The election must be near! Barack "Drill baby drill" Obama copies another page from the GOP playbook

He wants more oil drilling in Alaska now. And announces it at the quietest part of the news cycle.

Another way President Obama is holding back the economy

James Pethokoukis:

But the wonks aren’t driving U.S trade policy in the Obama administration. The political team is. Its priority is passing healthcare reform. To pass healthcare reform, Obama needs his core union support. And a push for new trade agreements would alienate Big Labor.

So Obama has not nudged Congress to pass long-stalled treaties with Colombia, Korea and Panama. Instead, the emphasis has been on get-tough actions such as slapping preliminary duties on tires from China and bricks from Mexico.

Obama borrows from Nixon playbook in bid to lower health care costs

What is it with left-of-center public servants emulating Richard Nixon these days?

As Reason's Steve Chapman sees it, President Obama has hopped on the Nixon policy bandwagon in a big way:

So how does Obama intend to make health insurance affordable? He wants the federal government to regulate premiums from coast to coast.

This approach mirrors Nixon's disastrous wage and price control program. Chapman relates how it worked out for Nixon:

Nixon's own chief economist, Herbert Stein, admitted that the administration eventually had to give up because the program was "a total disaster." Among the unwanted side effects: "Cattle were being withheld from market, chickens were drowned, and the food store shelves were being emptied." Motorists had to wait in line for hours to buy gasoline. At one point, Americans faced a nationwide shortage of toilet paper. Yes, toilet paper. Oh, and the inflation rate didn't fall. It rose.

I wonder what President Obama will try when he finds out that price controls don't work. Ford-style sloganeering?

"It's the economic uncertainty, stupid"

Jim Geraghty at NRO:

Did he believe that the healthcare reform and related tax proposals, the proposed cap and trade legislation and the consequent increase in energy costs, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the agitation for higher taxes on the wealthy, the proposal to increase corporate tax rates, the proposal to increase capital gains taxes, the trial floating of ideas such as a national VAT and removal of the earnings cap on FICA, the more robust regulatory bureaucracy . . . did he believe any of these uncertainties were depressing hiring?

He stated yes, without a doubt and proceeded to relay a conversation he had with a local chemical company regarding their 2010 capital expenditure budget. When asked what the company intended to invest in 2010, the response was ‘nothing,’ not due to a paucity of good opportunities, but because it was impossible for the company to calculate a rate of return given all the uncertainty over cost of labor, energy prices, regulatory mandates and the like.

It’s obvious to me that the Obama administration has no grasp on what their 'flavor of the day’ tax and regulatory proposals do to business decision making,

Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, are you listening? President Obama?

via Glenn

Pure wind: President Obama's unconvincing talk about jobs

When I hear Obama talk about jobs, his words remind me of a passage from one of George Orwell's essays:

political language ... designed ... to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Why is Obama so unconvincing on the topic of jobs? The Anchoress gives one of the reasons:

The president says he wants to create jobs, and to do that, he is surrounding himself with people who have never created them.

As evidence, she links to this chart from Investors Business Daily:


I don't know how accurate the chart is, but the message rings true.

As I've written before, politicians have little power to create jobs. But they can kill jobs very easily by creating uncertainty about what government will do next.

Obama's SOTU: a huge contradiction & a collapsed soufflé

[UPDATE: Don't-Say-I-Didn't-Warn-You Department: The "answer to everything" link below delivers an oddly apt simulation of Washington DC as experienced by the average voter.]

Peggy Noonan spots the contradiction:

The central fact of the speech was the contradiction at its heart. It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place.

With her speechwriter's eye, she also picks up on subtle-but-telling indications that Obama has given up on the health care bill:

Waxing boring on the virtues of the [health care] bill was a rhetorical way to obscure the fact that it is dead. . . . The bill will now get lost in the mists and disappear. It is a collapsed soufflé in an unused kitchen in the back of an empty house.

For what it's worth, a poll on the non-partisan Open Congress website currently shows 78% of participants opposing the Senate version of the healthcare reform bill.

President Obama's first State of the Union address

Clive Crook of the Atlantic boils it down nicely :

[President Obama] conveyed almost no sense that the country was sending him a message and that he was paying attention.

"when all Democrats are indispensable, every Democrat can be an extortionist"

George Will, writing about the health care bill in the WaPo:

So there have been serial purchases of 60th votes for health legislation. This squalid commerce (special benefits tailored for Florida's Medicare Advantage clients, for Louisiana and Nebraska, and for union members) did almost as much as the legislation itself to discredit the entire sorry business.

George has been full of energy lately. I think the Obama administration has invigorated him.

Advice for President Obama

You've had a rough week.

My suggestion: invite President Clinton to lunch and pick his brain on the fine points of triangulation. It's time for some mid-course corrections.

Obama's "uncertainty tax"

I think the phrase has a good chance of catching on.

When will the left--and the president--learn that there is really very little that government can do to create jobs other than (1) foster a stable, predictable regulatory/tax climate, and (2) get out of the way.

Things like the recent jobs summit are little more than PR blather and window dressing.

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, and what he should do with it

Mickey Kaus nails it.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has a survey of reactions.

Obama on treasury-draining health care entitlements: "We'll make it up on volume"

The Wall Street Journal's reaction to President Obama's health care speech:

Mr. Obama began by depicting a crisis in the entitlement state, noting that "our health-care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers," especially Medicare. . . .

On this score he's right. Medicare's unfunded liability—the gap between revenues and promised benefits—is currently some $37 trillion over the next 75 years. Yet the President uses this insolvency as an argument to justify the creation of another health-care entitlement, this time for most everyone under age 65. It's like a variation on the old Marx Brothers routine: "The soup is terrible and the portions are too small."

If a president wants to create jobs, the essential first step is to create a predictable regulatory environment

According to Jerry Bowyer, business people think Obama is failing at this. Or at least they are behaving that way:

America isn't hiring precisely because of government policy. Small business owners, who are usually the first into and the first out of the job pool, are standing by the fence and watching. They are paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. If they hire someone who ends up doing poorly, will they be able to fire that person? Will they have to pay their health care bills after they've been terminated? If so, for how long? ...

Jobs aren't languishing despite the government's best efforts. They're languishing because of them.

via Glenn

Health care reform: Obama shies from the cold stove because Clinton was burned by a hot one

David Brooks explains:

The great paradox of the age is that Barack Obama, the most riveting of recent presidents, is leading us into an era of Congressional dominance. And Congressional governance is a haven for special interest pleading and venal logrolling.

When the executive branch is dominant you often get coherent proposals that may not pass. When Congress is dominant, as now, you get politically viable mishmashes that don’t necessarily make sense.

Shelby Steele on why people change

Something about this phrase (at 5:00 min) stopped me short, in a good way:

People don't change because the government intervenes with a social program. People change when they become exhausted with their suffering.

Despite the subtitle, his book on Obama is well worth reading today.

On being pigeonholed as victims

Stephen Green commenting on President Obama's speech last week:

Why is it Democrats always speak to soldiers as veterans as just another grievance group in need of more benefits? Support the mission — lead, command! — and the troops will follow. Treating them as victims… well, I can tell you from the veterans who make up damn near my entire neighborhood… that stuff doesn’t play here.

Peggy Noonan: Home

A nice bit from Peggy Noonan's analysis of President Obama's inaugural address:

Mr. Obama suggested . . . that while Ronald Reagan was wrong in saying, in his first inaugural, that “government is not the answer, government is the problem,” Bill Clinton too was wrong in saying, in a State of the Union, that “the era of big government is over.” Such talk, Mr. Obama suggested, is beside the point. “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” Programs and policies that are effective should move forward, and those that are not “will end.”"

"Obama's likely most frequently repeated promise during the past three months"

Mark Tapscott reminds us what it was:

a tax cut for 95 percent of working Americans.

Mark's conclusion:

When [Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid] forget – as they surely will – why their chief executive could not possibly have been elected without speaking in the language of tax cuts, it will again be clear that America remains a center-right nation.

He's also on target with this:

Millions of white Baby Boomers saw in Barack Obama an opportunity to prove once and for all that they were not racists.

The energy industry; what role should government play in it?

Much of Obama and McCain's energy rhetoric is blather. Especially the part about energy independence. As Megan McArdle points out, energy independence from foreign oil is a pipedream.

In contrast to the candidates, John Tierney does a nice job of laying out the proper role of government: it should impose a carbon tax, then promptly step aside*. It should then watch from the sidelines to see which technologies private industry chooses to invest in and build.

In the comments to Tierney's article, Amory Lovins chimes in:

“Nuclear power and all other ways to produce or save energy should be allowed to compete fairly, at honest prices, regardless of their type, technology, size, location, or ownership.”

Glenn Reynolds & Dr. Helen interview interviewed Lovins a few months ago.

* Note: Stepping aside means eliminating energy production subsidies for all types of energy: nuclear, oil, gas, coal, wind, solar, geothermanl, and so on. Note, however, that the federal government should fund basic scientific research and early stage R&D for a variety of energy technologies.