Month: January 2009

“The Most Dangerous Man”

by Patrick Appel
Marc Thiessen, a speechwriter for W., is pissed by Obama’s executive orders:

The CIA program he is effectively shutting down is the reason why America has not been attacked again after 9/11. He has removed the tool that is singularly responsible for stopping al-Qaeda from flying planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, Heathrow Airport, and London’s Canary Warf, and blowing up apartment buildings in Chicago, among other plots.  It’s not even the end of inauguration week, and Obama is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

If this is true, why not set up a commission?

Not Making Waves

by Patrick Appel
Manzi:

Obama won by 7 points; FDR by 18. Obama’s talk of boldness, without actual bold proposals, is likely a reflection of his awareness of this hard fact. This is probably a reason that he is willing to yield so far on tax relief in the stimulus package, as an example. If a depression-level event unfolds over the next four years and he is seen as pushing an agenda in opposition to the other party, he will be vulnerable in a way that FDR was not almost no matter what happened.

The Costs Of War

by Patrick Appel
A snippet from the "Cost of Conflict in the Middle East," a report (pdf) by the Strategic Foresight Group:

The countries in the Middle East that are directly involved in or affected by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, internal strife in Lebanon and the U.S. invasion of Iraq have lost a whopping $12 trillion dollars (in 2006 dollar value) in opportunity costs from 1991 to 2010.

Grunstein comments:

I’m not sure if the vision of how things could be is enough to get people to come to their senses. But the fact that the Middle East is not a prosperous global power center is one of the most prominent and enduring testaments to human irrationality that I can think of.

What’s Cheaper?

by Patrick Appel
Tyler Cowen a post on the perils of bank nationalization over at the Atlantic’s new business channel:

The risk is that nationalization becomes a contagious idea and spreads from one bank to the next, acting as a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Even mentioning "the N word" scares off private capital, so if the government is not going to nationalize, a precommittment to that effect would be useful.  Either that, or get it over with.

Subsidies and bailouts, of course, have their own problems, most of all that they cost money.  But it also costs money to recapitalize a nationalized banking system.  I’ve yet to see the evidence that the nationalization option would be cheaper.  And if nationalization increases the number of banks that require assistance, one way or the other, it could well prove more expensive in the longer run.