Columnist.
The Treasury Department reported last week that the national debt had surpassed $15 trillion, clocking in at precisely $15,033,607,255,920.32 as of the close of business Tuesday. Since President Obama's inauguration in January 2009, the amount owed by the federal government to its lenders has soared more than $4.4 trillion, an increase of 41 percent in less than three years. To put those figures in perspective, consider these: When Bill Clinton was president, the national debt rose by an annual average of $193 billion. When the profligate George W. Bush was in the White House, the yearly debt increases averaged $612 billion. On Obama's watch, by contrast, the federal debt has been skyrocketing by more than $1.5 trillion per year.
Are you glum about the nation's prospects? If so, you've got lots of company. According to a recent poll for The Hill, a Washington-based daily, 69 percent of American voters say the US is declining, and 83 percent of voters describe themselves as worried (49 percent say very worried) about the country's future. Worldwide, the Pew Research Center finds in a separate poll, "many now see the financially-strapped US as a great power in decline." Among respondents in 18 countries, 47 percent expect China to replace the United States as the world's leading power. Only 36 percent disagree.
The Food and Drug Administration announced last year that harsh new labels, large and graphic, would soon have to cover half of the front and back of all cigarette packages and at least 20 percent of the space in all tobacco advertising. ... The explicit labels, which Congress authorized in the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, were supposed to be in place by next September. Last week, US District Judge Richard Leon wisely said no.
Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and isolationist would-be president, is against using tough economic sanctions or military force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. How then, he was asked on "Fox News Sunday," would he persuade Teheran to abandon its quest for the bomb? "Well," Paul suggested, "maybe offering friendship to them." Hmm, there's an idea. How might it work in practice?
Here's one for the Guinness World Records people: Two New York City taxi medallions were sold last month for $1 million apiece. That's the highest price ever paid for the right to operate a car as a taxicab in The City That Never Sleeps. It's also an expensive lesson in the harm caused to consumers and would-be entrepreneurs by overregulation and the strangling of competition. By law, every cab in New York has to have an official medallion -- the numbered metal plate nailed to the hood -- but the number of medallions is fixed at 13,237. When the city first issued taxi medallions in the 1930s, they cost $10 each. But before long the demand for taxi ownership had outstripped the limited supply of medallions. Since City Hall wasn't issuing new ones, the only way to get a medallion was to buy one from an existing owner. Over time the value of those metal tags went through the stratosphere.
At the Occupy Phoenix demonstrations, fliers encourage protesters to violently resist police officers, asserting that "you will usually have only two options: submit, or kill the cop." At Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, an Occupy Wall Street protester was sexually assaulted in her tent; according to the New York Post, a woman was raped at the same site a few weeks earlier. In Denver, "Occupy" activists turned on the police, screaming obscenities and knocking a motorcycle cop to the ground. Occupy Oakland grew even more violent, as police were pelted with bottles and rocks, and had M-80 firecrackers thrown at them. And in cities from Boston to Berkeley, Occupy encampments have coincided with surges in vandalism, assault, and theft.
America's war on terror was launched when the heroes of United Flight 93 rushed the hijackers over Shanksville, Pa., aborting what would have been Al Qaeda's fourth 9/11 attack. In the decade that began that terrible day, the goal of disrupting and crushing the Islamist terror network has been pursued with remarkable versatility: The United States has fought this conflict with military, diplomatic, and financial weapons; it has relied on aggressive intelligence-gathering and sensitive counterinsurgency; it has reshaped airline security and rewritten civil-liberties law. Jihadists have been killed with Predator drones abroad, detained as enemy combatants at Guantanamo, and thwarted in undercover stings at home. Yet in the long run it may turn out that more significant than any of these was the war of ideas that followed 9/11.
My mother's mother revered Franklin Roosevelt. She voted for him four times, and firmly defended him decades later, when I tried to convince her that FDR was not the haloed saint she imagined. "It's because of Roosevelt that I'm getting $800 in Social Security every month," she'd tell me. Actually, I'd reply, it was because of people like me -- workers paying into the system now, at tax rates considerably steeper than hers had ever been -- that retirees like her were receiving those monthly checks.
Charles Ponzi was a Boston swindler who, in 1920, bilked thousands of people out of millions of dollars by selling them bonds that guaranteed a fabulous rate of return -- 100 percent in just 90 days. The funds entrusted to Ponzi were never invested in legitimate enterprises. Instead, they were deployed in a classic pyramid scam: The first few investors were paid off with money collected from a larger, second round of investors, whose bonds were in turn paid off with money from a still larger group of investors who came after them. Like all pyramid swindles, which depend on a steadily expanding population of new investors, Ponzi's scheme was unsustainable. It collapsed within months. Ponzi went to prison, and his victims lost most of their principal. So is Social Security another Ponzi scheme?
In 2007, a prominent Florida televangelist named Bill Keller condemned Mitt Romney's religion in a "daily devotional" to his 2.4 million e-mail subscribers. "If you vote for Mitt Romney, you are voting for Satan!" Keller raged. "There is no excuse, no justification for supporting and voting for a man who will be used by Satan to lead the souls of millions into the eternal flames of hell!" That was ugly, offensive, and intolerant. So was another diatribe about religion, published by a different Bill Keller last week.
Columnists make predictions at their peril, but I'll go out on a limb: If Hurricane Irene turns out to have wrought the havoc some forecasters have predicted, some expert will quickly reassure us that all the destruction is good for the economy. "One of the most reliable results of any natural disaster," remarks economist Russell Roberts, "is the spreading of bad economics." And few fallacies are more enduring than the belief that disasters are really a net benefit to society, since the money spent on recovery stimulates new jobs and construction.
Warren Buffett is the billionaire CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a friend and political supporter of Barack Obama, and a well-known advocate of higher taxes on the rich. He is also a hypocrite, whose actions belie his words. For several years now, Buffett has been calling for significant tax hikes on extremely wealthy Americans like himself. Last week, in a New York Times column headlined "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich," Buffett lamented that the $6,938,744 he forked over in federal income and payroll taxes in 2010 amounted to just 17.4 percent of his taxable income. "What I paid," the world's most famous investor observed, "was . . . actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent."
To many liberals, Rick Perry's audacious pledge to make Washington as "inconsequential in your life as I can" is tantamount to a pledge to bring back the Dark Ages. Commenting on Twitter as the Texas governor announced his presidential candidacy, longtime Washington journalist Howard Kurtz wondered: "Perry wants to make DC 'inconsequential in your life.' Does that include Medicare, Soc Sec, vets' programs, air safety, FDA?" Former Bobby Kennedy aide Jeff Greenfield ran through a litany of Washington's contributions to American life -- from railroads, interstate highways, and the Hoover Dam to land-grant colleges, civil rights, and subsidized mortgages -- and marveled at the depth of the right's "disdain for all things Washington."
When Texas Governor Rick Perry announced his campaign for president last weekend in a speech to the RedState Gathering in Charleston, S.C., he saved his best line for the end. "I'll promise you this," he said to exuberant cheers and applause, "I'll work every day to try to make Washington, DC, as inconsequential in your life as I can." To a Democrat steeped in the big-government tradition of the New Deal and the Great Society, there could hardly be a greater heresy.
The fire hall next to my in-laws' house in northern New York State has a siren that can be heard for miles. "Loud" doesn't begin to describe the sound: a shrill, relentless, piercing wail that is impossible to ignore -- and can be extremely upsetting for anyone who isn't used to it. There's good reason for that. None of the rural towns in the area has a professional fire department, so when a fire breaks out, the siren is needed to summon volunteers. The urgent blast of that siren used to terrify my younger son, who would hide under a bed when it sounded, and angrily tell us afterward how much he hated it. In the recent clamor over the federal debt ceiling and the Standard & Poor's downgrade of US Treasury bonds, the Tea Party has been that fire hall siren. And a lot of liberals have been angrily telling us how much they hate it.
Late last month, President Obama announced new automobile fuel-efficiency standards that will require cars to achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Vehicle fleets currently average 27 miles per gallon, so the new target would boost fuel efficiency by an unprecedented 100 percent within 14 years. But barring an engineering miracle, that's probably pie in the sky. After all, from 1975, when the first federal mileage rules for new cars were enacted, it took more than 30 years to improve automobile efficiency by just 60 percent. And the easy gains were achieved early on; since 1980, fuel economy has climbed by only about 1 percent a year. In truth, there is less to the new standards (known as CAFE, for corporate average fuel economy) than meets the eye.
Did Vice President Joe Biden slander Tea Party Republicans by saying they "acted like terrorists" in the protracted debate over raising the federal debt ceiling? To use such language would be contemptible, especially in the wake of Anders Breivik's twin massacres in Norway and just weeks before the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities. Biden claims he never said it, and out of respect for his office I'd like to believe him. But I'm skeptical. Politico reported Monday that at a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic caucus the vice president joined in the "hot rhetoric" against GOP conservatives, specifically agreeing with one Democrat who described them as a "group of terrorists [who] have made it impossible to spend any money." Biden's office initially refused to confirm or deny the comment, but after it became public, he went on TV to disavow it: "I did not use the 'terrorism' word," he told CBS.
When the Daily Caller, a news site based in Washington, D.C., reported last week that Michele Bachmann gets migraine headaches, it labored to give the impression that it was breaking an important story. "Stress-related condition 'incapacitates' Bachmann; heavy pill use alleged," the foreboding headline read. (Cue the grim background music.) The article, by Jonathan Strong, depicted a woman who crumples in the face of stress, reacting to the normal aggravations of political life -- a staffer's resignation, a missed flight -- with "medical episodes" that leave her "incapacitated" for days at a time. To cope, she "takes all sorts of pills. Prevention pills. Pills during the migraine. Pills wherever she goes." These "debilitating" migraines "occur once a week on average," and at least three times have landed Bachmann in the hospital. Her staff must "constantly" consult with doctors to "tweak" their boss's medication.
David and Victoria Beckham were overjoyed by the birth last week of their fourth child, a baby girl they named Harper. "We all feel so blessed and the boys love their baby sister so much!!!" the former Spice Girl exulted to her vast following on Twitter. A few days later she posted a picture of her husband cradling his new daughter, with the tender comment: "Daddy's little girl!" Whose heart wouldn't be warmed by the Beckhams' delight in their newborn? The Observer's wouldn't.
In the eight days since the deadly shootings in Arizona, the nation has been engulfed by a tidal wave of rhetoric and reaction, much of it unnecessary, ungracious, or unfortunate. But amid the flood of words, two voices have spoken with an uplifting decency and grace that should make them memorable long after the hue and cry of the past week has ended. One of those voices was that of President Obama, whose remarks at the memorial service in Tucson Wednesday night were humane and eloquent, unmarred by the acrimony that has ricocheted back and forth in the political echo chamber. The president spoke movingly about each of the victims whose lives were cut short. He gratefully hailed by name those whose heroism and quick thinking prevented even more lives from being lost. And with no hint of self-interest or rationalization, he urged all Americans not to "use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other."
