Intellectual Clarity & Rocket-Propelled High Explosives

It’s a two-fer! When it rains it pours. No time for frilly introductions. Let’s get this soiree going.

Where’s Obama resolve on the budget battle?
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Wednesday, March 30, 6:39 PM

In his Libya speech,

Either politicians need to start giving their speeches better titles, or opinion columnists need to start referring to them as they are titled.

Obama was clear, forceful and principled.

This reminds me of the episode of Futurama where Richard Nixon buys Bender’s robot body to affix to his severed, chemically-maintained head-in-a-jar. After being skewered in the debate against Jack Johnson and John Jackson his publicist assures him that even though he had been thoroughly embarrassed, his “body stayed on message.” (An obscure reference, I’ll grant you, given that it includes something called a “truth-o-scope,” but it’s one that I’m confident will stand the test of time.)

The point is, Obama was only clear, forceful, and principled on a purely superficial level. Saying “let me be clear” and then following it up with something vague does not serve as an acceptable substitute for actual clarity. The content of the speech was vague, tepid, and uncertain, despite Obama’s insistence that he was being clear, forceful, and principled. Only his body and tone were on-message. This trick is starting to wear thin.

Yes, there were some ambiguities

Some?

but these were dictated by a genuinely uncertain situation on the ground, not by muddled thinking.

The President completely failed to distinguish Libya from Syria in any meaningful way. Simply asserting that this was a unique circumstance doesn’t exactly cut it. He regularly stated that the military action was in our national interests, but he failed to explain why. Some vague sense of moral obligation is not national interest. Neither is Libya’s geographic location between Tunisia and Egypt (arguably the most irrelevant fact brought he dredged up). Indeed, everything he said was predicated on the notion that the Libyan people would democratically elect leadership that it more friendly to the United States than Kadafi. In reality, there is no evidence that this would occur. This is the note of caution conservatives struck when Egypt was facing its own uprising. Now the leading party is a band of Islamist fanatics known as the Muslim Brotherhood.

The president made the case for a foreign policy rooted in morality yet also alive to the difficulties of acting wisely in an imperfect world that does not bend easily to one man’s or one country’s will.

So if I’m reading this right, the official United States foreign policy towards international crises is hyperactive morality coupled with fatalistic nihilism?

On the budget, by contrast, it’s hard to know what the president’s bottom line is, what deals he would regard as reasonable or when he will even join the fray.

He won’t join the fray; Obama wants a government shut-down. He knows that a government shut-down is viewed as much more dire than it actually is. (It’s not like our military stops functioning in the event of a shut-down.) The man is clearly pinning his re-election on his ability to blame Boehner and the Republicans, despite this being the budget for a fiscal year controlled solely by the filibuster-proof Democratic Congress of 2008.

The White House is so determined to keep the president antiseptically distant from the untidy wrangling on the budget that it will not even allow its allies in Congress to cite the administration’s own analyses of how harmful some of the Republican cuts would be. They can use the facts

Facts <> Analysis. Just saying.

but not let on that the administration put them together. What’s up with this?

Obama was not afraid to take risks on Libya,

The President was absolutely mortified to take risks in Libya. That’s why he put the decision off as long as he could and eventually deferred the decision to Hillary. The entire reason for our muddled mission is that the President refuses to fully engage in the fight because he’s not sure we should be in the fight in the first place.

including the hazard of criticism from all sides for his resolute refusal to lay out an all-encompassing policy toward the various uprisings in the Middle East.

That’s a nice way of saying that the administration’s official policy is to “embrace the clusterfuck.”

It’s amusing to watch us journalists

You’re not a journalist. You’re an opinion writer. It’s actually closer to “rodeo clown” or “pot farmer” on the continuum of professional respectability than journalist.

assume the mantle of medieval scholastics as we parse his every word in search of an “Obama Doctrine.”

True. You guys are fucking clueless.

But the last thing the United States needs is a doctrinaire approach to a series of conflicts that affect our interests in different ways and in which we have very different capacities to influence the outcomes.

Let go of your dogmatic structure of policy and reject the outmoded adherence to reason. Embrace the clusterfuck!

When “history is on the move,” as Obama put it nicely, rigid policy frameworks can be dangerous.

It’s much more sensible to trust the awesome power of the United States military to a single man too intellectually lazy to formalize his thought processes regarding the use of that power. Brilliant. Not only are we sacrificing the safety afforded by the balance of powers between the Executive and Legislative Branches, but we’re doing so to amass power for a man-child with less foreign policy acumen than the various strippers that let Charlie Sheen snort cocaine from their breasts.

What Obama did offer was an exceptionally honest and rigorous defense of humanitarian intervention.

Defend the clusterfuck for our God-given right to future clusterfucking!

“It’s true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs,” he said. “And given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always measure our interests against the need for action. [emphasis added]

This is kind of the crux of the speech here, and it underscores Obama’s tragically muddled understanding of the world. He believes that American interests run in conflict to the need for action. He admitted it. See? Right there. I italicized it

The pressing question, of course, is whose needs supersede those of America?

But that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what’s right.

First, measuring and balancing are not arguments. Showing that the costs outweigh the benefits is an argument. It’s one that, if proven, should ALWAYS deter the United States from military action. 

Second, it’s almost as if his reflexive meekness doesn’t permit him to understand the meaning of the words “always” and “never.”

In this particular country — Libya — at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale. We had a unique ability to stop that violence.”

In other words “Back off! I’m making this shit up as I go along.”

He was right to keep using that word “particular”

Yes, it absolves him of all need to be consistent when intervening in future skirmishes between America’s enemies.

and also right to argue that we should not have acted unilaterally.

If the argument is that we must “always measure our interests” is derailed by the caveat “unless the international community objects,” then it was even more tepid and limp-wristed than I made it out to be.

The United States will better maintain its power and influence by expanding the ways in which it can work in concert with like-minded nations.

We do that with trade partnerships, not by asking American military personnel to serve under a Canadian. Typing that just made me vomit in my mouth a little.

Putting aside the whatever-Obama-does-must-be-wrong wing of the Republican Party, there are two legitimate lines of criticism of his Libya policy.

Here are my top ten:

1)      A failure to take seriously the basic demands of leading the Executive Branch has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s massively under-qualified for the position he has.

2)      The decision to go into Libya was half-hearted and timid.

3)      We shouldn’t have gone into Libya in the first place, but the President got goaded into it by his advisors because he’s weak.

4)      The “Obama Doctrine” is simply an enshrinement of the notion that the Executive Branch can use the full force of the United States military haphazardly, and unilaterally.

5)      The mission is muddled in the mind of the man who conceived it.

6)      The mission is muddled in its implementation.

7)      The President apparently doesn’t know or doesn’t care that we are actively aiding and abetting Islamist extremists within the rebel movement in Libya.

8)      The President clearly doesn’t understand the concept of “American interests.”

9)      The President doesn’t understand the military necessity of a multi-faceted attach to achieve combat objectives worth having (i.e. you can’t win a war from 30,000 ft.)

10)  “Kinetic Military Action” proves that liberals are too much of pansies to admit that they started a war even when they started a war.

One is the realist’s view that the United States should not have intervened because we are already overcommitted and don’t even know who the rebels are. The other is that having declared that Moammar Gaddafi must go, we need to go all the way, arm the rebels and do whatever else is needed to ensure their victory.

Realists (and, for that matter, pacifists) won’t be moved by Obama’s humanitarian case, but I suspect many Americans were convinced that the United States and its allies could not stand by facing “the prospect of violence on a horrific scale.”

Which, of course, is a lie. We did it in Bosnia. We did it in Iraq. We did it in the Sudan, and Rwanda, and Myanmar. The simple and sad facts are these:

a)      Totalitarian leaders are asshats.

b)      Ethnic conflict blows.

c)      Neither is our responsibility.

Here’s my solution: split Libya. Why are we obsessed with the idea that Libya is a fixed and indivisible territory? The rebels get Benghazi; Kaddafi gets Tripoli. Literally split the country down the middle. Give them both international standing, legitimacy, and if they want to keep shooting each other, so be it.

As for giving more help to the rebels, it may come to that.

Somewhere, some talk radio personality is creating a parody song for “mission creep” to the dulcet tones of Radiohead.

But after our experience in Iraq, I’d prefer a president who is wary of the costs of a military mission devoted to regime change

The assertion that George Bush wasn’t aware of the costs of the Iraq War, both in human tragedy and in financial expenditures, is wrong and Dionne knows it.

See, it’s frustrating when someone simply asserts  facts, isn’t it?

and doesn’t lightly brush aside the risks of a quagmire.

Perhaps Obama has the same fear of quagmires when it comes to the budget fight,

Oh right. This column was ostensibly about budgets.

but this is not a battle he can avoid. So far, he has been more of a pundit or a distant judge, rendering verdicts from afar on the behavior of the various parties. “Both sides are going to have to sit down

I want some people do to their legislating standing up. That’s not a metaphor; I just appreciate the benefits of exercise and good circulation.

and compromise on prudent cuts,” he said a few weeks ago. Well, yes, but isn’t he on a side here? He talks periodically about his priorities, but he hasn’t put any muscle behind those who are actually trying to defend them in the brawl that’s raging at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Let’s be honest; Obama’s approval just slipped to the low 40s. He doesn’t have any muscle to spare.

In his speech on Monday, the president spoke of our obligation “to live the values that we hold so dear.” He’s done a decent job of that in Libya. He needs to do the same closer to home.

I actually feel for Obama in many respects. Domestically, he gave liberals everything he could get during his first two years. True, he didn’t get the public option into Obamacare, but then again, he simply didn’t have the votes in either the House or the Senate. He even floated the bat-shit crazy stuff from the fringes like Card Check and Cap and Trade. The budget was an issue that the Democratic-controlled house and the Democrat-controlled Senate should have taken up six months ago. Probably more.  This was Nancy Pelosi’s responsibility.

Now that he’s taken a stand—a wrong-headed stand though it may be—these little pissants start criticizing him for failing on domestic issues. No wonder his approval is heading into the 30s.

Extreme Daguerreotyping, and Other Reasons to Love the Free Market

I have to admit, I have been inconsolable recently. The loss of Bob Herbert hit me a lot harder than I thought it would. I desperately miss the vacant platitudes, the meandering logic, the confused sentence structure, the ever-present threat of a comma splice, and the general preoccupation with dismay that permeated every word.

There was something special about that guy’s particular breed of idiocy. I dare say that I will never again find anyone so disappointingly dense, so cravenly illogical, so colossally underqualified for their job…

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Let There Be Light Bulbs

By GAIL COLLINS

Why hello there.

Of all the controversies now raging in Washington, the one I find most endearing

We all prefer that our political discourse hinges on cuteness.

is the fight over federal regulation of light bulb efficiency.

“Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy,” complained Representative Michele Bachmann

Who is both lean and smart, if I can say that without sounding mildly creepy.

in her Tea Party response to the president’s State of the Union address.

Bachmann has strong opinions on this matter. She is the author of the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act, which would repeal a federal requirement that the typical 100-watt bulb become 25 percent more energy efficient by 2012.

Repealing nuisance federal regulations? What’s not to love?

Bachmann hateshateshates that sort of thing, as you would expect from a woman whose Earth Day speech in 2009 was an ode to carbon dioxide. (“It’s a part of the regular life cycle of the earth.”)

I’m sorry; I’m not getting it. Is the implication of this particular sneer that carbon dioxide is not part of the regular life cycle of the earth, or that Michelle Bachman was pointing out an obvious and indisputable fact?

Hysteria over the government taking away our right to buy inefficient light bulbs has been sweeping through certain segments of the Republican Party.

That’s mostly because efficiency is a feature determined by the market, not by the federal government. The nuisance of regulations on spending behaviors is compounded greatly by the symbolic relevance of a light bulb. Children see it in cartoons represent the very existence of an idea. Ayn Rand’s Anthem, is centered around the protagonist’s rebirth when he re-invents the light bulb in an oppressive totalitarian society. It is the very nature of humanity evinced with a single filament: where once there was darkness, now there is light.

This isn’t about losing an important symbol; it’s about having an important symbol usurped for a message that is clearly contradictory to everything that it represents. It wasn’t the government that created the light bulb. It was man. Specifically, it was a man. There was beauty in the nuance, because the time, effort, and colossal scientific intelligence that went into the product demanded precision, sobriety, and perseverance. It wasn’t poured so generously into the project for government, the common good, or even personal profit. It was done because it could be done. It is an enduring symbol of the possible. We are now being told that it is impossible to buy.

So while Gail Collins regards these impingements on personal liberty with the flippant nonchalance that permeates every word she writes, you and I know that when you raze the symbols of human greatness in favor of the mediocrity of the common man, you have inverted the incentives of an entire society to suppress the special and revolutionary.

Representative Joe Barton of Texas, sponsor of the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act, says we’re about to lose the bulb that “has been turning back the night ever since Thomas Edison ended the era of a world lit only by fire in 1879.”

The point isn’t that the light bulb must never be improved. The point is that it’s up to consumers what constitutes an improvement.

Barton’s vision of the standard 100-watt incandescent is so heroic, you’d think it would be getting its own television series.

“When Congress dictates which light bulbs folks in South Carolina must buy, it’s clear the ‘nanny state’ mentality has gotten out of control in Washington,” said Senator Jim DeMint, one of 27 co-sponsors of a Senate bill calling for repeal of the new efficiency standards.

The great thing about this battle, which has spawned predictions of widespread light-bulb-hoarding,

This isn’t complicated. The laws of supply and demand dictate that when you implement a quota (in this case, zero), the marginal cost of production falls, the price rises, and there is increased deadweight loss. The question, of course, is whether consumers are readily willing to transition to the new lightbulb, a substitute good, on their own. Since they’ve been on the market for years, and the transition isn’t complete (largely because the bulbs are more expensive) one would believe that the two types of light bulbs are not perfect substitutes. (For example, I have a lamp that will not fit one of those newfangled coiled light bulbs. I need the old ones.) So the short answer is yes, there will be hoarding.

is that it will take your mind off Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and the pending government shut-down.

That’s great? This woman is beyond helping.

It’s a little like the Donald Trump presidential candidacy, only less irritating.

With Bob Herbert and Frank Rich out, it won’t take Donald Trump for the words “you’re fired” to creep into your future if you keep writing shit like this, Gail.

Opponents of the law claim that the newer, more energy-efficient and cost-saving breeds of bulb give a less pleasing light,

No. That’s what some consumers say. Their opinions matter, after all, since it is their money buying the light bulbs.

although that doesn’t seem to have dissuaded the American consumers from moving away from the incandescents in droves.

We don’t purchase items democratically; this is precisely why the market exists. We don’t mandate beef because over 50% of the population bought it last week. Nor do we outlaw yachts because the industry only pertains to 0.05% of the population. In our fragmented consumer market, items are being increasingly customized. Whether your hobby is extreme daguerreotyping or free-style parcheesi, there are products and producers that have been tailored specifically to suit your needs. That’s why the market exists.

The National Electrical Manufacturers Association says demand for the allegedly beloved old bulbs has dropped 50 percent over the last five years.

Demand for the Windows XP operating system has dropped precipitously as well. Should we outlaw that too?

A terribly cynical mind might suspect the whole hubbub was just for political show.

Yes, but you don’t have a terribly cynical mind. You have a lazy mind, filled with nothing but regrets and cat-related fantasies.

Jeff Bingaman, the chairman of the energy committee, said he had not actually been accosted by any of his fellow senators begging him to help get angry light bulb aficionados off their backs.

“I heard the statements at the committee hearing, but nobody’s walking the halls lobbying me about this,” he said.

When Gail Collins timidly asserts an argument, her support generally buttresses the counterargument. For a “political show” to work, it needs to gain support from prospective voters. Prospective voters don’t even know about it. If Republicans thought this was a political winner, they would be lobbying. Instead, it’s probably a political wash. That means that their interest is a matter of principle, which is precisely the opposite of a political show.

That was the famous

Famous is a bit of a stretch.

hearing during which Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky began with a rant about light bulbs and wound up complaining that his toilets back home didn’t work.

Seriously, there’s an entire King of the Hill episode about this.

“You busybodies always want to tell us how we can live our lives better,” he said passionately. “I’ve been waiting for 20 years to talk about how bad these toilets are.”

Low-flow is bullshit.

If Paul has been stewing about his bathroom fixtures since 1991, it may go a long way toward explaining his rather gloomy worldview.

Paul’s world view is gloomy? The man’s a libertarian. He just wants you to stop telling him what to do/buy.

But the crux of his argument came at a different point, when he demanded to know whether Kathleen Hogan, a Department of Energy official, was “pro-choice.”

“I’m pro-choice on light bulbs,” Hogan said cannily.

Wow. She is crafty. What a deft rhetorical parry/riposte! Dare I say, she has a rapier wit.

::mockingly highbrow laugh::

Paul, not to be dissuaded, claimed that Obamaites favored “a woman’s right to an abortion, but you don’t favor a woman’s or a man’s right to choose what kind of light bulb.”

A cogent point. After all, a choice is a choice.

The proper comparison here would really be between the energy-efficiency regulations and the government rules that set minimum standards for sanitation and medical care when an abortion is performed.

That’s not an appropriate comparison at all. Consumer choice between light bulbs runs absolutely no risk of death or major bodily harm anyone, and the facts about the different bulbs are readily available to consumers. Moreover, slightly inefficient choices are punished by slightly impactful financial repercussions. If you choose incandescent when you should have picked that coily shit, you’re going to pay more on your next electric bill; probably about 2.1933 cents more. (Did you really expect me to have done the research on this?)

Inversely, when choosing a hospital for a certain procedure, the consumer has no way of knowing the sanitation conditions of the operating rooms, the effects of which could kill him or her. These safety requirements are designed to prevent catastrophic ramifications (e.g. death) in instances where consumers make reasonable decisions based on available criteria. The difference is the incongruence between the choice and the market’s punishment of that choice.

If you were willing to overlook the fact that any attempt whatsoever to equate abortions and light bulbs is completely nuts.

Freedom is freedom; we are losing our liberty in pin-pricks, not amputations.

It’s a classic Tea Party herd of straw horses. Paul managed to lump the light bulb regulations with things his supporters hate (abortions/federal government telling me what to do) while ignoring the fact that the rules are much closer to things they like, such as standards that guarantee that if they go to a hospital or clinic, the place will be clean and staffed by qualified personnel.

Actually, hospital standards are absolutely not a proper comparison, but I’ve already explained that. Does this constitute a straw-man argument of accusing the opposition of using straw-man arguments?

Although the Rand Paul crowd is blaming the light bulb regulations on Obama, the rules were actually signed into law in 2007 by George W. Bush.

Yes, yes. We’ve been over this. Bush’s non-tax-related domestic policies ranged from inconsequential to obnoxious.

And as Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article recently, Washington has been in the standard-setting business since 1894, “when Congress standardized the meaning of what are today common scientific measures, including the ohm, the volt, the watt and the henry, in line with international metrics.”

There’s a difference between standardizing the measurement of an ohm (which manufacturers can choose to ignore if they have a different unit of measurement they prefer) and mandating that certain light bulbs be used—a light bulb, by the way, that was pioneered by one of Obama’s chief advisors. Seriously, GE is some shady shit, and it didn’t get mentioned once this article?

All of this is not to mention that the purpose of this standardization is not safety, or to improve the market’s efficiency by guiding producers to easily replicable standards. It is a scalp for Democrats to throw the green movement. It also has the desirable side-effects of entrenching GE’s monopolistic grasp on the market share of light bulbs and increasing barriers to entry for new firms.

Please, just stop fucking around with the market.

You have to wonder if, back in 1894, there was a general outcry against the federal government trying to tell an American citizen how big his ohm should be.

I’ll count myself lucky. At least she didn’t veer over to school bullying, childhood obesity, or ten thousand other things I don’t care about. She stayed on the straight and narrow of being predictably wrong. Hooray!!!

Farewell, Bob Herbert

Losing Our Way

By BOB HERBERT

More like “Losing our jobs.” Frank Rich is already out at the Times, and now Bob Herbert follows today’s column with the declaration that “after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run [sic] I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society.” If he were a politician, I’d believe that he just got caught finger-banging the 17-year-old daughter of his largest donor. If that’s not PR-spin for “I just got shit-canned” then Barry Bonds is the patron saint of good sportsmanship. (Please ignore the used syringe hanging out of his ass-cheek.)

This is terrible news for me personally. There are very few targets I enjoy savaging as much as Bob Herbert. Thank God I still have Gail Collins. I regard Herbert as the paragon for the liberal hyper-conscience: sloppy in its arguments, constantly offended and outraged, reactionary in its deference to the perpetual victims, and poorly punctuated. This is the man who has appointed himself as the sentinel of the impoverished and the guardian for the unemployed. Now he’s one of them.

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash

Technically, we’re pouring shiploads of treasury securities, but don’t let that bog you down.

into yet another war, this time in Libya,

Admittedly a very questionable decision, given that the operation is being run by the Canadians. I’m going to rename the Libya Mission “Operation Neutral Zone Dump-And-Chase.” For those of you not down with ESPN 6 or higher, that’s hockey lingo.

Oh wait. There was a vote of no confidence in the Canadian parliament.

while simultaneously demolishing school budgets,

Clearly, after eighteen years, Bob Herbert still doesn’t really understand the Tenth Amendment or the separation of powers between federal, state, and local governments. School budgets are an issue for local governments; “Kinetic Military Action” in Libya is very much federal.

closing libraries,

Local.

laying off teachers

Still Local.

and police officers,

Local and/or state.

and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

It’s downright depressing that the quality of your life is contingent upon how many libraries we build and how much we pay teachers.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century.

“Welcome to Barack Obama’s America,” you mean. Where the media doesn’t care about military murders and persistent economic malaise is viewed with phlegmatic indifference.

An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies.

Holla! Dude sees the light!

Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Yep. It sucks out there.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish,

Sounds a lot like plagiarism to me.

liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline.

Take it in, people, you don’t get this type of concentrated ineptitude from many other writers. It’s absolutely glorious.

Greed is part of the human condition; nothing of the last ten to twenty years has changed its role in American society.

Corporate power is massively restricted. The “Big Oil” syndicate is still unable to drill in the Gulf of Mexico despite a judge ruling that the Obama moratorium is unconstitutional and hordes of industry lobbyists. Wal-Mart, perhaps the quintessential “big business” is clawing to get into cities like Chicago, where there is an overwhelming demand for their jobs and low prices. Corporate taxes in the United States are higher than any other industrialized country except Japan. Our regulatory environment is crippling the competitiveness of American businesses.

And despite our addiction to “foreign oil,” the policies of the left have put up every roadblock imaginable to stop us from developing domestic oil. Seven years ago, when ANWR was a major issue in the 2004 election, John Kerry and his allies regularly made the argument that the oil wouldn’t be ready for five or six years anyways. They still make that argument to this day! And all we get is more fucking windmills (which, FYI, are more dangerous than nuclear plants.)

 Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The baby boomers are pretentious assholes that have squandered the hard work of the greatest generation and failed to adequately relay the cultural maxims of American exceptionalism and individual responsibility to their children. Instead, they’re still obsessed with their own adolescent self-image as long-haired rebels, litigious and whiney by habit, and thirsty for significance in all the wrong places. It took them until recently to figure out that they sucked.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities.

Not a sentence.

When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Goddamn I’m going to miss Bob Herbert. This isn’t even a coherent ideology. This is attempting to wish away the constraints of scarcity. We shouldn’t go to war unless we have a perfect educational system or full employment? Maybe we should employ more teachers in the military. Dumbass.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck.

Yes, but the labor market isn’t static. We could have a glut of new jobs if we had a pro-growth agenda from the White House.

Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

That’s because undergraduate programs like English, Sociology, Gender Studies, or virtually anything else within the humanities are absolutely worthless in the job market.

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles.

It’s hard to get exasperated. It’s just fun to let the last of Bob Herbert’s unfathomable nonsense wash over me.

Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush.

Can someone please explain to me when we all decided that it was an acceptable goal for the United States federal government to use its authority to promote “income equality?”

As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

This isn’t 1895. If you don’t like your pay, quit. If you think you’re worth more, leave. If you think you can do better on your own, start your own business. The age of the internet has unprecedented opportunities for entrepreneurs. Seize it!

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable.

It’s both. It’s also a worthless statistic. How does it factor negative growth? Is it calculated in percentages, or nominal terms? Does it account for class mobility?

It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

Remember when liberals used to claim that conservatives too-often pined for the past, implying that conservatives somehow wanted to return to the era of segregation? It’s why they insist on calling themselves “progressives,” which is just foolish. (The reason that the term “liberal” has such a bad connotation in the American lexicon is because of colossal failures that always seem to be the result of liberal ideology.)

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

If you’re going to be serious about income inequality, geek out on it. The United States’ Gini Coefficient is, of course rising (indicating more income inequality), but since 1950, the United States Gini Coefficient has ranged from about .36 in the early 70’s to about .45 today. This is a less precipitous rise than that of the UK, but one of the major features of the United States Gini Coefficient is that it is relatively stable in its fluctuations, unlike France, Canada, Bulgaria, Mexico, and others.

In short, this is both normal and acceptable.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train,

 They’re known as welfare recipients and old people.

is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

What on earth do you think the Tea Party is about?

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

Keep in mind, their Chairman and CEO is a close Obama advisor and was a major donor. Also keep in mind that I genuinely believe that GE is right in this instance. The fact of the matter is that our congress has passed a tax code that only an idiot-savant can decipher, as well as legions of tax credits for worthless economic activity. None of that means that GE should not take advantage of our Congress’ ineptitude.

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

Keep in mind, that if we had, say, a 15% corporate tax rate instead of a 38% marginal corporate tax rate, that most of that revenue would be realized and taxable in the United States. This is precisely what conservatives are talking about when they argue that lower tax rates can generate higher tax revenues.

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

This is also why we prickle when we see hordes of Obamacare waivers being given out to Obama supporters, including Unions (who pushed the damn thing in the first place) and the state of Maine.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power.

You’ve got that backwards. Enormous imbalances in political power result in imbalances in wealth.

So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well.

It takes a particular brand of cynicism to believe that corporations are doing very well. Not to mention, it completely ignores who owns the corporations.

The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.

Except for the guys who fired you at the Times. I can't say that they were wrong to fire you. You're kind of an asstard. That's not even a word.

---

This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society. My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years. I can be reached going forward at bobherbert88@gmail.com.

Debt, Deficits, and the Penis Game

So Europe is in dire straits financially. (Culturally, too, but that's another discussion.) So many of the worst financial cases have cut government spending, and rightfully so. Paul Krugman has been claiming for what seems like years that spending cuts will suppress economic growth. Yet he has failed to adequately explain why spending increases have failed to spur economic growth or why he insists on playing a game of chicken with the national debt. Remember the penis game from middle school? A bunch of guys in the back of the bus take turns escalating the volume at which they shout "penis" until one is finally caught by the teacher and given detention? That's basically what Paul Krugman is advocating, except in this analogy, detention is analogous to crippling economic malaise and increasing public spending is akin to shouting "penis."

The Austerity Delusion

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 24, 2011

Portugal’s government has just fallen in a dispute over austerity proposals. Irish bond yields have topped 10 percent for the first time. And the British government has just marked its economic forecast down and its deficit forecast up.

Yeah. Europe is pretty much bojanked.

What do these events have in common?

OH! I know this! They all happened in Western Europe, which, as referenced above, is bojanked. All three countries are facing a major debt crisis. All three countries have stagnant economies and extensive social welfare programs. And, most depressingly, there’s a good chance that all of them are beyond the point of salvation.

They’re all evidence that slashing spending in the face of high unemployment is a mistake.

Sigh. It’s the same article he’s been writing for six months. You’d think he’d get bored. I know I am.

Austerity advocates predicted that spending cuts would bring quick dividends in the form of rising confidence,

True. Investors generally tend to respond positively when a bond issuer indicates that it will not continue to give buckets of money to cowboy poetry festivals and experiments about giving cocaine to shellfish.

and that there would be few, if any, adverse effects on growth and jobs;

Patently untrue. Even the strident deficit hawks understand that the formula for GDP growth explicitly includes government spending (GDP = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + NetExports). In order to make up for the offset to government spending, you need increases in consumption and investment, which are only possible if the spending cuts are accompanied by tax cuts. Government spending is virtually always inefficient. A hypothetical government program that simply buys items and destroys them, despite diminishing the net worth of the country, will add to GDP unless the debt offset is accounted for. (It isn’t.) FYI, that wasn’t a hypothetical government program; it was Cash for Clunkers.

The economy is a miraculously elastic construct, but it takes time to re-allocate the resources that were previously tooled towards inefficient growth. It doesn’t mean we should double-down on the inefficiency.

but they were wrong.

It’s always nice to see a guy winning an argument with his own oversimplified and factually inaccurate paraphrasing of someone else.

It’s too bad, then, that these days you’re not considered serious in Washington unless you profess allegiance to the same doctrine that’s failing so dismally in Europe.

Ironically, the mindless mimicry of failing European social welfare policies is what got us into the debt crisis in the first place.

It was not always thus.

Thanks, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. You’re using ‘thus?’ Seriously?

Two years ago, faced with soaring unemployment and large budget deficits

So…things were pretty much the same as they are now.

—    both the consequences of a severe financial crisis —

Bullshit. We’d have a large budget deficit even if the economy were humming. (Intellectual honestly compels me to agree that the deficit is, of course, worsened by a poor economy.)

most advanced-country leaders seemingly understood that the problems had to be tackled in sequence, with an immediate focus on creating jobs combined with a long-run strategy of deficit reduction.

If I’m not mistaken, this was also the situation in which George W. Bush found himself in 2001. He did the right thing and lowered taxes. Of course, he never got around to part two (cutting spending) both because he expended all of his political capital on the tax cuts (and the ensuing wars) and because he was a lukewarm conservative.

Why not slash deficits immediately?

Keep in mind, we’ve been trying the “Spend Ourselves Stupid” Theory of Macroeconomic Policy (that’s right, it’s a proper noun) for two and a half years now. The economy still sucks.

Because tax increases and cuts in government spending would depress economies further, worsening unemployment.

The 2008 housing crisis taught us that we need to decouple the overall economy from the fool-hardy, politically-motivated decisions of the government. The entire reason why the subprime mortgage market existed is because it was governmentally supported. Krugman’s argument is that we can’t make the people less dependent on government because the people are already so dependent on government.

And cutting spending in a deeply depressed economy is largely self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms: any savings achieved at the front end are partly offset by lower revenue, as the economy shrinks.

Easy, tiger, you’re walking in unfamiliar territory for liberals. The converse of this statement is that lost revenue from tax decreases are partly offset by higher revenue as the economy grows. Conservatives have been saying this for decades, (thank you, Art Laffer) and have been blasted by Keynesians like Krugman. We’re all supply-siders now, huh?

So jobs now, deficits later was and is the right strategy.

Yes, but more government doesn’t mean more jobs. It means more government. We found that out with the stimulus. Twice.

Unfortunately, it’s a strategy that has been abandoned in the face of phantom risks and delusional hopes.

Sigh.

On one side, we’re constantly told that if we don’t slash spending immediately we’ll end up just like Greece, unable to borrow except at exorbitant interest rates.

Undoubtedly, Greece is the eventuality of a government that borrows beyond its means. The only reasonable counterargument is that our debt ceiling is comparatively higher than Greece’s. That may be, but do you really want your government to play that game of brinksmanship with the fiscal stability of the country and the financial wellbeing of all of its citizens in the balance? There’s truly nothing to be gained from it, which, I suppose, is why rational people think Paul Krugman is batshit crazy.

On the other, we’re told not to worry about the impact of spending cuts on jobs because fiscal austerity will actually create jobs by raising confidence.

Keep in mind these are the people that said that expiring the Bush tax cuts would have no impact on jobs.

How’s that story working out so far?

Considering that we haven’t enacted any austerity measures in the United States, it’s a little premature.

Self-styled deficit hawks have been crying wolf over U.S. interest rates more or less continuously since the financial crisis began to ease,

It eased? Most of the college graduates I know are working as bartenders or in call centers. They’ll be glad to know the crisis has “eased.”

taking every uptick in rates as a sign that markets were turning on America. But the truth is that rates have fluctuated, not with debt fears, but with rising and falling hope for economic recovery. And with full recovery still seeming very distant, rates are lower now than they were two years ago.

Seriously. The Fed sets the rates. That’s what “Open Market Operations” are. It’s pretty much the only tool for directing monetary policy that the Fed actively uses.

But couldn’t America still end up like Greece? Yes, of course. If investors decide that we’re a banana republic whose politicians can’t or won’t come to grips with long-term problems, they will indeed stop buying our debt.

...So our economic stability is ensured so long as the people that you’re deriding continue to do the things that you’re deriding them for? Thanks, asshole.

But that’s not a prospect that hinges, one way or another, on whether we punish ourselves with short-run spending cuts.

Spending cuts are necessarily not short term. When you consider that federal budgeting is done with benchmarking, by cutting spending, you are not cutting a year’s worth of expenditures; you are cutting a spending perpetuity. With the low rate that the government borrows at, that means that the $100B of cuts that the Republicans promised (but have foolishly failed to achieve) have a (very roughly) $3.3T Present value to the long-term debt.

Just ask the Irish, whose government — having taken on an unsustainable debt burden by trying to bail out runaway banks —

Yeah, but that’s a terrible comparison. We would never do something that stupid. Wait…

tried to reassure markets by imposing savage austerity measures on ordinary citizens.

So spending cuts are akin to taking money out of the pockets of citizens…like tax increases…which you support.

The same people urging spending cuts on America cheered. “Ireland offers an admirable lesson in fiscal responsibility,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, who said that the spending cuts had removed fears over Irish solvency and predicted rapid economic recovery.

That was in June 2009. Since then, the interest rate on Irish debt has doubled; Ireland’s unemployment rate now stands at 13.5 percent.

Keep in mind that in June 2009, we all thought the world economy would recover rapidly. Even so, Reynolds’ prediction about Ireland is looking significantly better than Obama’s predictions about the unemployment-suppressing effects of the stimulus.

And then there’s the British experience. Like America, Britain is still perceived as solvent by financial markets,

…ehhhhh…sort of.

giving it room to pursue a strategy of jobs first, deficits later. But the government of Prime Minister David Cameron chose instead to move to immediate, unforced austerity, in the belief that private spending would more than make up for the government’s pullback. As I like to put it, the Cameron plan was based on belief that the confidence fairy would make everything all right.

I’m picturing Dana Milbank wearing a pink leotard and tutu.

But she hasn’t: British growth has stalled,

They downgraded from a 2% GDP growth to 1.6%. Go Speed Racer, Go!

and the government has marked up its deficit projections as a result.

Keep in mind that their deficit as a percentage of GDP (12%) is still, embarrassingly, higher than ours. The ratings agencies are also threatening to downgrade.

Which brings me back to what passes for budget debate in Washington these days.

A serious fiscal plan for America would address

By address, you mean cut. Because if you don’t, then that wouldn’t be very serious at all, would it?

the long-run drivers of spending, above all health care costs,

I agree. Let’s cut Obamacare. Entirely.

and it would almost certainly include some kind of tax increase.

I told you this guy loved him some tax increases.

But we’re not serious: any talk of using Medicare funds effectively is met with shrieks of “death panels,”

Actually it’s more like “repeal Obamacare first.” Then we’ll fix everything else.

and the official G.O.P. position — barely challenged by Democrats — appears to be that nobody should ever pay higher taxes.

You just spent an entire column talking about how you need to promote economic growth in a down economy to increase federal revenues. Now you take the one thing that everyone agrees suppresses economic growth—taxes—and claim that they’re necessary? Do you even re-read these articles before submitting them, or are you just trying to see how much progressive bullshit you can churn out in the guise of economics before someone calls you on it?

Instead, all the talk is about short-run spending cuts.

Also known as elimination of waste.

In short, we have a political climate in which self-styled deficit hawks want to punish the unemployed

No, you argued that the deficit hawks would damage the overall economy, not hurt the unemployed specifically. The “poor hit hardest by downturn” storyline is just so cliché.

even as they oppose any action that would address our long-run budget problems. And here’s what we know from experience abroad: The confidence fairy won’t save us from the consequences of our folly.

Here’s what Portugal (barely mentioned), Ireland (totally screwed before the austerity measures), and the UK (which still has a colossal budget deficit) taught us: we never should have emulated the fiscally suicidal Western European style of social spending. We’re Americans. It’s time to start acting like it. 

Rise of the She-Hulks

Fight of the Valkyries

By MAUREEN DOWD

They are called the Amazon Warriors,

No one has ever called Hillary Clinton an Amazon Warrior. I wouldn’t discount the lesbian thing out-of-hand, though.

the Lady Hawks,

That sounds like a WNBA team

the Valkyries,

An off-shoot of the high-school literary magazine featuring “poets” with green hair, body image issues, and a trans-historical lesbian crush on Sylvia Plath.

the Durgas.

Of course, it would have to be Maureen Dowd that deifies the colossally flawed Hilary Clinton--twice. The religion of liberalism is in full force here.

There is something positively mythological about a group of strong women swooping down to shake the president out of his delicate sensibilities and show him the way to war.

You’re still stuck on the Valkyries and Durga, which you made up. Actually this simply proves that women are equally flawed in their executive judgments as men.

And there is something positively predictable about guys in the White House pushing back against that story line for fear it makes the president look henpecked.

Henpecked implies that he’s getting some. President Obama is simply a weak person.

It is not yet clear if the Valkyries will get the credit or the blame on Libya. But everyone is fascinated

No one is fascinated. I’d rather dress up in drag and play the lead in a theatrical rendition of The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath is really taking it on the chin this write-up) than be party to this political apotheosis.

 with the gender flip: the reluctant men — the generals, the secretary of defense, top male White House national security advisers — outmuscled by the fierce women around President Obama urging him to man up against the crazy Qaddafi.

Except:

a)     They’re about three weeks too late to be effective.

b)     The US policy in Libya is both poorly defined and inconsistent.

c)      The French emasculated Obama more than Hilary could ever hope to.

d)     This is a war that in no way shape or form advances US interests.

How odd to see the diplomats as hawks and the military as doves.

Perhaps this would indicate that the Obama Administration is far out of its depth in a world that demands grown-ups with a mature understanding of foreign policy.

“The girls took on the guys,”

And the American people lost.

The Times’s White House reporter Helene Cooper said on “Meet the Press.”

Yes, a female reporter chose to take the woefully boring gender angle. We’re at war, but you’re right; girl power in the fractured inner circle of the Oval Office is super-important. Nay: fascinating!

Rush Limbaugh mocked the president and his club of “male liberals,” saying: “Of course the males were opposed. It’s the new castrati ... they’re sissies!”

Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador and former Clinton administration adviser on Africa, was haunted by Rwanda.

Was, or is? What soothed her burdened conscience?

Samantha Power, a national security aide who wrote an award-winning book about genocide, was thinking of Bosnia.

And to think we only bombed Kosovo. So close!

Gayle Smith, another senior national security aide, was an adviser to President Clinton on Africa after the Rwandan massacre.

With all this guilt, you’d think that it was the United States that was trying to systematically exterminate the Hutu and the ethnic Serbs.

Hillary Clinton, a skeptic at first,

Keep in mind that the genocide in Rwanda was 1993, while Hilary was focused on thrusing pre-Obamacare on a country that despises the notion.

paid attention to the other women (putting aside that tense moment during the ’08 primaries when Power called her “a monster”).

This has all the makings of a Lifetime movie.

She also may have had some pillow talk with Bill,

Samantha Power, or Hilary?

whose regrets about Rwanda no doubt helped shape his recommendation for a no-fly zone over Libya.

I’m confused. Is Bill Clinton a chick now too?

How odd to see Rush and Samantha Power on the same side.

We’re watching the French lead the free world into combat, and you’re disconcerted about agreement between Rush Limbaugh and Samantha Power?

We’ve come a long way from feminist international relations theory two decades ago that indulged in stereotypes about aggression being “male” and conciliation being “female.”

Can I bridge the gap a little and just say that at least three of those chicks are kind of mannish.

And from the days of Helen Caldicott, the Australian pediatrician and nuclear-freeze activist who disapprovingly noted the “psychosexual overtones” of military terminology such as “missile erector” and “thrust-to-weight ratio.”

Great! We can all acknowledge that liberals were lunatics during the cold war! Can the theme of this column be “too little, too late?”

Caldicott wrote in her book “Missile Envy:”

How refreshingly clever! It’s a penis joke, but subtle. Very highbrow.

“I recently watched a filmed launching of an MX missile. It rose slowly out of the ground, surrounded by smoke and flames and elongated into the air — it was indeed a very sexual sight, and when armed with the ten warheads

I think there are some basic anatomical disconnects arising from the “ten warheads” concept. It’s not a goddamn hydra.

 it will explode with the most almighty orgasm.”

By all means, please consult some aeronautics experts and construct your own rocket-propelled vagina if it soothes your ridiculousness.

There have been women through history who shattered gender stereotypes, from Cleopatra to Golda Meir to the “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, whose critics on the left sniffed that she was not really a woman.

To be fair, the average leftist would have no idea what to do with a woman if she fell in his lap.

 As U.N. ambassador, Madeleine Albright pushed back against Colin Powell on a Balkans intervention — “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

Does the divergence from the gender stereotype excuse the fact that it was a profoundly dumb thing to say?

she asked him — and Condi Rice pushed ahead with W. and Dick Cheney on invading Iraq.

When President Obama listened to his militaristic muses, it gave armchair shrinks lots to muse about.

Which, after all, is the most important byproduct of going to war.

As one wrote to me: “Cool, cerebral president chooses passion and emotion (human rights, Samantha, Hillary, Susan) over reason and strategic thinking (Bob Gates, Tom Donilon).

Last week: “Cool, cerebral president chooses Butler over Old Dominion, Japan, Libya.”

This week: “Cool, cerebral president chooses Rio beach over America, job, responsibility.”

Is it the pattern set up by his Mom and Michelle — women have the last word?”

God it’s depressing that we’ve elected a man that reflexively subordinates his own opinion for that of others. Whether it’s a profound lack of confidence or a natural timidity, this man does not in any way resemble a leader.

White House aides smacked back hard on the guys vs. girls narrative. A senior administration official e-mailed Politico’s Mike Allen that Power, Smith and Hillary Clinton weren’t even in the meeting where the president decided to move forward and tell Rice to seek authority at the U.N. for a no-fly zone.

Ba-zing!

Wait, what was our intrepid Secretary of State doing while the President was making monumental decisions that affected our geopolitical standing and our ability to diplomatically engage the Muslim World? Backgammon? Spider Solitaire?

 Maybe they were already nervous that the president was sightseeing in Rio with his own girls and watching drum performances while senators like James Webb and Richard Lugar were charging him with overstepping his authority in Libya, and Dennis Kucinich talked impeachment.

Let’s all agree that he’s an extremely narcissistic man who has no respect for the checks and balances provided by the legislature.

Keep in mind that the government is also going to run out of money in about two weeks without a budget.

Whatever the reason, the spinners were so afraid that the president would seem to be a ditherer chased by Furies that they went so far as to argue that three of the women were not even in the room for The Decision.

And like LeBron James’ ESPN primetime special, this decision has also been widely acclaimed as a smashing success , both in substance and style.

So the women were in their place? Where, the kitchen?

OH! Do I finally get to tell my women drivers joke?

As compelling as the gender split is,

It really isn’t. Not even a little.

 it’s even more interesting to look at the parallels between Obama and W.

Why on earth would she bring this up with about 7 lines left in the column?

Candidate Obama said about a possible strike on Iran, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Which, of course, was a factually inaccurate sound-bite designed to give cover to Obama’s desire to completely ignore the Iran issue. Still, no one called him on it then, so we might as well call him on it now.

Yet both men started wars of choice with a decision-making process marked more by impulse and reaction than discipline and rigor.

Hussein ignored a veritable deluge of paperwork backing UN resolutions and led the world to believe that he was on the precipice of making and exporting WMD materials. What’s more, he had already used WMD on his own people, making him a thousand times the monster that Kadafi is.

By contrast, Kadafi and the hard-liners of Libya collectively shat themselves after the invasion of Iraq. They ceased WMD activities and were docile house cats while President Bush was in office. With Obama’s brilliant idea that Muslim hostility was the byproduct of America projecting its anger and the accompanying Libya was a member of the UN Human Rights Council until it was “suspended” three weeks ago.

Also, you have yet to bring up anything about what President Bush said to compare against Obama.

Denouncing the last decade of “autopilot” for presidents ordering military operations,

That makes absolutely no sense.

Senator Webb

Oh. Now it makes sense.

 told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC: “We have not had a debate. ... This isn’t the way that our system is supposed to work.’’

I’m bored. I’m gonna make a sandwich.

Oh that’s why I need to get married.