A Little Class Warfare For Breakfast

Before I get started on a mini-rant, let me say something about the subject of this rant.

Elizabeth Warren was my bankruptcy professor in law school.  She was a terrific teacher -- unlike most of my professors, I didn't have a problem attending her class... and it wasn't just because she had an attendance policy.  And she's a nice person, she really is.  I enjoyed our discussions during office hours.  And she will have absolutely no reason to remember me, and is a hell of a lot more accomplished (then again, that last part is not saying much).

With that said, she's completely wrong here. Let's start with the video.



Okay, allow me to retort, Professor...

1. Last I checked, the factory owner in your hypothetical does pay taxes.  We're apparently arguing about whether he or she needs to pay a greater share of their income to pay for all of those wonderful services that government provides pursuant to the social contract you're referencing.  Guess what?  The factory owner who's making more income already pays more in taxes than the non-factory owners who make less income do, both in terms of total income and as a percentage of the income.  I know, Warren Buffett's secretary and all that crap might have convinced you otherwise, but go see the AP factcheck on that point.

2.  She's also missing an extremely important point here regarding what the factory owner contributes to society.  To wit, he or she is now producing goods that are a benefit to society.  He or she is purchasing good and services from suppliers and vendors.  He or she is employing people who now have jobs and are not a burden on the social safety net.  Those employees earn paychecks and spend money that in turn helps stimulate the economy.  The factory owner and the employees pay taxes -- employment taxes, income taxes, sales taxes on things they purchase... and those taxes help pay for government.

Get it?  Because of the factory owner's work and business, the factory owner is already providing additional benefits to society -- they are paying it forward in a far more important way than they do via additional taxes. 

Do they get credit for these benefits that they provide to society?  Perhaps the answer is that these benefits also come with costs in the form of an increased need for regulations, and that the increased activity leads to greater usage of public resources (by other people who are also presumably paying into the system).  But none of this is addressed in the silly analysis we see on the video.

3.  Why is it that every time we hear a liberal story about the services government provides, it's focused on the essential services that conservatives will happily concede as duties of government (fire service, policemen, roads), but not on all the insane services government now provides (and largely does a crappy job providing) that people find far more questionable?  And does government have a responsibility to spend our taxpayer dollars with care and account for it?  If they don't do so, doesn't the factory owner have an even greater reason to take offense to claims that he or she is not paying their fair share, if government seems to be wasting the money that the factory owner otherwise might have used in a productive manner?

4.  I'll let Jonah Goldberg handle the next point...

Of course conservatives believe in a social contract, albeit a more bare bones version than the one liberals believe in. Insinuations otherwise are a red herring. But you can believe in a social contract and also believe the Left is pursuing class warfare. The suggestion that one contradicts the other is entirely bogus.

Going from this video, Ms. Warren thinks the deficit Bush created is terrible because it put our kids in greater debt but the deficit Obama has created is fine, even though it does the same thing. And something called “the social contract” requires us to look the other way as we pile up ever more debt on policies that haven’t worked until now. Again, I’m sure that sounds great to people who want to hear liberals “fight back.” But I think she’ll have to try harder if she wants to persuade people who don’t already agree with her.

That last part is key.  Warren's articulating a form of class warfare that is poisonous to the social contract she's allegedly trying to defend.  There's an argument to be made that the factory owner should want to give back to society, sort of a moral obligation one may feel they should fulfill (think about when people return to their hometowns to "give back" through charitable endeavors).

But Warren is arguing that the factory owner owes that obligation to everyone else.  To begin with, it's not always true.  Maybe this factory owner doesn't owe it to society -- maybe his factory (now using masculine pronouns because I'm sick of using he or she) is actually a home office where he created some fabulous new app that allows us to determine just how many jobs President Obama will destroy every month.  And maybe he was home-schooled in the Alaskan wilderness and lives in a small privately-policed community located on an offshore island that's still a U.S. territory.  I suppose he should be thankful for protection from marauding bands of pirates or something.  However, he's already paying into the system, as noted above.  You're saying that he owes more simply because he's been successful -- you're punishing that success by obligating him to do something.  That's an affront to personal liberty.

5.  When you tax something, you tend to get less of it.  Do we want less successful people?  Fewer factory owners?  Fewer rich people?  Fewer people getting jobs?

Sorry, I just lapsed into a general description of the Obama Presidency.  Unrelated, I'm sure.

6.  Last point, which is unrelated to the substance:  I'll let Allahpundit take the floor...

The reason this is a viral hit on the left, of course, is because they think most of their political problems boil down to “messaging.” Their platform is foolproof — genius top to bottom — but the sheer ingenious complexity of the scheme means they have trouble explaining it to the common voting yokel.

I think the world of Elizabeth Warren as a law professor.  But she's not convincing anyone near the right-hand side of the political ledger to support more income redistribution with shoddy arguments like this.  She might win her race against Scott Brown (it is Massachusetts, after all), but she won't sell this policy around the country, and the problem isn't messaging.  After all, three years ago, I remember hearing how the liberals had a fabulous law school professor who could explain anything to anyone and get them to buy all of the brilliant liberal programs they had lined up.  And if he couldn't convince people to embrace bigger government, maybe the messaging wasn't the problem.

Wonder what happened to that guy?

A Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Seriously, who's planning President Obama's events?  The competence of the adminsitration's political arm is becoming worse than the competence of policy team...

The 48-year-old Brent Spence Bridge spanning the Ohio River near Cincinnati isn't much to look at. But for President Obama, it's become a rallying cry for his $477 billion jobs plan.

He referred to it in his Sept. 8 speech to Congress, saying "there's a bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that's on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America." And on Thursday he plans to use Brent Spence as the backdrop for another pitch for his jobs bill, which includes $27 billion in "immediate" highway spending.

But while local officials are delighted with Obama's attention, Brent Spence might not be eligible for that jobs bill money.

"Will funds be available for this bridge? We don't know at this point," said a spokesman for Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, whose district is in the area.

Although some press accounts have described Brent Spence as "crumbling," and the White House says it's an example of "ur gently needed" repairs, the bridge isn't falling apart. In fact, it's designed to last for decades more.

It is, however, "functionally obsolete," which in this case means it's too small to handle the daily traffic load. While designed to handle 85,000 cars and trucks, it now carries more than 150,000, leading to regular backups.

So the plan isn't to do extensive repairs on the bridge, but to build an entirely new one right next to it and keep the old one in use.

The problem is that construction work on the $2.3 billion bridge isn't scheduled to start for three or four years, according to the project's official website.

That would appear to put it outside the "immediate" timetable in Obama's jobs bill, which requires the Transportation secretary to "obligate" all the highway funds "not later than two years after enactment" of the bill.

The bridge failed to get any money from the previous $830 billion stimulus because it wasn't a "shovel ready" project.

The headline at Hot Air was even better:

"Obama pitches jobs bill in front of bridge that won’t benefit from jobs bill"

Hey, but at least they provided an example of the traffic problems on the bridge...

Nothing like a presidential visit to make bad traffic worse.

Ohio and Kentucky transportation officials had warned motorists to expect long delays Thursday afternoon around the time President Barack Obama visited Cincinnati, and the forecasts were timely.

An hour after Obama's speech at a concrete company by the Ohio River, southbound traffic was crawling through Cincinnati toward Kentucky at 10 mph. Northbound lanes, however, recovered quickly while some side roads were snagged badly by a visit that lasted less than two hours.

Look at this way -- with the way things are going, in 16 months, President Obama won't be President anymore, and he won't need to snarl up traffic to go visit any place.

The American Jobs Act, Part II

Rep. Louie Gohmert becomes my comic hero of the day by swiping the name of the American Jobs Act for his own bill...

Texas GOP Rep. Louis Gohmert officially introduced the American Jobs Act of 2011 on Wednesday afternoon.

"My bill is not the president's bill, it's a real job creator," Gohmert told The Hill, shortly after filing his two-page alternative to the president's plan, under the same title.

Gohmert said that he read the president's 155-page jobs plan, when it was emailed to lawmakers on Monday afternoon.

Calling the president's plan a "disaster," Gohmert said that he checked to see "who filed the 'American Jobs Act' for the president, here in the House, since we had to do it 'now, right away," but discovered that the plan had not been officially introduced in the House.

So, at 1:20pm Gohmert filed his own version of a jobs bill, under the title included on the president's legislation distributed to members of Congress two-days prior.

Unfortunately, it appears that you can use the name on multiple bills, so this isn't quite as awesome as it could have been.  But still, a few thoughts...

1.  Yes, it's a cheap political stunt.  Guess what?  So is Obama's bill.

2.  Gohmert's bill has at least as good a chance of passing as Obama's.  Both have been blasted by Democrats, but Gohmert's has not drawn any derision from the GOP.

3.  No Dem has introduced this in the House?  I thought we needed to pass this now!!!

4.  Seriously, is it a further sign of incompetence that they haven't even introduced the bill that Obama wants passed yesterday?  Or are Dems running away as fast as they can?

5.  Yes, Gohmert will be reported to Attack Watch.  I'm sure they'll get around to rebutting him... and if it's based on how well they do everything else, that should be in 2013.

6.  Jon Stewart is right -- the American Jobs Act is a ridiculously dumb name.  But perhaps someone else (like Ron Paul) can introduce a bill with that title that advocates the drowning of kittens or something equally ludicrous, so people can run ads saying, "Representative Pelosi voted FOR the infamous American Jobs Act.  The American Jobs Act mandated the drowning of kittens!"

Pretty Revealing

There's so much in the President's recent interview with Peter Baker, I don't know where to start.  But here's an excerpt which has several points that blow my mind...

While proud of his record, Obama has already begun thinking about what went wrong — and what he needs to do to change course for the next two years. He has spent what one aide called “a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0” with his new interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, and his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina. During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called “tactical lessons.” He let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.” He realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise.


Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. “Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”


That presumes that what he did was the right thing, a matter of considerable debate. The left thinks he did too little; the right too much. But what is striking about Obama’s self-diagnosis is that by his own rendering, the figure of inspiration from 2008 neglected the inspiration after his election. He didn’t stay connected to the people who put him in office in the first place. Instead, he simultaneously disappointed those who considered him the embodiment of a new progressive movement and those who expected him to reach across the aisle to usher in a postpartisan age. On the campaign trail lately, Obama has been confronted by disillusionment — the woman who was “exhausted” defending him, the mother whose son campaigned for him but was now looking for work. Even Shepard Fairey, the artist who made the iconic multihued “Hope” poster, says he’s losing hope.


Perhaps that should have come as no surprise. When Obama secured the Democratic nomination in June 2008, he told an admiring crowd that someday “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”


I read that line to Obama and asked how his high-flying rhetoric sounded in these days of low-flying governance. “It sounds ambitious,” he agreed. “But you know what? We’ve made progress on each of those fronts.” He quoted Mario Cuomo’s line about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose. “But the prose and the poetry match up,” he said. “It would be very hard for people to look back and say, You know what, Obama didn’t do what he’s promised. I think they could say, On a bunch of fronts he still has an incomplete. But I keep a checklist of what we committed to doing, and we’ve probably accomplished 70 percent of the things that we talked about during the campaign. And I hope as long as I’m president, I’ve got a chance to work on the other 30 percent.”

I feel like I need to bullet point a rebuttal to just this small portion of the article.

1.  In the same paragraph, the guy talks about not wanting to be seen as just another tax and spend liberal, then says he should have tactically let the GOP push for tax cuts as part of the stimulus so he could compromise on it.  Huh?  If you don't want to be seen as a traditional tax and spend liberal, perhaps it would help if you, I don't know, cut spending and taxes.

2.  Again, the failure of the stimulus is seen as a failure in messaging.  Elsewhere in the article, Ed Rendell calls the stimulus successful but attacks the White House's messaging on it.  Gibbs says they haven't had a meeting where policy is considered a problem in 20 months.  But this is the point: they are either so insulated from reality that they don't get it, or they think that they can get away with a blatantly false argument.

The stimulus has not worked to accomplish the goals the President and his team originally set out.  When it was passed, the stimulus was supposed to keep unemployment from rising over 8 percent; instead, unemployment's been stuck between 9 and 10 percent for several months.  It's stunning to have the White House talk about a failure in messaging while the President admits that he didn't know that there's no such thing as a government shovel-ready project.  The failure here was the policy, not the messaging.  A restaurant can put a turd on a plate and call it gourmet food, but if a customer doesn't like the taste, you shouldn't blame the waiter for not presenting it correctly.

3.  Again, the reference to messaging annoys the crap out of me.  The President thinks he's been neglectful of PR, but we see him on every media outlet known to man.  Hell, it's probably easier to list news media where he hasn't popped up for an interview -- perhaps Cat Fancy hasn't done an Obama piece, but maybe that's coming for the holidays.  I get that this President believes in his powers of persuasion, but perhaps he needs to realize something -- if his power of persuasion is so great, then why can't he persuade people on the other side of the issue?  They're not all unreasonable -- hell, some of them voted for him.  The reason might be because they don't want to buy what he's selling, no matter what arguments he makes.

4.  The last two paragraphs make me worry for the long-term prospects for this administration.  Obama calls his high-flying rhetoric "ambitious", but than argues that he's making progress.  Dude, you talked about healing the Earth and stopping hte oceans from rising.  That's not ambitious, that's a friggin' fairy tale.  And if you truly believe you're making progress on such grandiose goals...

There was a great point made by someone the other day about how one of the major problems with government today is that it doesn't have concrete goals (wish I could find the post, but I'll paraphrase for now).  When you keep goals simple, people know what they're trying to accomplish: Build a highway system.  Win a war.  Put a man on the moon.

Bush was guilty of this as well.  But Obama's taken that problem and magnified it.  Look at the goals Obama's setting up there.  "Care for the sick"?  Does this mean that everyone who's ill gets every bit of treatment possible?  "Good jobs for the jobless"?  How do we know what a "good" job is?

Bottom line, I'm worried about an administration that doesn't get why it's losing ground.  I'm even more worried when they appear to think the only problem is that everyone else doesn't get their brilliance.

5.  There is a passage in the article where Obama meets with some historians who try to help him understand the Tea Party movement by analogy, and provide references to Know-Nothings in the 1850's, the Populists of the 1890's, and Charles Coughlin's backers in the 1930's.  Perhaps they called the wrong historians.

Take out Coughlin's anti-Semitism, and the latter two were essentially left-wing populist movements whose goals might have more in common with Obama than the Tea Party.  All three called for greater government involvement in American life, rather than less -- again, something shared with Obama.

More important -- look at each of those three examples, and realize that those three groups all more or less failed. There are such movements that experienced much greater success -- the most prominent being the original Republican Party in the 1850's, the Progressives during the first decade of the 20th century, and the civil rights movement of the 1960's.

The historians are offering Obama comfort food.  If Obama thinks the Tea Party is destined to fail like the first three examples, he probably won't take it seriously.  Maybe he will be right -- but it makes more sense to treat your opponents as serious critics than as likely failures.  And the failure to understand the Tea Party movement makes me think that the President's extraordinary 2008 connection with the electorate may never be recaptured.

Next Thing They'll Tell Us Is That The Healthcare Bill Won't Cut Costs

The economy may be turning around, but economists seem to think the stimulus didn't have much of anything to do with it.

Good thing we don't need that stimulus money for anything else.

One Small Step for Democrats

For Democrats, the first step is admitting you have a problem. E. J. Dionne pulls that off, but fails to identify what the real problem is...

If you want to be honest, face these facts: At this moment, President Obama is losing, Democrats are losing and liberals are losing.

Who's winning? Republicans, conservatives, the practitioners of obstruction and the Tea Party.

The two immediate causes for this state of affairs are a single election result in Massachusetts and the way the United States Senate operates. What's not responsible is the supposed failure of Obama and the Democrats to govern as "moderates." Pause to consider where we would be if a Democrat had won the Massachusetts Senate race last month. In all likelihood, health reform would be law, Democrats could have moved on to economic matters, and Obama would be seen as shrewd and successful.

But that's not what happened, and Republican Scott Brown's victory revealed real weaknesses on the progressive side: an Obama political apparatus asleep at the switch, huge Republican enthusiasm unmatched by Democratic determination, and a focused conservative campaign to discredit Obama's ideas, notably his economic stimulus plan and the health-care bill.

The Obama administration argues that both the stimulus and the health bill are better than people think. That's entirely true, and this is actually an indictment -- it means that on the two big issues of the moment, Republicans and conservatives are winning an argument they should be losing.

Dionne goes on to claim that the stimulus is working, a claim that is questionable at best, as illustrated by Reihan Salam. I also tend to believe that when a large enough majority thinks something is true, it's probably illustrative of an underlying fact -- so when only 6% of the public thinks the stimulus is working to create jobs, that's not just a messaging problem. I think this reflects the underlying reality -- the stimulus may have created jobs, but no one thinks it was a good return on our investment of $787 billion. And the President's claims that the stimulus staved off a depression are ridiculed even by stimulus supporters like Megan McArdle.

But hey, maybe it is a messaging problem. I'm fully in favor of the Democrats pursuing this line of stupidity, because it probably won't lead to any more bad legislation and will boot them out of the House majority come November. So I'm not going to spend any more time identifying the real problems for them - it's not like they're listening.

Stimulate This

Hey, that stimulus is working out great... um, okay, maybe not, but the economy and unemployment would be far worse without it.... oh, damn...

Ten months into President Barack Obama's first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found.

Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn't matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama's argument that more road money would address an "urgent need to accelerate job growth."

Obama wants a second stimulus bill from Congress that relies in part on more road and bridge spending, projects the president said are "at the heart of our effort to accelerate job growth."

Construction spending would be a key part of the Jobs for Main Street Act, a $75 billion second stimulus to revive the nation's lethargic unemployment rate and improve the dismal job market for construction workers. The House approved the bill 217-212 last month after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., worked the floor for an hour; the Senate is expected to consider it later in January.

AP's analysis, which was reviewed by independent economists at five universities, showed that strategy hasn't affected unemployment rates so far. And there's concern it won't work the second time. For its analysis, the AP examined the effects of road and bridge spending in communities on local unemployment; it did not try to measure results of the broader aid that also was in the first stimulus like tax cuts, unemployment benefits or money for states.

"My bottom line is, I'd be skeptical about putting too much more money into a second stimulus until we've seen broader effects from the first stimulus," said Aaron Jackson, a Bentley University economist who reviewed AP's analysis.

Even within the construction industry, which stood to benefit most from transportation money, the AP's analysis found there was nearly no connection between stimulus money and the number of construction workers hired or fired since Congress passed the recovery program. The effect was so small, one economist compared it to trying to move the Empire State Building by pushing against it.

Apparently, the only thing that's shovel-ready is the BS.

Drew over at Ace of Spades gives credit to the AP for joining the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and becoming a non-news organization by actually reporting the problems with the stimulus. He also draws a pretty good analogy...

I used to know a guy who worked for the state DMV. He used to claim that his department 'made money' because they took in more than their budget. Try though I might, I could never quite get him to understand the difference between confiscating wealth and creating it. Now it seems people like him are running the government.

The best part about this analysis is they actually take on Obama's claim that you can't look at just the county where the money is spent because workers can come from all over. The AP looked at 700 counties that received project money and 700 that didn't. Unemployment trends were the same in both samples.

You know, I'm not having much trouble picturing Obama, or Joe Biden and Tim Geithner, running the DMV. And that's not a good thing.