Month: January 2009

An unexpected but typically shrewd take from conservative columnist Irwin Stelzer in the Times. Money quote:

Spend now, and cut taxes now, and run deficits now. Build stuff that has a positive social value. Maintain faith in the currency by brokering a grand bargain to bring entitlement spending and therefore postrecession deficits under control. At the right time, call in all that extra cash that is sloshing around, thereby preventing inflation. And all will be well in this best of all possible worlds. Perhaps. But if hyper-spending by government freezes out as much or more private-sector investment; if consumers, seeing tax increases in their future, rein in spending even more; if the government cannot impose its cost-benefit test on politically directed infrastructure spending – then Obama will not have kept his head when conservatives about him lost theirs.

The key is leveraging this moment for long-term sacrifices from both Republicans and Democrats on spending. Defense and entitlements; corporate welfare and middle-class welfare; tax hikes and spending cuts.

Ezra Klein explains why China is building a universal health care system:

Chinese economists see universal health care as a way to induce consumption and economic dynamism. The Chinese have a high savings rate — indeed, an absurdly high savings rate, between 30 percent and 40 percent of income — and one of the reasons is fear of medical expenses. China lacks a safety net, and so people spend less because they need to plan for catastrophe. And if catastrophe doesn’t befall, then they’ve simply spent less. Which is a problem when you’re facing down a potentially long recession. And so China is trying to make it safe for its citizens to spend, which means making future expenses more predictable, which means offering health care coverage.

It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

A reader writes:

Scott Horton is right. My feeling is that Obama’s opening days have gone better than I had any right to expect.

Obama has been many things in his life, but one of his roles has gotten short shrift.  He was a constitutional law professor at one of the best law schools in the country. And there’s something about the Bush administration that’s gotten short shrift as well.  It’s not just that there was a political disagreement — a lot of what the last administration did was illegal. And they didn’t just break run of the mill laws — they broke the central stuff that’s laid down in the constitution.  Their whole program was rooted in this violation of the constitution — without that enormous breach, they couldn’t have their expansive conception of executive power, upon which so many other things depended.

I think this point is really key.  Bush’s conception of the executive isn’t something about which reasonable people disagree.  It was unconstitutional, and the legal arguments defending it were specious and offered in bad faith.  They had as much intellectual integrity as Cheney’s assertion that he belonged to neither the executive or legislative branches.

There’s one last building block to my argument:  the government is made out of laws.  These issues aren’t just intellectual pastimes, things that spectators in armchairs engage in once the men of action take care of business.  These issues are at the center of everything.

Without the legal cover that Bush got, none of the awful stuff that transpired could have occurred. Obama has laid down a lot of stuff very quickly, and the effect of it will be to repudiate the entire philosophy of Bush’s government.  You can see it not only in his executive orders, but in the lawyers he’s appointed.  He’s already changed everything completely.

I read someone from the left who was concerned that Obama wouldn’t close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.  But he has to — he’s already created a new legal framework in which such a place can’t exist.  He’s put together a team that wouldn’t allow him to keep it open.  The facility’s closure is inevitable. I don’t know why more people don’t get this. 

Maybe it’s because the law hasn’t been taken seriously for so long that people don’t think what he’s done means anything.  I don’t really know why it’s flying under the radar. He’s already saved the constitution.  I know that sounds way over the top, but I absolutely believe it’s true. And as a final related point, this is one area where there is an enormous difference between Obama and Mrs. Clinton.  She would not have moved to reestablish the proper constitutional role of the executive.  She wouldn’t have understood that it’s the distortion of that role that’s at the center of so many of our problems. Every single thing he’s done points to an understanding that Cheney’s distorted view of the executive is to blame for so much that’s wrong, and there has been no hesitation, no wavering, in his response.  He’s gone in surgically and attacked it.

I agree. In fact, I’m staggered by how deep and profound the change already is. The antidote to the Cheney poison has been delivered. It will take some time to work through the system. But America is back.

Ta-Nehisi celebrates:

Kristol never seemed to have much respect for the Times before he got there. That didn’t change while he was there. His aspect was that of an overrated draft pick, knowing his time is short, and thus out to bed all he can in the meanwhile. Thus in the parlance of our time I say one great thing came out of all this–Like Bo crushing Bosworth, Bill Kristol has been exposed.

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, who has tried to forge closer relations between Jews and Catholics:

    With the re-introduction of the Latin Mass last year calling for the conversion of Jews, senior Vatican official Cardinal Renato Martino of the Peace & Justice Commission sharply criticizing Israel’s actions and likening the Gaza Strip to a concentration camp, and now the Pope admitting a Holocaust denier into the hierarchy of the Catholic Church should concern Jews worldwide … How will he walk into Yad Vashem and plant a wreath for the six million, when he just reinstated a bishop who denies that very historical fact within the greater truth of the Shoah? It is time for the Vatican to examine its conscience.

What the nit-pickers defending the move forget is that anti-Semitism is deeply embedded in the SSPX tradition. So while discussion of women priests and homosexual dignity is verboten in Benedict’s church, the inclusion of anti-Semites, bigots and reactionaries is vital. No openly gay people may approach the throne, but Holocaust-deniers are welcome. Amy Welborn has an excellent round-up of the details; Damian Thompson is always worth reading.

Michael Calderone reports on what the NYT will do now:

It remains to be seen if Rosenthal fills the spot with a conservative or libertarian voice. But some of the writers he’s spoken favorably of include the National Review’s Byron York and The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle.

Blago thought of appointing Oprah to Obama’s seat? He gives better copy every day.

A reader writes:

You’re right, it should not always be a crisis when the market adjusts after a bubble.  Real estate and many stocks are still too high.  But as non-participants in recent bubbles (we rent and don’t invest in vapor technology), we have not been rewarded.  Our income has been flat or falling, our conservative investments plummeted, and low interest rates assure few viable low risk savings alternatives.

Yes, being debt-free will (hopefully) allow us to suffer less than many.  But why does massive stupidity by some always result in universal punishment?  You make it sound like everyone benefited from the overindulgence.  We did not, but fully share the overdue hangover.

That’s a very fair point. We don’t all equally deserve this recession; but equally many of us who didn’t load ourselves up with debt we couldn’t repay enjoyed the material gains of the last two decades – from iPods to the Internet. And collectively we had it coming. What I liked about the austerity of Obama’s Inaugural was that he almost said it in those terms.

Hillary gives John Cornyn an earful.