The twin killers of success are impatience and greed.
Jim Rohn
"Mad Dog of the Middle East" Gets Put Down
I will not shed any tears over the demise of Muammar Qaddafi whom allegedly personally ordered the bombing of Pam Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing almost 260 on board the flight and whom was indicted by an international court for war crimes targeting his own civilian population. I still have issues with the level of American involvement in the Libyan liberation operations. News reports are something ambiguous about the details of the death; there was a purported clip of Qaddafi being alive and in custody, some discussion of a firefight between Qaddafi loyalists and the rebels, and a photo which seems to portray a dead Qaddafi with a bullet wound on his forehead. My inference is that he was not killed by any loyalist but probably executed at close range by a rebel. I regret that Qaddafi did not stand trial in the eyes of the international community, although I do understand the desire of Libyans to see justice done sooner than later.
The Nevada GOP Debate and Perry vs Romney:
Some Comments
I really don't like the way immigration issue has been used, but I don't think either Rick Perry or Mitt Romney handled the exchange below that well. We should never see a petty attack, like Perry served up, not to mention his boorish behavior constantly interrupting Romney; however, I don't think it was prudent for Romney to react as he did, letting Perry and the debate audience see it was getting under his skin (including putting his hand on Perry's shoulder, appealing to the moderator, and talking over each other). If it had been me, I would have have said one time to the moderator: "We start my clock after that guy stops talking, and the elapsed duration of his interruptions should be deducted from his remaining debate minutes."
To any reader who does not know the basic story, Rick Perry had the not-Romney momentum, The widely accepted viewpoint regarding the race to the GOP Presidential nomination is that Mitt Romney is assumed to be one of the two finalists, the "establishment candidate". There are multiple reasons for that: first, Romney paid his dues (he was the runner up for the 2008 nomination; technically, Huckabee got more delegates but only because he refused to drop out until McCain mathematically clinched the nomination; Huckabee got the unchallenged not-McCain vote.) Second, Romney has unquestioned business and economics credentials in an election year where the national economy will be the central issue. Third, Romney has consistently outpolled his rivals with independents and moderates and has run consistently better against his rivals in pairwise matchups with Obama.
With most contenders polling roughly 10% or less, it's been widely accepted there is room for only one first tier challenger to Romney. It was also widely expected that the challenger to Obama would have to have public sector administrative experience: that rule automatically rules out Cain, Bachmann, Gingrich, and Paul and leaves only Johnson, Huntsman and Perry. Gary Johnson and Ron Paul are basically fighting for the libertarian GOP vote and Huntsman is trying to siphon off independent/moderate support for Romney, but neither candidate is a serious threat for the nomination. This leaves Rick Perry, whom has a huge campaign war chest. Just a few weeks ago, Rick Perry looked like he had a lock on the South and Southwest states--until he blundered into the red meat issue of immigration.
I have repeatedly discussed the issue of immigration reform in this blog; most activist conservatives see immigration solely in terms of unauthorized Latino entries; I've discussed many of the misleading statistics made by the activists, I've looked at evidence of reverse migration because of a bad US economy and an improving Mexican economy, etc. Many activists, in other contexts, recognize that only one of every 2 American workers actually pays net federal income tax, and a number of lower income workers receive free/highly subsidized health care--but Latino workers are singled out. As a native Texas, I have attended school and colleges and have taught Latinos. Latinos, documented or not, are an important part of the highly successful Texan economy; there is good reason why equal protection legislation enjoys broad bipartisan support in Texas. Governor Perry was referencing this when he made his ill-received comments suggesting anti-immigrant activists don't have a heart.
There are a number of issues that I'm focused on: ending chained immigration; modifying obsolete quota systems; promoting merit-based entry; temporary work programs; and expediting consideration of foreign students earning US terminal degrees (particularly in medicine, science and engineering). I have argued the best way to deal with immigration issues from south of the border is to invest in the development of Latin American economies and expand our free trade zone across the hemisphere.
I can't prove it, but I suspect the biggest mistake Perry made in the debates was the "heartless" charge that many activists took personally, and they responded by switching their support for Cain. (The "heartless" charge had to deal with other candidates' attacks on Perry signing bipartisan legislation essentially allowing Texas residents, even unauthorized ones, to qualify for in-state tuition rates. Perry was arguing that Texas-educated students should not be held responsible for the decisions of an unauthorized parent.) No doubt Perry, who certainly has a lot of street smarts when it comes to politics--he easily withstood a challenge from the senior US Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison last year, didn't see this coming. You have got to like Perry's chances to fight his way back to the top tier: he's got the money and organization that Herman Cain doesn't have. All it would take is one effective negative campaign ad.
It's not clear why Perry didn't realize, after the widely-covered immigration reform failure in 2007, that he was playing with fire on immigration with the activist base; McCain paid a heavy price in 2008 with the base for his involvement in trying to forge a compromise. He has to find a way to triangulate a position on immigration given earlier immigrant-friendly statements, not unlike Romney in 2008 and McCain in 2010.
There are different approaches on how to repair his ties with the activists, but a typical low-road approach is to try to undermine the credibility of an opponent by charging hypocrisy. So that's why Perry resurrected an old story opponents used against Romney in 2008. Romney was using a lawn-maintenance service. He naturally assumed that the company was hiring authorized workers. A Boston newspaper discovered that the company had hired at least some unauthorized workers whom had worked on Romney's property. When this came out, Romney contacted the company, which promised to resolve the issue and use only authorized workers on his property. Some time later there was a follow-up investigation, and it turned out that the company hadn't kept its word to Romney, whom then terminated use of the service. Perry's discussion in the clip at first seemed to imply that Romney had hired an alien to work inside his house, like a maid or nanny; Perry then shifts to talking about aliens doing upkeep on the property. But it's still a knowing distortion because Romney wasn't directly employing lawn workers; he was using a service. It wasn't his responsibility to check out the company (unless he had preexisting knowledge that the company was using unauthorized labor)
What Perry did here was to resurrect an allegation which was debunked 4 years ago; I know enough about Texas politics to realize hardball politics happens, but unless you're bringing something new to an old story, it comes across a cheap shot and unworthy of a Presidential candidate. It's safe to say when the Maryland primary comes around, Rick Perry will not get my vote. As for the general election, I would be willing to vote for any of the current candidates against Barack Obama.
How would I have responded in Perry's place? I would have talked about gimmicks by the Obama Administration to mislead people about deportation of unauthorized aliens, picking and choosing which unauthorized aliens they were going to deport, cracking down on sanctuary cities (including immediate cutoffs of any and all relevant federal funding for noncompliance), streamlining deportation proceedings, and providing employer-friendly mechanisms (e.g., to utilize legally authorized temporary visiting workers).
Clueless Progressive Quote of the Day
"It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers, and that's what this legislation is all about."
Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), trying to rationalize a continuing bailout of state and municipality spending for politically favored public employees (i.e., teachers and first responders)
Expletive deleted! [To younger readers, this is an indirect reference to the Watergate tape transcripts.] Just a few comments: during the Bush Administration, the private sector did not grow jobs (if you take out job losses during the bookend recessions), but there was net job growth in the public sector (the de Rugy excerpt was dated a year ago, but notice government employment, unlike private sector employment, was positive, up some 1.4M since 2000; private sector employment needed 3.5M jobs just to break even):
Under Bush, private employment shrank by 673,000 jobs, federal employment grew by 50,000 jobs, and government employment grew by 1,753,000 jobs. Under Obama, the private sector has shed some 2.9 million jobs while the federal government has grown by 40,000 (after growing massively, the federal workforce shrank throughout the summer). Total government jobs, however, shrank by 357,000 jobs, mainly because of cuts at the state and local levels.
The public sector is a COST to the real economy. On the federal level, when tax receipts fell during the recession, the government not only failed to cut employee costs, but significantly added to it by hiring more people and paying existing people even more.
The state and local governments have had to cut back, but mostly because of needing to balance the budget. The normal criteria of operational efficiencies don't apply: for example, the private sector often operates with metrics like sales per employee. If we just take as one example teacher/student ratios, one might deploy an efficiency criterion by maximizing the number of students per teacher (e.g., by deploying some mix of technological aids). But the orthodox position over the past generation has been to shrink the number of students per teacher, which means hiring more teachers for a given student base. I've already mentioned in past posts that many of our international competitors have larger class sizes but perform better on relevant achievement tests.
For-profit companies have an implicit incentive to cut costs; most of them shifted from pension systems to 401K retirement plans decades ago. Now many public sector entities are facing skyrocketing pension costs as the Baby Boomers escalate retirements. We have 24-hour ATM's and gas pumps by credit card purchase.
Where are the comparable incentives in the public sector? Governments, unlike companies, are monopolies which can simply raise taxes rather than streamline operations. Companies often can't raise prices without losing sales and/or market share; they have to constantly find ways of cutting costs.
But let's look at some comparative statistics from BLS: in 2009, state/local employee costs per hour were $39.83 vs. private sector $27.49 and from 2006 to 2009, compensation grew by 9.8% vs. 6.9%, the number of federal employees exceeding $100K in compensation between 2007 and 2009 increased by 46%, and the average unemployment rate from 2007 to 2009 in government was 3% vs. 7.9%.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
CCR, "Proud Mary". Rock vocal performances don't get any better than this (well, the accent ("oye-ng") is an acquired taste, but still...) This song has to be on any decent rock retrospective.
