are some highly critical lines that should not be crossed if the essential character of our system of democratic capitalism is to be maintained. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has proposed to cross one of them.

Geithner has proposed that the federal government be given the authority to take over financial institutions that, in its judgment, pose a systemic risk.

After taking over the company, the federal government would have unlimited power to do whatever it wants. It could override the rights of shareholders and abrogate obligations to and contracts with employees, creditors and customers. All the normal legal rights of these other parties would be...]]> Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The United States should be a country dedicated, in part, to the protection of individual liberty. Such a society should be highly circumspect about the behaviors it deems criminal and thus worthy of depriving those who engage in them of their liberty.

The use of recreational drugs should not be such a behavior. Instead, it should be treated as a matter of personal responsibility and personal and public health.

The United States does not treat it as such. But, increasingly, the country treats drug use less and less as a criminal matter as well.

Few people are actually incarcerated for just drug usage. Diversion into treatment has become the norm.

This has...]]> Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 But it can also become a dangerous delusion. And, with respect to the American people, it may be yesterday's news.

The United States has been historically distinctive. But that's not because our people are wired differently. After all, except for Native Americans, there really isn't an American race. We are a hodgepodge of other people.

What has made us different is that we lived in a framework that tended to maximize human potential. That was in part legal, a government dedicated to the protection of individual rights, including the right to property and to engage in commerce. And it was in part a culture that created and reinforced expectations about self-reliance and right...]]> Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Assuming government officials can fix housing assumes that they know how many homes should be bought and built and what they should cost. They don't. No one does. That's why there are markets.

Instead, federal policy regarding housing is best seen as a welfare program, using the term descriptively, not pejoratively. The question is what government should do to help people cope with the stress the burst of the housing bubble and the economic contraction have put on mortgages.

There are three categories of people who could use assistance: those who bought more home than they could afford, assuming that rising values would permit a later refinancing; those who are having trouble...]]> Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 The Democrats propose that the federal government build new stuff for virtually everyone.

The Congressional Budget Office has already noted the constraints that exist on government's ability to get hundreds of billions of dollars of construction money out the door quickly. But even that ignores the constraint from those who would need to do the work.

Residential construction is, of course, in a deep slump. Commercial construction not so much. And residential construction workers are not easily redeployed to do commercial and heavy construction. The skill sets are different.

The deceit is that all this spending requires suspending ordinary budget constraints to...]]> Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 To address that problem, the Bush administration asked Congress for up to $700 billion to buy those assets and take them off the books of the financial institutions. Congress agreed, set up the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and released the first $350 billion.

But instead of using the money to buy up the distressed securities, the Bush administration decided to inject public capital into the banks.

In fairness to the Bush administration, the consensus among economic experts at the time was that injecting public capital was preferable to buying distressed securities. But it turned out to be a colossal mistake.

The TARP investments increased the capital of the financial...]]> Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 George Washington was indispensible to the founding of the Republic. Abraham Lincoln was indispensible to preserving it. And King was indispensible to beginning the process of healing it.

Electing a Black president doesn't mean that the wounds of slavery and Jim Crow are healed. But it is a testimony to the opportunity an America true to its principles proffers, and to the man whose character, ability and good will persuaded his fellow Americans to entrust him with the leadership of our country.

Now, however, Obama has to govern.

Obama's inaugural address indicates a moderate with big ambitions and plans.

Obama's chief challenge, of course, is to repair the...]]> Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 These are unprecedented levels in the post-World War II era. They exceed previous records by large margins. The previous highs were reached in 1983, 6 percent of GDP for the deficit and 23.5 percent for spending.

In historically-challenged Washington, the current economic difficulties are routinely described as the worst since the Great Depression. Everyone in town must have sleepwalked through the 1970s and early 1980s.

In any event, even Washingtonians are willing to admit that the Great Depression was worse. So, what was the federal government's response to those economic troubles? Federal spending never exceeded 11 percent of GDP and the deficit never exceeded 6...]]> Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 According to Huntington, the Cold War had held in abeyance a reshaping of the world order based upon culture, primarily from ethnicity and religion.

Nation-states would increasingly align themselves with competing and conflicting civilizations: the West, Russian Orthodox, Chinese, Islamic, Hindu, Latin American, African and Japanese - although Huntington predicted that Japan would accommodate itself to the rise of China and work within its civilizational orbit.

Globalization would actually result in more conflict not less, since it reduces the elbow room each civilization has with respect to the others.

This was quite a splash of cold water. Huntington was saying not...]]> Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Nevertheless, I have some hope that some good will come from the Obama presidency. He may usefully define the limits of responsible liberal governance, as Ronald Reagan usefully defined the limits of responsible conservative governance.

That conservatives and Republicans will be undergoing a soul-searching discussion to decide who they are and what they now stand for is commonly observed. However, less noticed, but more consequential (at least in the short-term), is that liberals and Democrats will now be defining how they govern.

In reality, liberals haven't governed since LBJ. To govern, control of the presidency is required.

Jimmy Carter didn't so much govern as cope...]]> Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 If Democrats gain unchecked power, the one thing it is most clear they would do is to abolish the secret ballot for union elections. Even the so-called "conservative" Democrats running in swing districts are toeing the line on this one.

The House Democratic leadership forced a vote on the proposal last year, even though the issue could be used against its vulnerable members. Only two Democrats voted against it. All the Arizona Democrats running in swing districts - Harry Mitchell, Gabrielle Giffords, Ann Kirkpatrick and Bob Lord - support abolishing the secret ballot for union elections.

The second most likely thing Democrats would do is to make the tax system sharply more...]]> Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The legislation purported to instruct the treasury secretary to buy distressed securities at the lowest possible price for taxpayers, using market mechanisms such as a reverse auction.

However, the bill also required that the secretary obtain warrants for stock in the companies whose distressed securities were being bought. The warrants were to be for whatever percentage of the company the secretary decided, at whatever price the secretary set.

This pretty much obviated the reverse auction idea. How would a company know how much of a discount on its securities to bid if it didn't know how much of the company the government would demand in exchange and what the company would...]]> Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Note the disdain for the ethos of self-responsibility. Democrats do not merely regard it as insufficient. Instead they regard the idea that people should provide for themselves as divisive.

Even more significantly, Democrats regard self-responsibility as a "recipe for failure." In other words, Democrats don't think the American people are capable of making it on their own.

And so, Democrats have a government program for, well, everything.

Democrats want government to help you raise your kids, send them to college, train and retrain for a job, buy a home and save for retirement.

They must be saving the burial assistance program for 2012.

If you want an...]]> Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The ambitions of the communist Soviet Union were universal. It wanted to remake the world in its image.

It promoted the spread of communism throughout the globe. It actively sought to undermine Western democracies, particularly in Western Europe. It posed a military threat to the independence of Western Europe.

Vladimir Putin has emasculated nascent democratic institutions in post-Soviet Russia. He has successfully turned Russia's oil and natural gas resources into an instrument of state power. Putin's Russia seeks power and influence.

But there is no evidence that Putin's Russia aims to remake the world in its image. Instead, it is seeking safe space for its...]]> Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 To which, the most brutally relevant question is: So what?

Russia clearly has a strategic objective of Finlandizing the Caucasus.

During the Cold War, the West was unwilling to commit to the defense of Finland. So Finland, to achieve a degree of domestic independence, had to make its foreign policy subservient to Soviet interests.

Georgia and Ukraine want to avoid this fate. But the harsh reality is that the West is unwilling to commit to their defense as well.

Bush has pushed for Georgia and Ukraine to be included in NATO, a call echoed by both McCain and Obama.

This merely reflects continued confused thinking about NATO.

NATO began as a military...]]> Wed, 06 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The developing world is actually developing. The conditions that lead to economic growth are now widely known, if still very imperfectly practiced.

Meanwhile, much of the world's oil supply lies in places with troubling governance.

That means that world demand for oil is likely to continue to outpace increases in supply.

Gas prices will always fluctuate, but the trend pressure is likely to be upward. Increased domestic production, while desirable for other reasons, is highly unlikely to alter the trend pressure.

American politicians, however, aren't in the habit of talking about unpleasant truths. So, both sides are telling the American people that inexpensive and...]]> Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 There were two significant points about the speech. The first is that it wasn't apologetic.

There is a strong consensus in Europe that the United States is too backward to wield the power and influence it has in the world. So, U.S. power and influence need to be constrained and directed by Europe.

Most American liberals tend to defer to the European judgment, at least implicitly. Obama didn't.

Obama anchored his speech in the Berlin airlift, when the exercise of American power prevented free Berlin from being swallowed up by the Soviet Union.

Rather than concede European criticism, Obama asserted that "just as American bases built in the last century still help to...]]> Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Recently, the stock prices for Fannie and Freddie fell precipitously, to roughly a quarter of their previous peak. That represents a sharply revised judgment by investors about the value of Fannie and Freddie's business model and activities.

That's too bad for holders of Fannie and Freddie stock. But in and of itself, it doesn't represent a systemic economic threat warranting the intervention of the federal government.

Other financial institutions do hold mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie. If Fannie and Freddie's financial condition deteriorates to the point of raising questions about their ability to make good on their guarantees, that would reduce...]]> Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 World War IV is against Islamic jihadism. Podhoretz prefers, as does much of the conservative commentariat, the term "Islamofascism." That, however, is misleading. In fascism, the state is supreme and religion serves the interests of the state. In radical Islam, it's the opposite - religion is supreme and the state serves religion. Regardless, according to Podhoretz and others who see the world this way, the fight against Islamic jihadism more resembles the Cold War than either World War I or II.

It is a clash of irreconcilable ideologies. It's likely to go on a long time, often in ways that are not entirely visible. And it is a fight for survival - one side will win and the other...]]> Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500