If a man will begin with certainties,
he shall end in doubts;
but if he will be content to begin with doubts
he shall end in certainties.
Sir Francis Bacon
Congratulations, Caleb Johnson, American Idol 2014!
I now have a 5-year winning streak of picking the winner (although I only picked 2 of the previous 5 seasons, most notably not picking the most commercially successful alumnus Carrie Underwood, arguably the most dominant country vocalist today). In yesterday's post, I embedded his performance of his new single. When yesterday, he led off with Fuller's choice of Aerosmith's "Dream On", to be followed by his own choice of McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed", I knew it was his contest to lose. I was most nervous of how he would handle the high falsetto notes at the end of "Dream On". but not to worry. I think I preferred his earlier season performance of "Maybe I'm Amazed", but I thought his second performance was better than Jena's slow version of Presley's "Can't Help Falling in Love With You". In fact, he won all three performances on my card.
Image of the Day
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| Via Drudge Report |
This is a continuation of yesterday's post on the recent ABC This Week. To provide context for this excerpt Karl Rove recently raised eyebrows when he discussed Hillary Clinton's concussion issue and age as factors possibly keeping her from pursuing the Presidency in 2016. There was also a suggestion that Hillary may be positioning her candidacy less as an Obama third term and more of a Bill Clinton third term. (This is a no-brainer if Obama's approval numbers continue to erode).
GRANHOLM: I -- I completely disagree that she was somehow dissing the Obama administration. But she certainly has a -- the Clinton years were good years for people. And, of course she's going to remind them of that. Of course, the Obama administration has been digging out of a hole that was left under the -- his predecessor.Oh, my God, is this piece of work really going to bash Bush again? How many times has The One talked about the freaking ditch that allegedly Bush drove the economy into? Let's be clear here: during the last 2 years of his Presidency, when the Great Recession started, Bush had to deal with a Dem-controlled Congress. Let us recall Bush started with a recession, in part triggered by a meltdown of the Nasdaq, which still has still not returned to its former 2000 peak. The end of the Clinton era had been largely fueled by easy monetary policy (e.g., the Asian crisis, the overhyped Y2K problem, etc.) Here's CNN:
So, you know -- and look how far we've come. We're now at an unemployment rate that was less than when he took over. So there is...
However, data and supporting analyses from economists indicate that the recession began well before Bush took office, making political criticism of the president on the jobs issue even more inappropriate. Real disposable income peaked in October 2000. Industrial production/manufacturing and trade sales both peaked in June of 2000. Non-farm payroll employment peaked in February 2001, not March 2001. And monthly gross domestic product, which the NBER recently announced will be included in dating recessions, also peaked in 2000. We also know that the stock market started to decline in March of 2000, business investment began to fall in the third quarter of 2000, and initial jobless claims began to rise at the end of 2000 - more evidence that the U.S. economy in late 2000 was in fact "on the front end of a recession."Keep in mind nonfarm employment peaked within weeks of Bush's inauguration, and he had inherited Clinton's budget.
Now keep in mind the same easy money that had propped up the stock market had heated the real estate market--when I moved to Santa Clara, CA in late 1999; I lived in an overpriced apartment but my colleagues told me even ordinary area houses on the market were going for $450-500K. I remember thinking at the time it was ludicrous; you could buy 3 decent middle-class houses in Texas for that money. My rent was over 50% higher than my former Chicago suburb complex for a smaller, spartan apartment. My state income tax had tripled; when I went to buy groceries, it seemed like everything except produce was double-digit percentages higher. There was a sort of public shaming if you griped about paying over $10 for a movie ticket. I knew the real estate market was unsustainable then.
But the Dems seem to be in a state of denial over their role in the housing bubble. Many try to point at the "bankster", but there was political pressure to expand housing ownership to riskier lower-income households, many of whom couldn't make a traditional 20% down payment. In a low-growth environment and wages treading water, the surging housing market was defying gravity and enabled only by loose monetary policy and, e.g., for the GSE's to buy lower-quality mortgages using cheap Treasury money. I knew at least as early as 2005 we were heading for a nasty day of reckoning when I saw a late night "get rich quick" infomercial on flipping condos.
Did Bush deserve his share of blame? Yes. I still recall a speech where he proudly pointed out home ownership was at an all-time high, no doubt consistent with his flavor of compassionate conservatism. And he appointed the architects of loose monetary policy, Greenspan and Bernanke. He only made a half-hearted attempt to reform the GSE's after their accounting scandals, and he poorly handled the economic tsunami.
The Democrats are somehow accusing Bush of "causing" the tsunami somehow through his temporary tax cuts and alleged deregulation. The tax cut allegation is totally without merit; the cuts resulted in record tax revenues during Bush's second term, and Obama has only begun to reach similar revenue numbers over 5 years in his Presidency and after the end of the recession, 4 of which were under the Bush tax cuts. Bush was hardly an ideological deregulator; federal regulations grew under his tenure.
But give me a break: Bush's recessions were nearly 4 times longer than Obama's. Obama has had record low interest rates and almost trivial inflation. Unlike Bush, Obama had a super-majority in the 111st Congress. And yet we've had one of the slowest job recoveries in American history and the lowest labor force participation rates in decades. With all his advantages, he's now only beginning to approach Bush's numbers well into the Great Recession. Let me quote about someone whom inherited a much worse hand than Obama. From a Forbes op-ed:
Three worsening recessions starting in 1969 were about to culminate in the worst of all in 1981-1982, with unemployment soaring into double digits at a peak of 10.8%. At the same time America suffered roaring double-digit inflation, with the CPI registering at 11.3% in 1979 and 13.5% in 1980 (25% in two years). All of the above was accompanied by double -igit interest rates, with the prime rate peaking at 21.5% in 1980. The poverty rate started increasing in 1978, eventually climbing by an astounding 33%, from 11.4% to 15.2%. A fall in real median family income that began in 1978 snowballed to a decline of almost 10% by 1982. In addition, from 1968 to 1982, the Dow Jones industrial average lost 70% of its real value, reflecting an overall collapse of stocks.President Reagan campaigned on an explicitly articulated, four-point economic program: 1. Cut tax rates to restore incentives for economic growth; 2. Spending reductions, including a $31 billion cut in spending in 1981, close to 5% of the federal budget then, or the equivalent of about $175 billion in spending cuts for the year today; 3. Anti-inflation monetary policy; 4. Deregulation, which saved consumers an estimated $100 billion per year in lower prices. The Reagan recovery started in official records in November 1982, and lasted 92 months without a recession until July 1990, when the tax increases of the 1990 budget deal killed it. During this seven-year recovery, the economy grew by almost one-third. Nearly 20 million new jobs were created during the recovery, increasing U.S. civilian employment by almost 20%. Unemployment fell to 5.3% by 1989. Astoundingly, inflation from 1980 was reduced by more than half by 1982, to 6.2%. It was cut in half again for 1983, to 3.2%. What is so striking about Obamanomics is how it so doggedly pursues the opposite of every one of these planks of Reaganomics.Facebook Corner
(IPI). On Friday, the federal government released more than 400 pages of health-care regulations. Buried deep within these pages are new laws that allow for bailouts of the insurers participating in the #ObamaCare exchanges — should they lose money in the program.
The only bright spot is, as bad as cronyism is, it's better than single-payer. With economically illiterate policies of guaranteed issue and community rating, the only people this system makes sense for are those socializing their personal health expenses--not real risk-sharing. It would have a lot simpler simply to shore up state/regional high risk pools or introduce some Medicaid-like cost-shared vehicle; however, this was inconsistent with the Dems' megalomaniac, futile obsession with command-and-control healthcare and to vest as many people/voters as possible on government-run/subsidized healthcare. Why? Because they want the GOP to pay a price for cancelling people over their current healthcare coverage; they're betting negative press coverage of hard-luck stories of people "losing" health coverage will lead GOP moderates to back off.
This is but a variation of cost-plus (vs. fixed bid contract) nonsense, where the risk is covered by taxpayers. It makes no economic sense because it perversely eliminates the natural incentive to control costs. It would have made more sense simply to reinsure the vendors for excessive losses. We all know how this story plays out: the kaleidoscope accounting by which Democrats attempted to argue that ObamaCare would "cut" the deficit will eventually be replaced by massive program deficits, which of course the Dems will blame the "greedy" health insurers... Cronyism is the symptom; fascist government is the disease.
(Cato Institute). Health insurance doesn't have to be 'Made in the U.S.A.'
Part of the problem deals with tax-advantaged coverage of ordinary health expenses vs. major medical problems (true insurance). A second problem was anti-competitive state mercantilist barriers to entry. A better reform would have allowed for interstate competition among health insurers (say, qualified national vendors, especially of major medical plans), cross-state rating pools including self-insurance options, and perhaps federal shoring up of state/regional high risk pools in a cost-sharing Medicaid-like arrangement. Perhaps federal healthplan reform (including Medicaid/Medicare) spinning off operations and funding state/local government control according to the principle of Subsidiarity...
More Creative Proposals
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Robert Airail via Townhall |
Chicago, "Saturday in the Park"
