Wise Words about Fear Mongering

Charles Krauthammer is an intelligent, articulate writer who often makes lots of sense.  I'm putting his latest piece here in its entirety.

Deseret News Metro 03/03/2013, Page G02

Obama making sequester look like Armageddon WASHINGTON — “ T HE WORST-CASE SCENARIO for us,” a leading anti-budget-cuts lobbyist told The Washington Post, “is the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens.” Think about that. Worst case? That a government drowning in debt should cut back by 2.2 percent — and the country survives. That a government now borrowing 35 cents of every dollar it spends reduces that borrowing by two cents “and nothing bad really happens.” Oh, the humanity! A normal citizen might think this a good thing. For reactionary liberalism, however, whatever sum our ever-inflating government happens to spend today (now double what Bill Clinton spent in his last year) is the Platonic ideal — the reduction of which, however minuscule, is a national calamity. Or certainly should be. Otherwise, people might get the idea that we can shrink government, and live on. Hence the president’s message. If the “sequestration” — automatic spending cuts — goes into effect, the skies will fall. Plane travel jeopardized, carrier groups beached, teachers furloughed. The administration has every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity — cuts the nation survives. Are they threatening to pare back consultants, conferences, travel and other nonessential fluff? Hardly. It shall be air-traffic control. Meat inspection. Weather forecasting. A 2011 GAO report gave a sampling of the vastness of what could be cut, consolidated and rationalized in Washington: 44 overlapping job training programs, 18 for nutrition assistance, 82 on teacher quality, 56 dealing with financial literacy, more than 20 for homelessness, etc. Total annual cost: $100-$200 billion, about two to five times the entire domestic sequester. Are these on the chopping block? No sir. It’s firemen first. That’s the phrase coined in 1976 by legendary Washington Monthly Editor Charlie Peters to describe the way government functionaries beat back budget cuts. Dare suggest a nick in the city budget and the mayor immediately shuts down the firehouse. The DMV back office stacked with nepotistic incompetents remains intact. Shrink it and no one would notice. Sell the firetruck — the people scream and the city council falls silent about any future cuts. After all, the sequester is just one-half of 1 percent of GDP. It amounts to 1.4 cents on the dollar of nondefense spending, 2 cents overall. Because of this year’s payroll tax increase, millions of American workers have had to tighten their belts by precisely 2 percent. They found a way. Washington, spending $3.8 trillion, cannot? If so, we might as well declare bankruptcy now and save the attorneys’ fees. The problem with sequestration, of course, is that the cuts are across the board and do not allow money to move between accounts. It’s dumb because it doesn’t discriminate. Fine. Then change the law. That’s why we have a Congress. Discriminate. Prioritize. That’s why we have budgets. Except that the Democratic Senate hasn’t passed one in four years. And the White House, which proposed the sequester in the first place, had 18 months to establish rational priorities among accounts — and did nothing. When the GOP House passed an alternative that cut where the real money is — entitlement spending — President Obama threatened a veto. Meaning, he would have insisted that the sequester go into effect — the very same sequester he now tells us will bring on Armageddon. Good grief. The entire sequester would have reduced last year’s deficit from $1.33 trillion to $1.24 trillion. A fraction of a fraction. Nonetheless, insists Obama, such a cut is intolerable. It has to be “balanced” — i.e., largely replaced — by yet more taxes. Which demonstrates that, for Obama, this is not about deficit reduction, which interests him not at all. The purpose is purely political: to complete his Election Day victory by breaking the Republican opposition. At the fiscal cliff, Obama broke — and split — the Republicans on taxes. With the sequester, he intends to break them on spending. Make the cuts as painful as possible, and watch the Republicans come crawling for a “balanced” (i.e., tax hiking) deal. In the past two years, House Republicans stopped cold Obama’s left-liberal agenda. Break them now and the road is open to resume enactment of the expansive, entitlement-state liberalism that Obama proclaimed in his second inaugural address. But he cannot win if “nothing bad really happens.” Indeed, he’d look both foolish and cynical for having cried wolf. His incentive to deliberately make the most painful and socially disruptive cuts possible (say, oh, releasing illegal immigrants from detention) is enormous. And alarming. Hail Armageddon.

Passing along good information

Took this from a longer article, but thought it important enough to repeat.

Believing Polls? Hardly.

I was reading today about how polls are taken.  Most of them require land phone lines and people who are willing to answer the call, and the questions.  I don't answer when I get a call (I know my mother doesn't either).  It makes me wonder just who does.

Then there is the writing of the poll questions.  They can be skewed to solicit certain kinds of responses.  After all, they are multiple choice so the choices can be whatever the poll taker wants the results to show.

Think how you would answer the old standard, "Have you stopped beating your wife?"  What if your possible responses were:  1) Recently    2) Maybe next week   3) Not yet.

The pollster could therefore state that almost all respondents were beaters, but some had stopped and a small percentage would be stopping soon.  Hardly realistic, but an accurate representation of the poll results.

Since most polls are media related, it is little wonder that they run liberal.  That's why I'm skeptical of their results.

Obama and fiscal cliffs

I don't know if anyone much reads this, but it makes me feel better to put it out there.  Obviously, there are some political cartoonists whose work I enjoy.  I'm sharing a few of those today.

I have wondered if President Obama really had an idea what his policies were doing to regular people.  I know he considers himself far about the average citizen.

He makes noises in speeches about how Congress wouldn't work with him.  Even his own party couldn't support some of his ideas, and he has never offered a budget that Congress could take seriously.

I think we are in for a bad ride, and if President Obama gets reelected, our country is in some very deep trouble.

Media spin

The Mainstream Media is trying hard to make sure Barack Obama wins the 2012 election.  There is very little written or spoken on the major networks that is not glowing about him.  On the other hand, the microscope never wavers from Mitt Romney.  Things he says--no matter what the subject--are dissected, criticized, and enlarged for days.  President Obama can say whatever, even things that are proven false or misleading and he is almost never called on it.  He's golden.

Mitt Romney can say nothing that is positively reported by the major networks or national press.

Kathleen Parker provided an excellent example from a couple of months ago:

 I left out her entertaining account of how that make-believe strategy session may have sounded.

Romney said he would repeal Obamacare because he has always says that.  How would the pundits have described his speech if he had modified it to fit what he thought his audience wanted to hear?  They would have pilloried him as a deceiver.

I'll conclude with more of Kathleen Parker's words about the use of the word Obamacare:

I agree.

One more example from the newspaper today:

It's not just me who has noticed.

I forgot that I'd saved an article written by Charles Krauthammer, who explains this same idea in a very clear and erudite way.  This is not the entire piece, just the paragraphs I thought were the most revealing.

Business and Obama

President Obama has had few real jobs.  He was a professor for a short time, but I know of no other real jobs.  Being a Senator or Representative is supposed to be a public service job, but it is not full time (unless you count all the time spent working to get reelected).  Community Organizing is not a job one sees advertised in the classifieds.  If he has actually worked somewhere else, no one talks about it.

So, admittedly, he knows nothing about the difficulties and rewards of creating and maintaining a business--accounts payable, receivable, capital, tax accounting, personnel, materials, organization, etc.

Even ignorance is no excuse, these same entrepreneurs paid the taxes that made everything possible.  Many of them probably worked on some of these things too.

This last comic really sums it up.