A Future of Growth or Government?

The Left snickers now that while the public favors spending restraint in the abstract it abhors (and will abhor Republican) reductions in the specific. President Obama is staking his re-election on this – that voters will recoil from the GOP and turn back towards him when Congress tries to do something it has not done in generations: pass a budget smaller than the previous one.

That may be. Existential spending cuts may very well cost Republicans (and the republic) another long term of Obama, possibly their House majority.

But that does not change the substantive reality that the ruinous course for us and especially the next generation of Americans is to do what President Obama and the Left propose: nothing. For decades we have indulged ourselves not with our own money but with that of our children and grandchildren. Now we face the upshot of that irresponsibility, that generational theft.

It presents us with a choice. One is to select a future of growth and prosperity, a choice that entails the shared sacrifice of spending cuts and entitlement reform that will permit tax levels to remain low, alter the incentives in the health-care industry to improve its pricing and provision, and free future Americans from what Jefferson once called "the dead hand of the past."

The other is to do nothing, to sullenly limp towards a future suffocated by a ubiquity of red. Debt levels approaching GDP will necessitate even more exponential growth in government as Uncle Sam has no other recourse but to completely grab onto the billfolds and checkbooks of Americans. The need for such an overweening state will choke out even the faintest hope of economic growth and bring us closer, if not in lockstep, with the stifled economies of Europe. Having stuck our children with the tab, we will have also ungraciously denied them the means to pick it up.

Hoping only for political gains in the next election, this is the option President Obama and his party of unions and special interest payouts have selected. For those who seek another course, "have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

Stasis in Wisconsin

Those forces in Wisconsin opposing the governor's budget reducing proposals ought to answer a simple question: why is compensation greater than what those with comparable employment in the private sector receive sancrosanct when the state cannot afford that excessive compensation and it is paid on the backs of Wisconsin taxpayers?

This is simply an exercise in an entitled class of people fighting to preserve their preferential, market-immune sinecures.

Point, Counterpoint

Leadership having been abdicated by the president, House Republicans have indicated that they will include entitlement reforms in their forthcoming budget proposal. Whatever shape these reforms take, Democrats will scream that the GOP is gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and that unquantifiable suffering by the American people will ensue.

The counter to this is simple: the unquantifiable suffering will only occur should Republicans adopt the Democrats' position of cowardice and inaction. These programs cannot meet their long-term obligations. Left alone massive increases in taxes or austerity cuts will be inevitable. Comprehensive reform as Republicans propose is the only manner through which these entitlements can be made viable into the future. This is plain and simple – the conclusion of the president's own debt commission.

Through sheer inaction, Democrats simply plan to watch the entitlement car drive straight off of the cliff.

Obama, Condemned

Charles Krauthammer pens a devastating condemnation of President Obama's abdication on the debt crisis, managing, in a mere collection of paragraphs, to illuminate the manifold problems with his budget.

If accepted on its own terms, the budget fails to trim discretionary spending in any meaningful sense. The $1.1 trillion in savings it claims to instill would not be enough to balance the budget this year, let alone the federal government's long-term structural deficit.

The preponderance of spending "reduction" it does contain consists mostly in tax increases, abolishing many tax loopholes in the corporate tax-code while leaving the rate itself alone. The actual spending reductions it does contain barely set spending back to the baselines he inherited in 2009. "Classic Obama debt reduction: Add $2 trillion in new taxes, then add another $1 trillion in new spending and, presto, you've got $1 trillion of debt reduction."

All of this ignores the fact that the foundation upon which this budget plan is built are absurdly, shall we say optimistic economic-growth predictions coupled with cheap accounting gimmicks. When these are swept away, as they will be, the president's budgetary proposals would lead to additional federal outlays of nearly $1 trillion per annum.

President Obama's most egregious transgression is not one of commission but omission: he completely ignores the major debt-creating monster – the self-indulgent largesse of current and previous generations that is entitlements. For the federal fiscal house to be put back in order these unsustainable leviathans will need to be reformed or they will utterly fail to meet their obligations.

Cognizant of this, the president has nevertheless refused to do anything. On the single largest challenge that menaces his country at the time he is its president, he has shirked leadership in a cynical political ploy to force the opposition to fill the void – fully intending to attack as soon as they put one toe out on the branch. "A more cynical budget is hard to imagine. This one ignores the looming debt crisis, shifts all responsibility for serious budget-cutting to the Republicans — for which Democrats are ready with a two-year, full-artillery demagogic assault — and sets Obama up perfectly for re-election in 2012."

As a cruel mockery of his newest slogan, President Obama is forfeiting America's future for his own political advantage.

To Demure & Bequeath

Since his State of the Union address the president has been fond of talking about "winning the future" by revving the engine of government to invest in all facets of the country. Such rhetoric willfully ignores the reality that the combination of increased outlays from his first biennium coupled with desperately insolvent entitlements promise a future consumed by debt. Far from "winning the future," further government "investment" akin to what the president is calling for promises to steal the future from present and successive generations.

As our cumulative national debt approaches GDP levels, action – both drastic and immediate – is required.

The president pays some lip service to this but is derelict in deed. Before Congress last month, he refused to acknowledge the issue (and the reason that dozens of new members from the other party were sitting in his audience) and called for billions more in new spending on light-speed rail and other sundries.

His budget, released today, does not cut even half of what Republicans are proposing and does virtually nothing to ameliorate the red ink crisis. As Fred Barnes points out, the president's budget would cut $1.1 trillion over the next decade – a sum that does not even exceed the projected deficit for this year.

President Obama and his apologists came into office fancying him as the next FDR: the long-awaited heir who would create a social welfare system for the twenty-first century. This is clearly the presidency he and they still envision.

It is not the presidency that history, or what Machiavelli called fortuna, has designed for him.

The defining issue of this political generation is debt, the single matter that we cannot shirk without being entirely consumed in a sea of insolvency. For other generations it was slavery and civil war, Nazism or communism. Debt is ours.

The president refuses to either recognize or accept this, and so he demurs, creating a leadership void others will be compelled to fill. Only by that time the problem will be even greater than it is now. As Noemie Emery writes, "The mess he claims he inherited from President George W. Bush (which was made in large part by Obama's friends and his party) will be as nothing compared to the one he'll pass on to his heirs."

A long snake of debt – made of zero after zero – ready to squeeze and suffocate present and future generations: such is the bequest the president will leave for his successors.

Kidnapped Conservatives

It was another harmless day in 8^th grade U.S. History when my teacher dropped the bomb. "Yes Lincoln was the first Republican president, but it is pretty obvious that were he alive today he'd be a Democrat." Dumbfounded, this was my first experience with an odious phenomenon: when a conservative is dead and buried (and has been vindicated by the course of history) the Left engages in a concerted effort to claim him as one of their own and/or use that revision against living, breathing conservatives. As Jonah Goldberg writes, "The only good conservative is a dead conservative… It's just we-the-living who are hateful ogres, troglodytes, and mopers."

Lincoln is the first example of this. The man who declared that the chief "purpose of the Republican party is eminently conservative" and who sought nothing save the restoration of "this government to its original tones…and there to maintain it, looking for no further change" was no liberal (no modern liberal). A believer in free markets, individual liberty and the rule of law, Lincoln would have loathed the large administrative state and social welfare regime Democrats envision today. These initiatives create quasi-permanent subclasses of government dependents and instill a disincentive to labor, the surest means Lincoln envisioned to self-perfection and social advancement. His opposition to slavery was predicated not only in his belief in the natural rights of man but in the knowledge that, as Allen C. Guelzo writes, "allowing one man to own the fruits of another man's labor…discouraged hard work in both."

Lincoln never spoke of leveling down the playing field or "sharing the wealth." Instead "the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men" allowing "the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else."

Lincoln's top hat simply will not fit the head of today's Democratic donkey.

Now it is Ronald Reagan. The man who declared that "government is the problem" as he sought massive reductions in its size and scope was apparently a moderate pragmatist, in sharp contrast to the conservatives of today who are….well, saying and trying to do the exact same thing. Liberals from Andrea Mitchell to Eugene Robinson to TIME have alleged an affinity between Ronald Reagan and the center-left that the world somehow failed to notice since his days as a New Dealer in the Screen Actors' Guild.

Regrettably, liberals who try to pull this stunt ignore two items, one being that pretty much everything he stood for in his public life was (and still is) inimical to the Left's creed. Not only did he come to the White House pursuing aggressive spending cuts (and would leave it lamenting that he had not cut more), but the abolition of entire cabinet-level departments. He sought cuts to Social Security and Medicare (rebuffed by Congress). He exponentially increased defense spending. He cut taxes (and when he had to raise them as part of a compromise with Congressional Democrats he lamented that his heart "wasn't in it"). He was firmly and vocally pro-life. His Justice Department aggressively promoted originalism to counter decades of the judicial left amorphously interpreting the Constitution to mean whatever they wanted it to. In a deliberate departure from détente, he pursued a policy of confrontation with the Soviet Union that could lead to one thing and one thing only: "We win, they lose."

Today's liberals not only ignore all of this in alleging that Reagan was a moderate (or even a liberal), but they also disingenuously ignore the stubborn little reality that they opposed him in all of these things in forms every bit as passionate, ranging-on-hateful as they did George W. Bush. When alive the Left labeled him a "dunce," an "ideologue," a "right-wing extremist," and a "cowboy." At one point Tip O'Neill went so far as to say that there was "evil…in the White House…And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America." Praising his diplomacy in ending the Cold War now, liberals howled when he labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire." (To call Reagan himself "evil" was apparently kosher, but damn the man who dared label a regime responsible for the death and oppression of millions in such terms.)

Had there been blogs or cable news the Kos' and Olbermanns would have treated forty every bit as vituperatively as they treated forty-three.

Ronald Reagan was no squishy moderate or liberal, and as Steven F. Hayward writes, those on the Left who now contend otherwise "should be made to explain why they appreciate the virtues of conservatives [especially Reagan] only after they are gone from the scene."

One suspects that, placed on the wrong side of history, they are not so much trying to pull Reagan towards themselves but themselves towards Reagan and away from the fact that he was right and they were wrong. (They are not above scoring cheap political points over conservatives in the here-and-now either.)

If the metaphor above may be strained a little, Reagan's top hat does not fit the heads of liberals today any better than Lincoln's.

Mubarak's Address

Prior to Hosni Mubarak's national address today the masses gathered in Tahrir Square were in high spirits and absorbed in chants tinged with a sense of triumph. Buoyed by reports Mubarak would be announcing his resignation, they also had no other logical conclusion to come to. With what purpose would Mubarak come before his people again unless something in the plans he laid out in his last speech had changed?

No apparent one.

Instead of announcing what everyone planned to hear though, he simply reiterated that he would stay until September, that he was transferring some powers to his vice president, and that he would pursue some constitutional reforms.

Unsurprisingly Egyptians are furious and some sort of violence is expected tomorrow.

One has to wonder what exactly Mubarak was hoping to accomplish. He has long since lost credibility with his countrymen and so nothing he could say short of resignation would placate them. In fact, the only motive that would fit the import of his address today is a desire to see the country he pretends to be the champion of burn, which it quite possibly could now.

The Meaninglessness of ‘Judicial Activism’

Adjectives used pejoratively in the political lexicon tend to lose their original meaning the longer their currency is. After awhile they transform from something specific you disagree with to anything and anyone you disagree with or view negatively. Such became the case with "fascist", "neoconservative" and (liberals would argue) "socialist."

Such has now also become the case with "judicial activist." Used originally by conservatives to pejoratively describe the Warren Court and what they alleged to be its departures from the traditional (and constitutional) role of the judiciary, the moniker has now evolved into the designation both spectral sides employ on judicial acts they do not agree with.

To wit, the ink had barely dried on Judge Vinson's decision invalidating the entirety of last year's health-care reform as unconstitutional before the Obama Administration lashed out at it as a clear case of "judicial activism."

The term has now graduated into the pantheon of its aforementioned predecessors, which is to say it has floated into the realm of utter meaninglessness. No longer applied to a specific type of judicial behavior, and instead used to describe quite disparate ones by disparate sides, to say that an act of the third branch is an example of "judicial activism" is now to say no more than that you disagree with said act.

1099 Repeal

This week the Senate repealed the 1099 provision of the recent health-care law which would have required all businesses to file tax forms each and every time they spent $600 on a single vendor. The extra financial burden this would place on small-business (at a time when we are putatively trying to encourage job growth) is self-evident.

That such an odious example of the federal government's insatiable desire to regulate everything in American life made it into the health-care legislation serves as yet another condemnation of both the legislation itself and the manner in which it was enacted.

Woefully unpopular with the American people, the Democratic super-majorities in control of Congress had to ram through the legislation (through greasing the skids in a manner that defines "corruption") before further scrutiny exposed the bill even more. As a result, final legislation that exceeded a thousand pages in length was shoved through in a matter of days before anyone, including those voting on it, had a chance to actually read and adequately understand what they were voting on.

In consequence, provisions such as this – which no one could rationally vote for after mature deliberation – became the sovereign law of the land.

This state of affairs makes a mockery of President Obama's/Congressional Democrats' claim that the debate over the health-care act is over. The final legislation that was passed and signed was never discussed or debated in any meaningful sense prior to passage, begging the question how anything can be concluded that has never actually begun?

Besides, elected officials are not the ultimate arbiter of what is settled and what is not – the American people are. If you put it in the most charitable terms possible, Americans have deep-abiding reservations about this legislation, especially its most significant provisions. Distinct pluralities to clear majorities favor comprehensive repeal while even more simply 'oppose' the legislation. When you think about it, it is appalling that Democrats forced this 'reform' upon the American public in the dead of night and are now responding to their further objection with a blithe shrug and declaration that the debate is over.

Ultimately the moral of this specific story is that Democrats would have saved themselves time, anguish and embarrassment if they had allowed enough time to scrutinize the entirety of the bill prior to its passage. If you actually read something before acting on it you tend to have an understanding of exactly what it is your acting upon and you are saved from having to repeal something you were the author of a few months prior.

On Affairs in Egypt

The United States has called Hosni Mubarak a friend for thirty years under the postulate that his presidency was the lone bulwark preventing Islamist control of one of the strategically pivotal countries in the region.

Perhaps this was correct. Perhaps it was either Mubarak as he has always been or the Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps we were never able to utilize Mubarak as a stopgap while simultaneously taking steps to encourage the development of Egyptian civil society – the precondition to a sustainable system of representative government. There are, after all, real limits to the influence of the most powerful superpower the world has ever known.

Regardless, Egypt, the Middle East and the United States are in the moment they are in now because of the choice we made to sustain Mubarak since the assassination of his predecessor. He has always ruled absolutely over his country and by the same means that he repressed violent Islamist elements he repressed any and every viable democratic element.

That combined with the eruption of popular disgust leads to a dynamic where he stands on the precipice of being driven from power, leaving a gaping void in his wake. Because he has spent his time in power quashing democratic development there is no such component that can step in and fill that vacuum when he is gone, leaving the very real and terrifying possibility that the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever name radical Islam calls itself will be able to assume control without challenge. (Mubarak repressed both Islamists and democrats, but as the sword of Mohammed has a head start of a few centuries and so better organization than democracy in the broader Middle East it is exponentially better prepared to seize the opportunity when it presents itself.)

The American decision to prop up Mubarak might have prevented an Islamist takeover of Egypt for thirty years – perhaps this was our only choice, the least-worst choice – but it has left us in a particular vexing bind now. Mubarak's tenure has been a bulwark heretofore but has conversely decimated the one societal element that can permanently prevent the Islamist takeover long feared. Now we are left, seemingly helplessly, watching the one entity (Mubarak) that we needed to prevent another entity (Islamists) from taking control lose power after he has spent decades decimating the only other entity (democracy) that can prevent the second entity (Islamists) from taking power now that his sclerotic regime is crumbling.

All our eggs have been put in one basket and that basket is about to be crushed.