Columnist.
ROME -- If Americans think fuel and food prices are high, they should try Europe, where both can nearly double those in the United States -- while salaries here are often lower. Italians, like most now-broke Southern European countries, are desperate to privatize bloated public-owned utilities. Politicians are trying to curb pensions, and to encourage the private sector to hire workers and buy equipment, as a way of attracting wary foreigner parents to lend such perpetual adolescents more bailout money.
Democrats in Congress recently went all out to try to pass the Dream Act, an amnesty for illegal-alien students willing to enroll -- and stay -- in college. Most who opposed it were derided as heartless at best, racist at worse. An insolvent California -- still struggling with its $15 billion budget shortfall -- is trying to advance its own version of the bill that would contravene federal immigration law and cost millions of dollars. At about the same time, the state has announced plans to release about 40,000 prison inmates due to a shortage of funds needed to address overcrowding. Highly taxed Californians can borrow money to send illegal aliens to school, but not to keep felons in prison.
Is America's preeminent world role over? That's what a recent New Yorker essay, based on interviews with presidential advisers, claimed. It characterized the new Obama foreign-relations style as "leading from behind" -- given the supposed inevitable American decline and growing unpopularity. The president is said to agree with pundits such as Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman, who have often outlined the parameters of what the post-American world would look like.
Osama bin Laden is dead. The Middle East is in chaos. And radical Islam is floundering. For a time after 9/11, bin Laden was riding high. Destroying 16 acres in Manhattan and hitting the Pentagon won al-Qaeda even more admiration from the Arab Street, hidden cash donations from sympathetic petrol-sheiks, and bribe and hush money from triangulating Middle East dictatorships. But now bin Laden and most of his henchmen of a decade ago are dead, like the bloodthirsty Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed by American forces in Iraq. Or they were captured, like the 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan. Or they are in hiding, like Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the increasingly irrelevant blowhard al-Qaeda information minister.
The welcome end of Osama bin Laden at the hands of helicopter-borne American military commandos raises a number of issues. Americans rejoiced at news of the end of this psychopathic mass murderer, and, privately, are probably relieved that he was not to be captured and extradited to Guantanamo. If bin Laden had been taken alive, we might be revisiting the controversy surrounding the Obama administration's failed efforts to try in a civilian federal court bin Laden's subordinate, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- the master planner behind 9/11.
Are high gas prices a good thing? That is not as dumb a question as it sounds. Examine a few revealing past remarks from President Obama and the Cabinet officials who are now in charge of the nation's energy use and oil leases on federal lands. Then decide whether the current soaring gas prices are supposed to be good or bad. In 2008, then-Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar -- now the secretary of the Department of the Interior in charge of the leasing of federal oil lands -- refused to vote for any new offshore drilling. In a Senate exchange with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Salazar objected to allowing any drilling on America's outer continental shelf -- even if gas prices reached $10 a gallon. We can now see why the president appointed Salazar, inasmuch as Obama recently promised the Brazilians that he would be eager to buy their newfound offshore oil -- while prohibiting similar such exploration here at home.
Last week, President Obama reversed course once again and now wants to raise taxes on the "rich" making above $250,000 per year. Obama is in dire need of additional revenue after proposing a $3.8 trillion 2011 budget -- containing the largest deficit in U.S. history at an estimated $1.6 trillion. Yet his latest share-the-wealth proposals make little sense. Obama never distinguishes between the super-rich and the well-off. At one point in justification, the president scoffed, "I don't need another tax cut, Warren Buffett doesn't need another tax cut."
Barack Obama just gave a belated but stern warning about escalating debt -- a few weeks after he presented a 2011 budget with a $1.6 trillion annual deficit, the largest shortfall in American history. Congressional Republicans are now crowing about reducing Obama's red ink by forcing some $38 billion in cuts. Such supposed slashing means America will borrow just $1,562 billion this year rather than the scheduled full $1,600 billion. The administration expects that someone will have enough money to float our $4 billion- to $5 billion-a-day loans -- either foreigners such as the Chinese, whom we are accustomed to lecturing about their illiberal habits, or our own wealthy, whom President Obama so often chides and threatens with higher taxes. Meanwhile, shrill critics of the modest cuts claim that the elderly, poor, sick and helpless will be cast adrift if their government dares to trim its massive borrowing by about 3 percent -- or just about 1 percent of this year's projected $3.7 trillion budget.
President Obama has announced that America would stop attacking Col. Muammar Gadhafi's forces in Libya. He instead hopes that others can force out Gadhafi -- or that the dictator will leave through economic and diplomatic pressure. It will apparently be up to NATO to finish the war -- without direct American combat participation. The relieved Obama administration had never quite explained what the mission was in the first place -- or for whom and for what we were fighting. Was the bombing to stop the killing, to help the rebels, to remove Gadhafi, or to aid the British and French, who both have considerable oil interests in Libya?
By bombing Libya, President Obama accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America: a) War-mongering liberals. Liberals are now chest-thumping about military "progress" in Libya. Even liberal television and radio cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an oil-producing Arab country, without prior congressional approval or majority public support -- and at a time of soaring deficits -- is well worth supporting, in a sort of "my president, right or wrong" fashion. Apparently liberal foreign policy is returning to the pre-Vietnam days of the hawkish "best and brightest."
Gas is well over $4 a gallon in most places in California -- and soaring elsewhere as well. But are such high energy prices good or bad? That should be a stupid question. Yet it is not when the Obama administration has stopped new domestic offshore oil exploration in many American waters, curbed oil leases in the West, and keeps oil-rich areas of Alaska exempt from drilling. Last week, President Obama went to Brazil and declared of that country's new offshore finds: "With the new oil finds off Brazil, President (Dilma) Rousseff has said that Brazil wants to be a major supplier of new stable sources of energy, and I've told her that the United States wants to be a major customer, which would be a win-win for both our countries."
More than 400 years ago, William Shakespeare wrote a riveting tragedy about a young, charismatic Danish prince who vowed to do the right thing in avenging his murdered father. That soon proved easier said than done. As a result, Hamlet couldn't quite ever act in time -- given all the ambiguities that such a sensitive prince first had to sort out. In the meantime, a lot of bodies piled up through his indecision and hesitancy. President Obama wanted to give us all universal health care. But then he discovered that the country was broke and that most people did not like his massive federal takeover. So we got both his health care and so far more than 1,000 exemptions from his landmark plan for unions, corporations and entire states.
The Obama administration figures that it has read the national mood well. This therapeutic generation of Americans loves to talk and worry about problems and then assumes that either someone else will solve them or they will go away on their own. And why not, since we have had periodic "energy crises" since 1974, have run budget deficits in most years since World War II, and have been warned about a looming Social Security meltdown for the last decade -- and yet remain wealthy and affluent. But now gasoline costs more than $4 a gallon in many places in California, and averages more than $3.50 nationwide. In response, the Obama administration is reportedly considering tapping into the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to increase supplies and drive down high prices brought on by a recovering world economy and unrest in the oil-rich Middle East.
America seems trapped in an exploding Middle East minefield. Revolts are breaking out amid the choke points of world commerce. Shiite populations are now restive in the Gulf monarchies. Not far away, Iran's youth are sick and tired of the country's seventh-century theocracy. Astride the Suez Canal, Egyptian demonstrators just threw out the Mubarak regime. On the coast of the southern Mediterranean, Tunisia and Libya are in upheaval, just a few hundred miles from Europe.
President Obama established a bipartisan debt-reduction commission -- and then ignored its findings, which called for unpopular reductions in entitlements and across-the-board spending cuts. His first two budgets led to the largest deficits in U.S. history. The ensuing $3 trillion dollars in red ink prompted the Tea Party movement and led to the largest midterm defeat of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives since 1938. No matter. The president has proposed a new budget with an even larger, $1.6 trillion deficit. That record federal borrowing prompted columnist Charles Krauthammer to describe it as Louis XV indulgence, an allusion to the wild royal spending that brought about the French Revolution. Even Newsweek editor at large Evan Thomas, who once gushed that Obama stood "above the world" as some "sort of God," called the president's new budget a "profile in cowardice." After Obama leaves office, a perfect storm of rising international interest rates, an anemic dollar and panic on the part of foreign lenders may force an end to this unhinged American rush to borrow and blow what it has not earned.
In times of massive deficits, why are we borrowing millions to subsidize profitable agribusiness? Lots of presidents have asked that question. George H.W. Bush tried to cut farm subsidies in the late 1980s. Bill Clinton did, too. George W. Bush wanted them ended as well. All failed. The so-called 1996 "Freedom to Farm Act" was supposed to stop farm supports for good, by offering the carrot of extending crop payouts to growers, regardless of current commodity prices, in exchange for ending the flow of federal money altogether after a slow weaning-off period of seven years. But when it came time to honor the agreement, suddenly a new rationale appeared -- that of post-9/11 security. So crop subsidies reappeared under the "Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002," on the dubious premise that in a new terrorist climate, Americans needed to ensure the prosperity of agribusiness. "Investment" in today's bureaucratese, remember, translates into the government borrowing more money to distribute to special interests.
California Gov. Jerry Brown must rapidly close a $25 billion budgetary shortfall. But right now it seems almost a hopeless task since the state's disastrous budget is a symptom, not the cause, of California's much larger nightmare. Take unemployment. It currently runs 12.6 percent in California, the nation's second-highest rate. Take livability. A recent Forbes magazine survey listing the most miserable 20 cities in the nation ranked four California municipalities among the index's five worst places to live.
The 2008 financial crash originated with a housing bubble. Not long ago, the cheap money policies of the Federal Reserve, the infusion of trillions of dollars in new foreign investment, and the misguided policies of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae all conspired to extend to millions of Americans lots of easy cash for inflated houses that they could hardly afford. Owning a house was seen as a "right" rather than the just rewards of household sacrifice, delayed gratification and budgetary discipline.
American reality has been turned upside down in just 20 years. Americans no longer count on their news to be filtered and shaped by the Associated Press or the New York Times. Nor do millions have it read to them in the evening by CBS, ABC or NBC anchorpersons -- not with the Internet, cable news and talk radio. Matt Drudge's website, "The Drudge Report," reaches far more Americans than does CBS anchor star Katie Couric. The old notion that America's most successful citizens are turned out by prestigious four-year universities -- the more private and Ivy League, the better -- overseen by disinterested professors is also nearing an end. Private for-profit trade schools and online colleges are certifying millions in particular skills.
