Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Why We Lost the War on Poverty
Take a look at the graph below. From the end of World War II until 1964 the poverty rate in this country was cut in half. Further, 94% of the change in the poverty rate over this period can be explained by changes in per capita income alone. Economic growth is clearly the most effective antipoverty weapon ever devised by man. The dotted line shows what would have happened had this trend continued. Economic growth would have reduced the number in poverty to a mere 1.4% of the population today ? a number so low that private charity could probably have taken care of any unmet needs.
Magic Words and Numbers
Barack Obama, the first president shaped by the celebratory culture in which every child who plays soccer gets a trophy, and the first whose campaign speeches were his qualification for the office, perhaps should not be blamed for thinking that saying things is tantamount to accomplishing things, and that good intentions *are* good deeds. So, his presidency is useful after all, because it illustrates the perils of government run by believers in magic words and numbers. The last progressive president promised Model Cities, with every child enjoying a Head Start en route to enjoying an Upward Bound into a Great Society. Today's progressive president also uses words -- and numbers -- magically emancipated from reality.
Saturday, February 8, 2014
From The Comedy Store
The Winter Olympic Games opened in Russia at the Black Sea resort of Sochi. This town is not far from Chechin terrorists, Georgian drug lords, and al-Qaeda cells. The U.S. Olympic athletes trained for Sochi last year by running for their lives in the interior of Mexico.
Friday, February 7, 2014
Killing Immigration Reform Is Tragedy for the GOP
Like Hamlet pacing the stage in angst-ridden doubt, Speaker John Boehner this week delivered the message that immigration reform is dead for 2014. It's not that he doesn't realize the issue is important. It's not that he doesn't believe our current immigration system is broken. It's just that he'd rather suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than take arms to end the sea of troubles brewing in the GOP. Boehner blames President Obama for his troubles. And he has a point -- up to a point. Republicans don't trust that the president will actually enforce a new law that includes stronger border security. Indeed, the president already has shown he's happy to ignore pesky provisions of laws with which he doesn't agree -- think not only his manipulation of Obamacare but also his decision to ignore federal drug statutes on marijuana, to name only two examples.
Unemployment Is Freedom
Obamacare will reduce American workforce participation by the equivalent of 2 million full-time jobs in 2017, according to a new report by the Congressional Budget Office. Work hours would be reduced by the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs in 2024, a tripling of the previous estimates. If you believe this report -- and I'm not sure why we pay this much attention to CBO projections -- you can then believe that Obamacare discourages work, pushes people out of the labor market and, consequently, leads to fewer people having jobs. Certainly, it is well within the parameters of political rhetoric for the opposition to assert that the CBO has found that Obamacare is "costing" or "killing" American jobs. It is no more a "lie" to say so than it is to claim that Mitt Romney was "shipping jobs overseas" or for an administration to assert that it "created jobs" -- or to use any of the other countless shorthand terms we use for economic consequences in political debate.
Obama's Work Trap
So let me get this right. Team Obama taxes millionaires who create jobs, while Obamacare creates incentives not to work at those jobs. No wonder recovery is so anemic. The policy here is to create fewer jobs and induce people to work less at those jobs. If my logic is correct, this runs counter to the most basic principles of our economy and our country. I thought the American Idea (see Jack Kemp and Paul Ryan) had at least something to do with the virtues of work, family and opportunity. But what I see from the Obama administration are policies that undermine these ideals.
Pop-Culture Titans Bow to the Pope?
The nastiest corners of popular culture in Hollywood and Manhattan usually love nothing better than denying their filthiness by hectoring orthodox Christians for the sex scandals lurking behind their "judgmental" ways. But the last few weeks have shown that the current aura around Pope Francis, and the false hope that he'll "go native" with the permissive crowd, is exploited in a different way. Rolling Stone put Pope Francis on the cover, which hardly puts a practicing Catholic's mind at ease. But perhaps it was only natural that this weed-and-leftist-screed magazine would try to absolve itself for its horrendous James Dean-like cover of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Free the Job-Locked Poets!
"Job-lock!" It's only February, but it's already my favorite word -- or phrase, I guess -- of the year. (Who knows, by December it may be shortened to "joblock.") It's not euphonious or edgy, but it does offer insight into the unreality of the Democrats' predicament. The Congressional Budget Office issued a politically explosive report this week, finding that Obamacare will reduce the number of hours Americans work by the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time jobs. This is different than killing 2.5 million jobs, Obamacare defenders are quick to insist. This will be a shortfall on the demand, not supply, side. In other words, people with health insurance will opt not to work in certain circumstances if they know they won't lose their coverage.
The Science of the Lambs
"It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter." Every time I read that verse from Proverbs I think of the kids' magazine Highlights that I used to read in the dentist's office. My only interest in the magazine was the hidden picture puzzles where you had to discover the objects hidden within the various pictures. The world as created by God is filled with hidden objects, and He has left it to man to discover those objects -- whether it be oil or coal beneath the earth's surface or the discovery of the atom. God is the Creator, and being created in His image, we as human beings were designed to create. One of the major tools used in the process of discovery and creation is science.
The Left's Valentine to Defiant Jihad-Enabler Lynne Stewart
What are you doing for Valentine's Day? Bleeding-heart progressives across the country are raising money for "an evening of music, song and sharing love for recently released People's Lawyer Lynne Stewart." Warm fuzzies for one of the world's most notorious terrorist helpers? I can't think of a more stomach-turning way to mark the holiday. Thanks to the Obama administration, Stewart walked out of prison on New Year's Eve. She is reportedly suffering stage-four breast cancer. Now she's passing the plate among her supporters, asking them to foot the bill for her health insurance deductibles and co-pays, as well as for a "special diet, vitamins and other healing methods." What, no Obamacare?
People Aren't All That Good
There are those who believe that in their natural state, people are kind, generous and good-natured. I, however, don't believe they are any of those things. Unless they are raised by parents with decent values and taught at a very early age that evil actions have dire consequences, people will grow up to be savages. I still recall an experiment in a college psych class some years ago. In test after test, three students seated behind mirrored glass were told that they were free to administer electric shocks to other students in a lab, and that nobody would be able to tell which of them was responsible. Well, no surprise to me, those holding the controls kept turning the knobs, believing they were delivering shock after shock. It was only later that they learned that their "victims" were being alerted by a noise and, so, in spite of their feigned spasms and grimaces, weren't actually being tortured.
The New Workers' Party
The Obama administration's response to the Congressional Budget Office's prediction that Obamacare will cause 2.5 million fewer Americans to work in the coming years is an opportunity for Republicans to seize the moral high ground on the issue of work. Rather than dispute the CBO's analysis -- which would have been awkward, as the White House has touted CBO's predictions in the past -- the administration is spinning the jobs loss as a kind of liberation. No longer tied down to the pesky need to earn a salary, some Americans will be able to follow their bliss. The is part of a pattern from this administration (it would be crude to call it a "war on work"), of incentives, disincentives, taxes, regulations and other decisions that make jobs more difficult to find and unemployment more entrenched.
The Health Care Myths We Live By
Swedish researchers report that antioxidants make cancers worse in mice. It's already known that the antioxidant beta-carotene exacerbates lung cancers in humans. Not exactly what you'd expect given the extravagant -- and incessant -- claims you hear made about the miraculous effects of antioxidants. In fact, they are either useless or harmful, conclude the editors of the prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine: "Beta-carotene, vitamin E and possibly high doses of vitamin A supplements are harmful." Moreover, "other antioxidants, folic acid and B vitamins, and multivitamin and mineral supplements are ineffective for preventing mortality or morbidity due to major chronic diseases." So useless are the supplements, write the editors, that we should stop wasting time even studying them: "Further large prevention trials are no longer justified."
At What Point Do People Scream 'Enough'?
President Obama must believe he's politically untouchable at this point, given his seeming indifference to the multitude of scandals, failures and other outrages for which he is directly responsible. I intended to write this column solely on the devastating Congressional Budget Office report putting the final nail in the Obamacare coffin -- or at least it would be the final nail in a sane world -- but everywhere I turn in the news, I'm bombarded with evidence of equally troubling nightmares. So, in fairness to balance and diversity, I decided not to dwell on CBO-gate alone but to share with you the smorgasbord of disasters.
Americans Learn to Succeed by Learning From Failure
America succeeds because Americans fail and forgive. That's the intriguing message -- or part of it -- of Megan McArdle's new book "The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success." McArdle, a Bloomberg blogger and columnist, stands out among economic writers, and not just because she's the only woman among them who is 6 feet 2 inches. She combines a shrewd knowledge of economics and practical experience with a writing style that every so often segues into comedy monologue. Americans fail a lot, she argues. Most new businesses fail. Most predictions are wrong. As the screenwriter William Goldman wrote about Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything."
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Viva Las Vegas
I am going out to Las Vegas the week of February 16 to talk to clients in the insurance industry on the weather risks we face in the coming years and decades. The title of the talk, "Going Forward by Way of Looking at the Past," is a play on words from the movie "Back to the Future." As I was putting this together, it struck me as odd that the man-made global warming argument even exists. I am presenting many examples of past weather events that are similar to today, and I marvel at how climate alarmists have gotten away with this. If you've seen something before, why should the same thing happening now be the result of something completely different? We have had cold winters, warm winters, heat, drought, hurricanes, tornadoes -- all this has happened before. How is all this somehow different, and why do some many people push it?
A Bridge Too Far-Fetched
New Jersey governor Chris Christie deserves to be defended. The gravamen of the media's case against Christie on Bridgegate seems to be that he is a "bully" -- which I painstakingly gleaned from the fact that the governor is called a "bully" 1 million times a night on MSNBC and in hundreds of blog postings and New York Times reports. Christie is not a bully. If anything, he's a pansy, a man terrified of the liberal media, of Wall Street, of Silicon Valley, of Obama, of Bruce Springsteen, of Mark Zuckerberg, of Chuck Schumer. It's a good bet he's afraid of his own shadow. (In fairness, his shadow is probably pretty big and scary.) About the only thing Christie doesn't seem afraid of is the buffet at Sizzler.
Hillary Has A 'Woody Allen Problem'
Dylan Farrow, now 28 years old, is the adopted daughter of Oscar-winning director Woody Allen. In "An Open Letter From Dylan Farrow," published in The New York Times, Dylan accuses her father of inappropriately touching her "for as long as I could remember." She said: "When I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house. He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother's electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me." Not good news for Mr. Allen -- or for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Here's why.
'Alone Yet Not Alone' vs. Academy's 'Ethics'
In a world where Woody Allen can get a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes at the same time his adopted daughter accuses him of sexually abusing her when she was a child (Allen has repeatedly denied it), and where a film "The Wolf of Wall Street" sets a record for use of the F-word, it is a wonderment that an obscure, low-budget film called "Alone Yet Not Alone" has had its Best Original Song Oscar nomination withdrawn for allegedly violating ethical rules. The Los Angeles Times writes that Cheryl Boone Isaacs, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, "told The Times that the 'key point' in the academy's nullification of (songwriter Bruce) Broughton's nomination was its violation of Rule 5.3, requiring that the credits of composer and lyricist be removed from the DVD of eligible songs sent to members of the music branch.