Government economics sure are weird.
Imagine you go to the grocery store and the manager tries to convince you to pay $8 for a gallon of milk — twice the usual price.
“But wait,” he says. “I’ll give you a $4 subsidy or rebate for the gallon of milk, which drops the price to an affordable $4.”
Here in Las Vegas nine days ago, President Obama, who ran on a promise of post-partisan “change,” made a campaign swing in support of 23-year U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, who has spent 40 of his 70 years on the public payroll.
A passage in Mr. Obama’s Friday speech at UNLV seemed somewhat disconnected from most Americans’ current perception of Washington and what it’s doing to our economy.
“The heads of President Barack Obama’s national debt commission painted a gloomy picture Sunday as the United States struggles to get its spending under control,” The Associated Press reports.
Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles told a meeting of the National Governors Association that everything needs to be considered — closing down the federal Departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Labor, and Health and Human Services (none of which are authorized by the Constitution, anyway); shutting down the Federal Reserve and going back to minting money of gold and silver; pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan; slashing the Pentagon budget in half; privatizing Social Security, and ending tax-funded wealth redistribution by closing down Medicaid and Medicare, instead turning over medical care for the poor to private, voluntary charities.
As with many Constitutional provisions, “recess appointments” have come to be used in ways the founders didn’t intend. Presidents now use recess appointments to get a desired appointee into office — at least for a time — over the objections of recalcitrant legislators, especially when the Senate is in the hands of the opposition party.
But President Obama’s recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to the position of Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — July 7, when lawmakers were out of town for their annual July Fourth break — broke new ground, because Dr. Berwick was not a nominee whose appointment had been subjected to inordinate delays or an overtly hostile reception by the Congress.
In the past, if anyone asked whether the folks in charge in the nation’s capital were certifiable lunatics, or whether policy decisions were being made by superannuated college kids with no experience out in the real world, who apparently stayed up too late last night, smoking too much dope and listening to too much heavy metal, those questions could be safely dismissed as exaggerations for rhetorical effect.
Last month, however, another wacky Obama appointee, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, told Al Jazeera Arab television that President Obama told him before he took the job that he wanted him to do three things: inspire children to learn math and science, expand international relationships and “perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.”
Nominated by a president whose party controls both houses of Congress, Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s “confirmation hearings” for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court are largely a formality.
Nonetheless, the nominee’s well-coached insistence on pathetically bland non-answers has been so exasperating — and insulting — that she might as well have placed a video monitor on the witness table, programmed to respond to each question: “I will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring …” and, of course, to “use resources wisely.”
I’ve lost track of precisely how many “number one” priorities Barack Obama now has. I believe he recently said cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf, drilled on a permit issued by the Obama Interior Department in the spring of 2009, which permit contained no emergency plan to deal with a blowout since federal regulators agreed none was needed, was his new number one priority — just before the president broke for a game of golf.
(“For decades, Libertarians have warned against putting trust in government regulatory bureaucracies like the Minerals Management Service (MMS),” Libertarian Party Executive Director Wes Benedict pointed out last week. “While costing the taxpayers a lot of money, these agencies generally fail to deliver the kind of protections they promise, they tend to become corrupt, and they discourage vigilance on the part of citizens by lulling them into a false sense of security…. Thanks to liability caps provided by the federal government, BP was able to engage in riskier activities than it would have otherwise.”)
President Obama last week made another change of command in the Afghan War, an historically bizarre enterprise that continues to sap American military morale and manpower, yet for which Mr. Obama has already announced his surrender-and-withdrawal date (July, 2011.)
Mr. Obama relieved Gen. Stanley McChrystal due to a profile of the general appearing in the latest Rolling Stone magazine. It’s hard to point to a specific direct statement by the general in that article that triggered the move, but the report captured an unmistakable tone of disrespect for his civilian superiors at the general’s headquarters — a belief that Mr. Obama, Vice President Biden, and the president’s ambassadors to the region are a bunch of posturing clowns more interested in appearances than in results.
As I mentioned the other day, Sequioa Pearce was made to kneel before the Las Vegas police officers who held her at gunpoint in her bedroom Friday night, June 11, and watch them shoot her unarmed fiance in the head.
The 20-year-old, who was nine months pregnant, could see her fiance, Trevon Cole, reflected in the mirror from the bathroom, where he, too, was being held at gunpoint as officers told him to get on the floor. He met her gaze in the mirror. She watched him put his hands up.
Sequioa Pearce was made to kneel before the Las Vegas police officers who held her at gunpoint in her bedroom Friday night, June 11.
The 20-year-old, who was nine months pregnant, could see from the darkened bedroom into the bathroom where her fiance was reflected in the mirror.
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