American National Priorities

2005

2005-11-14-USAT-Wolf-Walker

A ‘fiscal hurricane’ on the horizon
By Richard Wolf
USA Today, 2005-11-14

2007

2007-08-14-FT-Grant-Walker

Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned
By Jeremy Grant in Washington
Financial Times, 2007-08-14

The US government is on a ‘burning platform’
of unsustainable policies and practices
with
fiscal deficits,
chronic healthcare underfunding,
immigration and
overseas military commitments
threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon,
the country’s top government inspector has warned.

David Walker, comptroller general of the US,
issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future
in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”.

These include
“dramatic” tax rises,
slashed government services and
the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned
there were “striking similarities” between
America’s current situation and
the factors that brought down Rome,
including

• “declining moral values and political civility at home,


• an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and


• fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

“Sound familiar?” Mr Walker said.
“In my view, it’s time to learn from history and
take steps to ensure the American Republic
is the first to stand the test of time.”
Mr Walker’s views carry weight because he is a non-partisan figure
in charge of the Government Accountability Office,
often described as the investigative arm of the US Congress.

While most of its studies are commissioned by legislators, about 10 per cent –
such as the one containing his latest warnings –
are initiated by the comptroller general himself.

In an interview with the Financial Times,
Mr Walker said he had mentioned some of the issues before
but now wanted to “turn up the volume”.
Some of them were too sensitive for others in government to
“have their name associated with”.

“I’m trying to sound an alarm and issue a wake-up call,” he said.
“As comptroller general I’ve got an ability to look longer-range
and take on issues that others may be hesitant,
and in many cases may not be in a position,
to take on.

“One of the concerns is obviously we are a great country
but we face major sustainability challenges
that we are not taking seriously enough,”
said Mr Walker,
who was appointed during the Clinton administration to the post,
which carries a 15-year term.

The fiscal imbalance meant the US was
“on a path toward an explosion of debt”.
“With
the looming retirement of baby boomers,
spiralling healthcare costs,
plummeting savings rates and
increasing reliance on foreign lenders,
we face unprecedented fiscal risks,”
said Mr Walker, a former senior executive at PwC auditing firm.
Current US policy on
education, energy, the environment, immigration and Iraq
also was on an “unsustainable path”.

“Our very prosperity is placing greater demands on our physical infrastructure.
Billions of dollars will be needed
to modernise everything from highways and airports
to water and sewage systems.
The recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis was a sobering wake-up call.”

Mr Walker said he would offer to brief the would-be presidential candidates
next spring.

“They need to make fiscal responsibility and inter-generational equity
one of their top priorities.
If they do, I think we have a chance to turn this around but if they don’t,
I think the risk of a serious crisis rises considerably”.

2007-08-15-Raimondo-Walker

Decline and Fall
U.S. comptroller general: America is Rome
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com, 2007-08-15

[This is Justin Raimondo’s retelling of, and expansion on,
David Walker’s 2007-08-14-FT-Grant-Walker warnings.]

2008

2008-01-09-Samuelson

Promises They Can't Keep
By Robert J. Samuelson
Washington Post Op-Ed, 2008-01-09

[Paragraph numbers and emphasis are added.]

[1]
The big lie of campaign 2008 -- so far -- is that
the presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican,
will take care of our children.
Listening to these politicians, you might think they will.
Doing well by children has now passed motherhood and apple pie
as an idol that all candidates must worship.

[2]
“We will do whatever it takes to make America a better country,
to give our kids a better future,”
says Mike Huckabee, winner of the Republican Iowa caucuses.

[3]
“We will deliver for our children, our grandchildren
and our great-grandchildren,”
claims Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic winner in Iowa.

[4]
“We’re going to reclaim the future for our children,”
says Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton.

[5]
Actually, these are throwaway lines, completely disconnected from reality.

[6]
Our children face a future of

• rising taxes,


• squeezed -- and perhaps falling -- public services and


• aging -- perhaps deteriorating -- public infrastructure
  (roads, sewers, transit systems).

Today’s young workers and children are about to be engulfed by
a massive income transfer from young to old
that will perversely make it harder for them to afford their own children.

[7]
No major candidate of either party proposes to do much about this,
even though the facts are well known.

[8]
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid --
three programs that go overwhelmingly to older Americans --
already represent more than 40 percent of federal spending.
A new report from the Congressional Budget Office projects that
these programs could easily grow to about 70 percent of the budget by 2030.
Without implausibly large deficits,
the only way to preserve most other government programs would be
huge tax increases (about 40 percent from today’s levels).
Avoiding the tax increases would require draconian cuts in other programs
(about 60 percent).
Workers and young families, not retirees,
would bear the brunt of either higher taxes or degraded public services.

[9]
Similar pressures, though less ferocious,
exist at the state and local levels.
Schools, police, libraries and parks will be squeezed by
the need to pay benefits for retired government workers.
A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that
states have promised retired workers
$2.7 trillion in pension, health care and other benefits
during the next three decades.
Only about $2 trillion has been set aside;
the rest would come from annual budgets.

[10]
Medicaid,
a joint federal-state program with states paying about 40 percent of the costs,
represents another drain;
about two-thirds of its spending stems from the aged and disabled.
Roads, water and mass transit may also be shortchanged.
States and localities pay about three-quarters of their costs.

[11]
But facing these facts would expose candidates to three daunting problems.

[12]
First:
Lightening the burden on the young requires
cutting retirement benefits for the old --
raising eligibility ages,
being less generous to richer retirees and
making beneficiaries pay more for Medicare.
Simply increasing taxes or cutting other programs won’t work.
The problem is not just closing the budget deficit.

[13]
Second:
We can’t wait.
Ideally, prospective retirees would have received several decades’ warning,
but we’ve delayed too long.
We need to cut benefits for baby boomers and even some existing retirees.
They are the source of mounting costs.

[14]
Third:
Even if retirement benefits were cut,
pressures for higher taxes and lower public services would not disappear.
Social Security and Medicare are part of the nation’s social fabric.
Although individuals’ benefits can be responsibly trimmed,
the growth in the elderly population (a doubling by 2030)
and rapidly rising health-care costs
would still expand total spending.
The increases would simply be smaller.

[15]
A moral cloud hangs over our candidates.
Just how much today’s federal policies,
favoring the old over the young
and the past over the future,
should be altered ought to be a central issue of the campaign.
But knowing the unpopular political implications,
our candidates have lapsed into calculated quiet.

[16]
They pay lip service to children
but ignore the actual programs that will shape their future.
The hypocrisy is especially striking in Obama.
He courts the young, promises “straight talk”
and offers himself as the agent of “change.”
But his conspicuous omissions constitute “crooked talk”
and silently endorse the status quo.
[But don’t forget “Mr. Straight Talk”, John McCain.]

[17]
The insidious nature of this problem is that
because the spending increases for the elderly occur gradually,
the pressures on taxes and other government programs
will also intensify gradually.
A crucial moment to clarify the stakes
and compel politicians to make choices
probably won’t occur until it’s too late.

[18]
The longer we delay -- and we’ve done so now for several decades,
because the strains created by an aging society have been obvious that long --
the more likely that eventual “solutions” will be unfair to both young and old.
To acknowledge that and to come to grips with it
would constitute genuine “change.”

2008-07-09-Samuelson

The Candor Gap
By Robert J. Samuelson
Washington Post, 2008-07-09

2008-07-14-NYT-Peterson

Spending $1 Billion to Restore Fiscal Sanity
By JOHN HARWOOD
New York Times, 2008-07-14

[An excerpt; emphasis is added.]

[Peter G. Peterson] aims to startle voters and politicians alike,
and summon them to the task of closing
the long-term imbalance between
what the government will take in and
what it has promised to pay out,
most notably through Social Security and Medicare.
...

“Has something fundamental happened to the character of our people
or our societal structure,
or has no one stepped up to provide the leadership?”
Mr. Peterson asked.
“We’re not going to know that until we try.”

...

In a recent Pew Research Center poll,
the federal deficit ranked behind
the economy, education, jobs,
health care, energy, Social Security and Iraq
among voters’ priorities.

Those rankings are precisely what Mr. Peterson hopes to change.
The Web site of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation flashes a frightening fiscal fact:
The looming retirement of 78 million baby boomers
has generated unpaid entitlement obligations
that are triple the size of the entire economy —
$175,000 for each American.

2008-10-22-Samuelson

Young Voters, Get Mad
By Robert J. Samuelson
Washington Post, 2008-10-22

[Its conclusion; emphasis is added.]

What should you -- the young -- do?

First, get angry --
at the media and think tanks
for discussing this problem in misleading euphemisms
(for instance, the problem is not an “entitlements crisis”;
it’s excessive benefits for the old);
at the candidates for exploiting your innocence; and
at yourself for your gullibility.

Next, start picketing AARP.
It’s the citadel of seniors’ political power
and the country’s most powerful “special interest.”
It wields a virtual veto over roughly two-fifths of the federal budget.
Your activist groups ought to be there every day with placards reading
“Give Us Generational Justice” or “Get Off Our Backs.”
Ask direct questions of federal candidates about what benefits they’d cut,
which they’d keep and why.

You need to appeal to the shame and guilt of older Americans
by reminding them that their present self-absorption
is not a victimless exercise.
Only if older Americans act on their rhetorical pledges
of worrying about their children
will the political climate change.
If you -- the young -- don’t stand up for yourselves, believe me,
your elders and your politicians won’t.

2009

2009-03-29-Lachman

Welcome to America, the World’s Scariest Emerging Market
By Desmond Lachman
Washington Post Outlook, 2009-03-29

[1]
Back in the spring of 1998, when Boris Yeltsin was still at Russia’s helm,
I led a group of global investors to Moscow
to find out firsthand where the Russian economy was headed.
My long career with the International Monetary Fund and on Wall Street
had taken me to “emerging markets”
throughout Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America,
and I thought I’d seen it all.
Yet I still recall the shock I felt at a meeting in Russia’s dingy Ministry of Finance,
where I finally realized how a handful of young oligarchs
were bringing Russia’s economy to ruin
in the pursuit of their own selfish interests [cf.],
despite the supposed brilliance of Anatoly Chubais,
Russia’s economic czar at the time.

[2]
At the time,
I could not imagine that anything remotely similar
could happen in the United States.
Indeed, I shared the American conceit that
most emerging-market nations had poorly developed institutions
and would do well to emulate Washington and Wall Street.
These days, though, I’m hardly so confident.
Many economists and analysts are worrying that
the United States might go the way of Japan,
which suffered a “lost decade”
after its own real estate market fell apart in the early 1990s.
But I’m more concerned that

the United States is coming to resemble
Argentina, Russia and other so-called emerging markets,
both in what led us to the crisis,
and in how we’re trying to fix it.

[3]
Over the past year, I’ve been getting Russia flashbacks
as I witness the AIG debacle
as well as the collapse of Bear Sterns and a host of other financial institutions.
Much like the oligarchs did in Russia,
a small group of traders and executives at onetime venerable institutions
have brought the U.S. and global financial systems to their knees
with their reckless risk-taking -- with other people’s money --
for their personal gain.

[4]
Negotiating with Argentina’s top officials
during their multiple financial crises in the 1990s
was always an ordeal,
and sparring with Domingo Cavallo,
the country’s Harvard-trained finance minister at the time,
was particularly trying.
One always had the sense that, despite their supreme arrogance,
the country’s leaders never had a coherent economic strategy
and that
major decisions were always made on the run.
I never thought that was how policy was made in the United States --
until, that is, I saw how totally at sea
Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy F. Geithner and
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke
have appeared so many times during
our country’s ongoing economic and financial storm.

[5]
The parallels between U.S. policymaking and what we see in emerging markets
are clearest
in how we’ve mishandled the banking crisis.
We delude ourselves that our banks face liquidity problems,
rather than deeper solvency problems,
and we try to fix it all on the cheap
just like any run-of-the-mill emerging market economy would try to do.
And after years of lecturing Asian and Latin American leaders
about the importance of consistency and transparency
in sorting out financial crises,
we fail on both counts:
In March 2008, one investment bank, Bear Stearns,
is bailed out because it is thought to be
too interconnected with the rest of the banking system to fail.
However, six months later, another investment bank, Lehman Brothers --
for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from Bear Stearns
in its financial market inter-connectedness --
is allowed to fail,
with catastrophic effects on global financial markets.

[6]
In visits to Asian capitals
during the region’s financial crisis in the late 1990s,
I often heard Asian reformers
such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew or Japan’s Eisuke Sakakibara
complain about how the incestuous relationship
between governments and large Asian corporate conglomerates
stymied real economic change.
How fortunate, I thought then,
that the United States was not similarly plagued by crony capitalism!
However, watching
Goldman Sachs’s seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs
as well as the way that Republicans and Democrats alike
tiptoed around reforming Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae --
among the largest campaign contributors to Congress --
made me wonder if
the differences between the United States and the Asian economies
were only a matter of degree.

---

[7]
On Wall Street there is an old joke that
the longest river in the emerging-market economies is “de Nile.”
Yet how often do U.S. leaders
respond to growing signs of economic dysfunctionality
by spouting nationalistic rhetoric
that echoes the speeches of Latin American demagogues
like Peru’s Alan Garcia in the 1980s and Argentina’s Carlos Menem in the 1990s?
(Even Garcia, currently in his second go-around as Peru’s president,
seems to have grown up somewhat.)
But
instead of facing our problems we
extol the resilience of the U.S. economy,
praise the most productive workers in the world, and
go on and on
about America’s inherent ability to extricate itself from any crisis.
And we ignore our proclivity as a nation to

spend, year in year out, more than we produce,
put off dealing with long-term problems, and
engage in grandiose long-term programs
that as a nation we can ill afford.

[8]
A singular characteristic of an emerging market heading for deep trouble is
a seemingly suicidal tendency
to become overly indebted to foreign creditors.
That tendency underlay
the spectacular collapse of the Thai, Indonesian and Korean currencies in 1997.
It also led Russia to default on its debt in 1998
and plunged Argentina into its economic depression in 2001.
Yet we too seem to have little difficulty
becoming increasingly indebted
to the tune of a few hundred billion dollars a year.
To make matters worse, we do so to countries like
China, Russia and an assortment of Middle Eastern oil producers --
none of which is particularly well disposed to us.

[9]
Like Argentina in its worst moments,
we never seem to question whether
it is reasonable to expect foreigners to keep financing our extravagance,
and we forget
the bad things that happen to the Argentinas or Hungarys of the world
when foreigners stop financing their excesses.
So instead of laying out a realistic plan for increasing our national savings,
we choose not to face up to the Social Security and Medicare crises
that lie ahead,
embarking instead on massive spending programs that --
whatever their long-run merits might be --
we simply cannot afford.

[10]
After experiencing a few emerging-market crises,
I get the sense of watching the same movie over and over.
All too often, a tragic part of that movie is
the failure of the countries’ policymakers to hear
the loud cries of canaries in the coal mine.
Before running up further outsized budget deficits,
should we not heed the markets that now see a 10 percent probability that
the U.S. government will default on its sovereign debt in the next five years?
And should we not be paying close attention to
the Chinese central bank governor’s musings that
he does not feel comfortable with the $1 trillion of U.S. government debt
that the Chinese central bank already owns,
let alone adding to those holdings?

[11]
In the twilight of my career, when I am hopefully wiser than before,
I have come to regret how
the IMF and the U.S. Treasury all too often lectured leaders in emerging markets
on how to “get their house in order” --
without the slightest thought that
the United States might fare no better when facing a major economic crisis.
Now, I fear time is running out for our own policymakers
to mend their ways
and offer real leadership
to extricate the United States from its worst economic calamity since the 1930s.
If we insist on improvising and not facing our real problems,
we might soon lose our status as a country to be emulated
and join the ranks of those nations we have patronized for so long.

Desmond Lachman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,
was previously chief emerging market strategist at Salomon Smith Barney
and deputy director of
the International Monetary Fund’s Policy and Review Department.

2009-06-02-Examiner-Healey-problems-due-to-voters

Voters are the cause of America’s fiscal mess

By: Gene Healy
Washington Examiner, 2009-06-02

[A column that points out that it is wrong to just blame politicians
for the financial disaster coming.]

[1]
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the fiscal mess we’re in. By ramming through a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, President George W. Bush launched the biggest expansion of entitlements in four decades.

[2]
President Obama has added insult to injury by pushing through a $789 billion “stimulus” package, and attempting to, as the New Republic’s John Judis puts it, transform “the American relationship of state to economy,” with a budget that envisons a public sector more like France’s or Sweden’s.

[3]
The result is that, in the midst of the Baby Boom generation’s retirement, we’re facing a 2009 deficit of nearly $1.8 trillion--larger than the entire federal budget in 2000.

[4]
There’s no end of finger-pointing in our Red-Team/Blue-Team battles over fiscal incontinence. But there’s one group that rarely gets the blame it merits. That’s us. When you look at the positions embraced by the ordinary American voter, you start to suspect that we’re getting the government we deserve.

[5]
Sixty percent of Americans say the federal government has too much power and too much money, according to a Rasmussen poll released last month. And they’re right. But what are they willing to do about it?

[6]
In 2007, the Harris polling firm looked into that question, and the answer was “not much.” Very few of us are willing to support the spending reductions necessary to get our fiscal house in order. Harris reports that “hardly anyone would cut Medicaid (4%)... Social Security (2%) or Medicare (1%)”--among the biggest chunks of the federal budget.

[7]
The overwhelming majority of respondents to the Harris poll rejected higher taxes to handle the deficit; the only increases they’d support are in “sin” taxes on alcohol and tobacco. Fair enough: taxes are far too high as it stands.

[8]
If you’re not going to increase revenue, though, you’ve got to reduce spending. So what does the public want to slash? “Space programs top the list by a wide margin (51%).” Keep in mind that NASA spends less than $18 billion out of a $3.9 trillion federal budget.

[9]
The GOP is known as the party of smaller government, and polling results reflect that sentiment. In the Pew Research Center’s 2007 political values survey, 68 percent of self-identified Republicans said they’d rather have a smaller government providing fewer services; only 28 percent of Democrats said the same.

[10]
But the Harris data show that Republicans don’t support cuts in any area that represents a large percentage of the federal budget. Democrats were more willing to trim Pentagon outlays (22 percent of federal spending), but overall, fewer than one in three Americans would support defense cuts.

[11]
Add up defense, health care, and Social Security, and you find that the public has declared more than two-thirds of the federal budget off limits. Nondefense discretionary spending--the territory on which most budget fights take place--is 17 percent.

[12]
We could (and should) shutter the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, and Homeland Security (for starters) but even that wouldn’t begin to dig us out of the hole we’re in.

[13]
Analyzing two recent government reports on Social Security and Medicare, economist Bruce Bartlett reports that “federal taxes would have to rise by roughly 81% to pay all the benefits promised by these programs under current law.”

[14]
Yet the American voter wants to head off our looming fiscal apocalypse by giving a haircut to NASA and raising taxes on booze and smokes. Sure, that’ll cover it.

[15]
Few politicians can get through a speech without lavishly praising “the wisdom of the American people.” Interestingly, the people themselves are less sure that they’re quite so wise.

[16]
The Pew survey reports that “the public is increasingly suspicious of itself,” with fewer Americans than ever expressing confidence in “the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions.”

[17]
H.L. Mencken once described democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” We’re going to get it “good and hard” in the coming decades, and it won’t be pleasant. But the pain we’ll suffer may help us learn a badly needed lesson.

Examiner columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency.

2009-12-07-Samuelson-health-care-nation

Health-care nation
Medical spending threatens everything else
By Robert J. Samuelson
Washington Post Op-Ed, 2009-12-07

[1]
President Obama’s critics sometimes say that
he is engineering a government takeover of health care
or even introducing “socialized medicine” into America.
These allegations are wildly overblown.
Government already dominates health care, one-sixth of the economy.
It pays directly or indirectly for roughly half of all health costs.
Medicine is pervasively regulated, from drug approvals to nursing-home rules.
There is no “free market” in health care.

[2]
What’s happening is the reverse, which is more interesting and alarming:
Health care is taking over government.
Consider:
In 1980, the federal government spent $65 billion on health care;
that was 11 percent of all its spending.
By 2008, health outlays had grown to $752 billion --
25 percent of the total, one dollar in four.

[The figures get even more dramatic if you go back to, say, 1950.
As to the priorities back then,
I can recall no political angst over
the far lower spending on health-care back then.
Where were the politicians arguing over it back then,
or the newspaper headlines concerning it?
The only major health-care concern then was polio.]

[3]
Even without new legislation, the health share would grow,
as an aging population uses more Medicare (insurance for the elderly)
and Medicaid (the joint federal-state insurance for the poor,
including the very poor elderly).
Obama would magnify the trend by expanding Medicaid
and providing new subsidies for private insurance.
Thirty million or more Americans would receive coverage.

[4]
All this is transforming politics and society.
The most obvious characteristic of health spending
is that government can’t control it.
The reason is public opinion.
We all want the best health care for ourselves and loved ones;
that’s natural and seems morally compelling.
Unfortunately, what we all want as individuals may harm us as a nation.
Our concern sanctions open-ended and ineffective health spending,
because everyone believes that cost controls are heartless and illegitimate.
The recent furor over proposals to reduce mammogram screenings
captures the popular feeling.

[5]
One consequence is
a slow, steady and largely invisible degradation
of other public and private goals.
Historian Niall Ferguson, writing recently in Newsweek,
argued that the huge federal debt
threatens America’s global power by
an “inexorable reduction in the resources” for the military.
Ferguson got it half right.
The real threat is not the debt
but burgeoning health spending
that, even if the budget were balanced,
would press on everything else.

[6]
“Everything else” includes
universities, roads, research, parks, courts, border protection and --
because similar pressures operate on states through Medicaid --
schools, police, trash collection and libraries.
Higher health spending similarly
weakens families’ ability to raise children,
because it reduces households’ discretionary income
either through steeper taxes or lower take-home pay,
as higher employer-paid premiums squeeze salaries.

[7]
A society that passively accepts constant increases in health spending
endorses some explicit, if poorly understood, forms of income redistribution.
The young transfer to the elderly,
because about half of all health spending goes for those 55 and over.
Unless taxes are increased disproportionately for older Americans
(and just the opposite is true),
they are subsidized by the young.
More and more resources also go to a small sliver of the population:
In 2006, the sickest 5 percent of Americans accounted for
48 percent of health spending.

[8]
Political power in this system shifts.
It flows to groups that promote and defend more health spending --
AARP, the lobby for Americans 50 and over,
and also provider organizations such as the American Medical Association (AMA), which represents doctors.
Predictably, AARP has been active in the present debate.
It claims to have participated in 649 town-hall and other meetings
and to have reached more than 50 million people through ads this year.
Not surprisingly,
AARP and the AMA recently conducted a joint TV ad campaign.

[9]
The rise of health-care nation
has confounded America’s political and intellectual leaders,
of both left and right.
No one wants to appear unfeeling
by denying anyone treatment that seems needed;
no one wants to endorse openly meddling with doctors’ independence.
It’s easier to perpetuate and enlarge the status quo
than to undertake the difficult job of
restructuring the health-care system
to provide better and less costly care.

[10]
Obama’s health-care proposals may be undesirable (they are),
but it’s mindless to oppose them -- as many Republicans do --
by screaming that they’ll lead to “rationing.”
Almost everything in society is “rationed,”
either by price (if you can’t afford it, you can’t buy it)
or explicit political decisions (school boards have budgets).
Health care is an exception; it enjoys an open tab.
The central political problem of health-care nation
is to find effective and acceptable ways to limit medical spending.

[11]
Democrats are no better.
Obama talks hypocritically about restraining deficits and controlling health costs
while his program would increase spending and worsen the budget outlook.
Democrats congratulate themselves on caring for the uninsured --
who already receive much care --
while avoiding any major overhaul of the delivery system.
The resulting society discriminates against the young
and increasingly assigns economic resources and political choice to
an unrestrained medical-industrial complex.

2009-12-27-NYT-Braem-letter

To the Editor
by Alan Braem
New York Times Letter to the Editor, 2009-12-27

Frank Rich’s column doesn’t mention
the most important fictions we have been led to believe in:

• there are no lasting consequences
  to our national and personal debt levels;


• we can afford our government programs,
  and several huge new ones to boot;


• our global military presence and the distant wars we engage in
  do not create grave risks by making us an enemy to millions; and


• our above-average living standards can be maintained
  no matter how energetically we squander our capital.

We have only begun to pay for these delusions.
The hucksters Mr. Rich mentions are amateurs
compared with our reckless politicians.

Alan Braem
Kendall Park, N.J., Dec. 20, 2009

2010

2010-01-03-Ignatius

When political dysfunction threatens the economy
By David Ignatius
Washington Post Op-Ed, 2010-10-03

What worries me, looking ahead,
is what might be called the “Californiazation” of America --

the growing tendency of our political system
to make promises in social spending programs
that it isn’t prepared to pay for with tax increases.

…

So will Washington become like California?
Some would argue that has already happened,
with the fiscal disaster masked by
the federal government’s ability to sell its massive debt cheaply and
print money to pay its bills.
[A process that ends in disaster.]
And you see in Washington the same dysfunctional political process
that’s at work at the state level --
Democrats who get elected by delivering services and
Republicans who get elected by delivering tax cuts.

...

We should judge President Obama and Congress this year on
whether they’re paying for the promises they make --
and providing real reform that cuts costs,
rather than another political goody bag.

2010-03-28-WP-Pelosi

Why did health-care reform pass?
Nancy Pelosi was in charge.
By Vince Bzdek
Washington Post Outlook, 2010-03-28

[1]
Congress had tried to hammer together a national health-care initiative for a century, but it wasn’t until a woman ascended to a key position of power in Washington that a plan actually passed.

[2]
This is not a mere historical coincidence. Sure, President Obama pushed health-care reform to the top of the country’s agenda, and the Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate were essential to passing the bill. But make no mistake: The overhaul happened because Nancy Pelosi wanted it to happen, deep in her DNA.

[3]
This wasn’t just another piece of legislation for Pelosi --
this was the culmination of
a crusade she has been waging her entire career
to reorder Washington’s priorities.

Pelosi’s animating ambition has been to put
so-called women’s and family issues such as
health care, education and the welfare of children
on the same level as
homeland security, foreign relations and defense.

[4]
The tenacity with which she fought for health-care reform is directly tied to her gender. The belief that women, and the agendas they tend to support, are underrepresented has provided much of the rocket fuel that propelled her rise through Congress over 22 years. In 1984, Pelosi ran for the Democratic Party’s national chairmanship and lost; party leaders told her she would have won if she had been a man. Since then, the Californian has been on a mission to smash the old-boy network in Washington.

[5]
When Pelosi made expanding health care one of her top priorities, friends and colleagues say it was, without question, because she is a woman and a mother.

[6]
“It’s personal for women,” Pelosi announced on the House floor during final arguments on the health-care bill March 21. In an interview the next day, she said, “My sisters here in the Congress, this was a big issue for us.”

[7]
Pelosi said her fellow “caregivers” had a lot invested in reform, since they are the ones who provide most of the health care for their families and are acutely aware of problems in the system.

...

And on the House floor, she said,
“After we pass this bill,
being a woman will no longer be a preexisting medical condition.”
In a recent roundtable discussion,
Pelosi explained that
insurance companies charge women higher premiums than men
by “gender rating” conditions such as
giving birth, having a C-section or being a victim of domestic violence.
These “preexisting conditions” also allowed the companies to refuse coverage;
they can’t do that anymore.

[No doubt that’s part of the reason
why insurance companies charged women more than men,
but it’s hardly the whole story.
For example, consider the story
“Premenstrual dysphoric disorder
makes some women a bit crazy every month”
by Anne Miller.

Here is the lead paragraph:

“Every month I battle a monster.
I gird myself with a healthful diet and a couple of pills,
but the personality switch comes, like a lamp switched on,
three weeks into my menstrual cycle.
If most women get a little bloated, a little cranky, maybe a little confused,
I swell an entire dress size and try to ban my husband from any room I’m in.
Deciding what to eat for dinner so overwhelms me
that I’ve broken down crying in the frozen food aisle.”

So while insurance companies no doubt considered the conditions Pelosi mentioned,
I have no doubt that they also looked at
the overall greater use of the healthcare system by women.
(For another example, consider this story.)]

2011

2011-01-21-NYT-Poll-entitlements

Poll Finds Wariness About Cutting Entitlements
By JACKIE CALMES and DALIA SUSSMAN
New York Times, 2011-01-21

[Please also note this excellent, informative graphic detailing the results.]

[1]
As President Obama and Congress brace to battle over how to reduce chronic annual budget deficits, Americans overwhelmingly say that in general they prefer cutting government spending to paying higher taxes, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

[2]
Yet their preference for spending cuts, even in programs that benefit them, dissolves when they are presented with specific options related to Medicare and Social Security, the programs that directly touch the most people and also are the biggest drivers of the government’s projected long-term debt.

[3]
Nearly two-thirds of Americans choose higher payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security over reduced benefits in either program. And asked to choose among cuts to Medicare, Social Security or the nation’s third-largest spending program — the military — a majority by a large margin said cut the Pentagon.

[4]
While Americans are near-unanimous in calling deficits a problem — a “very serious” problem, say 7 out of 10 — a majority believes it should not be necessary for them to pay higher taxes to bridge the shortfall between what the government spends and what it takes in. But given a choice of often-discussed revenue options, they preferred a national sales tax or a limit in the deduction for mortgage interest to a higher gasoline tax or taxing employer-provided health benefits.

[5]
Americans’ sometimes contradictory impulses on spending and taxes suggest the political crosscurrents facing both parties as they gird for debate over how to address the fiscal woes of a nation with an aging population, a complex tax system and an accumulated debt that is starting to weigh on the economy.

...

[This is certainly interesting,
but I wish they would show a breakdown of these results along demographic lines as well,
in particular between men and women.
My suspicion is those would differ on entitlements versus defense spending,
but it would be interesting to see the actual results.]

American excess

My opinion (2010-04-28):

America(ns) are suffering from an abundance of excesses:
Too many or too much of:
lawyers, doctors, financiers, health care, consumption
(of goods that aren’t really needed and food that most certainly isn’t),
higher education
(how many college graduates does a sustainable economy really require?),
and so on ....

The path to national salvation is simply to be satisfied with less,
less food, less clothing, less house, less medical care, and so on,
and to produce more of what we need, rather than importing it.
(Tom Friedman ranks right up there with the music man
among those who have led Americans astray.)
There really is no alternative, no other way out.

Saying the end is nigh sounds awfully, well, corny,
but really,
how much longer can the U.S. keep on piling up more debt,
and producing far less, especially of hard goods, than it consumes?
The examples of those European countries
that are having their credit rating slashed
should be a view of what awaits the U.S.

The only edge the U.S. has is
that the dollar is and has been the world’s reserve currency,
but there is no law of nature that says that must continue forever.
When the rest of the world, in particular,
those nations (the petro-states and the low-cost production centers)
with whom we run such an unfavorable balance of trade
decide they want to set up their own exchange system,
i.e., when they get tired of taking depreciable dollars
for the hard goods they sell us,
there is absolutely nothing to stop them from doing just that.

2011

2011-01-06-Will

Given up your New Year's resolutions? It's the American way.
By George F. Will
Washington Post Op-Ed, 2011-01-06

2012

2012-12-04-Cal-Thomas-on-stewardship

No skin in the game
by Cal Thomas
calthomas.com, 2012-12-04
[Also available at the Washington Examiner

[1]
An Internet search is inconclusive as to where the phrase
“no skin in the game” originated.
Some ascribe it to the late columnist William Safire;
others to investor Warren Buffett.
Politicians often use the phrase to justify policies to their liking.
It can also be applied to the latest in a long list of their outrageous behaviors, as well as to those of President Obama.

[2]
Like an increasing number of politicians,
the president has never served in the military,
nor has he ever run a business.
He has never headed a company that needed to make a profit
(and thus employ people who create things people wish to purchase).
He has likely never had to produce a balance sheet.
His entire career — and that of too many other politicians —
appears to have been about
redistributing other people’s money and
organizing “communities” to receive government benefits.

[3]
Very few elected officials see themselves as stewards;
even fewer practice stewardship.
It’s an old word, stewardship,
but it is a word that carries weight and authority.
One entry on dictionary.com defines it as
“The responsible overseeing and protection
of something considered worth caring for and preserving.”

[4]
We the people grant power to political leaders.
Along with that power goes — or ought to go —
a presumption that the men and women we elect
are stewards, or caretakers of America;
that they will behave as responsible overseers
of what has been entrusted to them.
We expect them to see our country
as worthy of protection and preservation,
for us and for future generations.

[5]
Can this president and Congress credibly say their irresponsible spending
and the “fiscal cliff” they are driving us toward
meet this definition?

[6]
Have you ever been entrusted with someone else’s property?
A car, a family heirloom?
Unless you are terribly irresponsible,
you probably took care of it, making sure it was not damaged
and that you returned it to its owner
in the same, or better, condition than when you received it.

[7]
Politicians operate differently.
They take what is not theirs and irresponsibly tax, spend or over-regulate it.
Too many are not invested in America.
They have no skin in the game.
And so they treat America’s economy as unworthy of their care
and do not feel it their responsibility to protect it.

[8]
Democracy as practiced in our constitutional Republic is fragile.
It is not the natural state of humanity.
Look around the world and see how many nations come close to America
in economic strength, endowed rights and standards of morality.
What we have is not inherited, as from a will.
It must be fought for, sometimes in war,
but always against our lower nature,
which too often succumbs to the temptation
to give people what they want, rather than what they need;
to trade goodies for votes, preserving not the country, but political careers.

[9]
A self-indulgent nation cannot long exist,
at least not as the nation delivered to us by our forefathers.
Our ancestors learned to do without in order to retain things of real value.
I was taught that excessive debt was a great evil
because it contributed to a loss of freedom.
If that is true for individuals, it is truer still for our country.

[10]
America is slowly descending into a kind of economic slavery.
We are increasingly in servitude to others who are financing our debt.
We are shackling our posterity with a debt load we are unlikely to pay off.

[11]
Things might be different
if the president and Congress saw themselves as stewards.
Instead, they behave as they do
because they have little or no skin in the game.

[Thomas’s perspective is not exactly mine,
but I certainly agree with the idea that
the notion of entitlement has corrupted America’s value system,
notably when it is used to justify the elderly being supported for
an ever-longer period after their working life,
longer than they supported their predecessors.
It is amazing that the elderly can be aware of this without noticing the unfairness of it.]

What's Wrong With America

The title is intended to be reminiscent of
Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas?.

Well, of course, everyone has their own view on the answer to that question.
Here are some of the things on my mind that do not seem to be widely addressed
(although I think they should).

Consider the following excerpts from a recent news article:

2010-05-07-WP-Yuan-Chinese-industrial-policy-protectionism

China's industrial policy is bigger concern than yuan, U.S. executives say
By John Pomfret
Washington Post, 2010-05-07

...

[3]
U.S. officials, senators and some economists have predicted that
if China allows the value of the yuan to rise,
it will mean
a smaller trade deficit with China, more American exports and
more jobs for American workers.

[4]
Fat chance on both counts, according to the American Chamber delegation.

[5]
It might make good economic sense
for China to stop subsidizing its exports with a distorted exchange rate,
but it’s silly to think that
the United States is going to be a major beneficiary from such a move,
the delegation and other business groups are arguing.

[6]

For one, the stuff China sells us
has been imported by the United States from other countries for decades.
So if we don’t buy it from China, we’ll buy it from someone else.
Take TVs.
Twenty years ago, they all said “Made in Japan” on the back.
Now they say “Made in China.”
If China allows the yuan to appreciate,
it’s not like TV manufacturing is going to move back to the United States
and RCA Victor will rise anew.
Americans will just buy them from someplace else.

[Note how this view,
which the Washington Post reporter seems to imply
is that of the American Chamber of Commerce team,
is identical to
that of China’s commerce minister, Chen Deming, in his March 2010 interview.]

...

[12]
“The Chinese government is more than happy to keep the focus on the currency
because it’s not the real problem,”
said a member of [the American Chamber of Commerce] team.
“The real problem is China’s industrial policy
and our inability to deal with it.”

[End of article]

---

Okay, back to KHarbaugh opining.

---

Everyone no doubt has their own gripe list.
I, for one, think it is just a terrible shame that
America cannot even build its own TVs.
(And, of course, this is just an example of
a whole range of products we no longer
can economically and competitively produce,
for our own market let alone the global one.)

How did this situation come about?

It was certainly not true in the 1950s,
when RCA, Sylvania, and Magnavox, among others,
all made televisions.
(For an extensive list, see this.)

It would seem that the problem is a combination of several factors:

• Government policies
  which pushed up the cost of manufacturing in this country.
  Especially those which affected labor costs.


• Decisions by the financial community (Wall Street)
  as to what they valued
  and would provide financing for.
  Demands for short-term profits (next-quarter earnings) over long-term investments are a key example.
  Corporate buccaneering and raiding and leveraged buyouts
  were a major factor,
  where corporations were essentially gutted by their new owners,
  and then left to die.
  


• Unions pushed up labor costs
  (ever heard of a union in China?).
  The general pattern was:
  A corporation has a favorable economic environment,
  profits and management salaries rise accordingly,
  and then labor, naturally, wants its chair of the pie.
  Contracts are written.
  Then when the economic climate changes,
  labor is unwilling to give up its “hard-won gains”.

It is sad that such leaders of free enterprise and capitalism
as Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute
do not seem to focus on the key issues.
Brooks, in his 2010-05-23 Washington Post Outlook article,
argues for
“the principles of free enterprise --
limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship
and rewards determined by market forces.”
Is that an adequate remedy for the forces that have destroyed
America’s ability to manufacture the goods that it consumes?
I do not know, but I suspect not.

2010-07-21-WP-Miller-declining-living-standards

The Great Recession is just the beginning
By Matt Miller
Washington Post Opinion, 2010-07-23 (the day it appeared in the print edition)

[1]
Here’s a cheery midsummer thought. You know those 15 million unemployed, and that sluggish growth, and the debt hangover and de-leveraging, and those soaring deficits? Well, these woes aren’t our biggest economic problems.

[2]
The real test for the U.S. economy starts once we get past the fallout from the burst housing and banking bubbles that triggered the Great Recession. And when it comes to that challenge -- which involves preserving U.S. living standards in a world of global competition -- we either (1) don’t know what to do, or (2) we do know but seem to have little intention of doing it.

[3]
A brief trot through history places this moment in context. After World War II, when the United States was the only economy left standing, we began an unprecedented economic run. “You had a 60-year period where every new industry of huge value-added or breakthrough innovation or high risk -- whether it was pharma, biotech, software, personal computing or semiconductors -- were all totally U.S.-based,” Bill Gates said in 2007.

[4]
The shared prosperity this dominance made possible built the middle class. But the age of U.S. supremacy had to end sometime, and, starting two decades ago, rising powers such as India and China began the reforms that would make them genuine competitors.

[5]
From the point of view of humanity, these nations’ rise has been fantastic news. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted from poverty, with billions hoping to follow. But for workers in advanced countries, the wage strains were inevitable, as it became feasible to locate more work with low-cost (and, increasingly, high-quality) labor anywhere on the planet.

[6]
It was at this point in the saga, when research already showed that up to 100 million Americans were living in households earning less than their parents did at a similar age, that -- bam! -- the housing and financial bubbles burst.

[7]
Historians may therefore think of the Great Recession as Decline, Interrupted.

[8]
The thing to remember is that these are different kinds of events. The bursting bubbles, and the associated market panic and credit freeze, was a heart attack, to which the authorities responded with emergency measures.

[9]
But “the fate of the middle class” in a global era is different. It’s more like cancer -- a slower yet more profound threat, requiring a fundamental renewal of American competitiveness. And without a galvanizing “emergency.”

[10]
Broadly speaking, there are two big things we need to do. The first, put well (if not in a sexy slogan) by economist Michael Spence in the Financial Times recently, is “to create capital-intensive jobs that have labor productivity levels consistent with advanced country incomes.”

[11]
The second big thing is to make sure Americans have the skills to perform these jobs.

[12]
How are we doing on this agenda? Dismally. For starters, U.S. elites simply don’t think in terms of a national economic strategy of the kind Spence states so simply. To be sure, the stimulus funded some energy technologies with real promise -- advanced storage and lighting technologies, and power conversion devices, for example -- that are poised to lift productivity in these areas dramatically. Such productivity gains can make higher wages sustainable. But we’re not yet close to the needed scale of public- and private-sector effort here.

[13]
And, in any event, why will firms that can locate work anywhere manufacture these breakthroughs in America? As former Intel CEO Andy Grove argued in Bloomberg Business Week recently, it’s not enough to do the product innovation in the United States; we need to do the manufacturing, too. That’s the only way, Grove says, to gain the hands-on experience with products that leads to all subsequent innovations. Surrender the manufacturing and you lose this virtuous cycle -- a logic that leads Grove to call for protectionist measures if need be to make sure America keeps this innovation-to-manufacturing-to-good-jobs link here.

[14]
On education, meanwhile, the administration’s agenda, though “bold” by historic standards, isn’t nearly ambitious enough. In terms old SAT-takers can understand, “Race to the Top” is to “needed education reform” as “little seed” is to “giant oak.” At this pace we’re looking at a decades-long fix.

[15]
No politician will talk about the prospect of declining living standards. Business leaders who know what’s afoot abroad talk privately about it all the time. The defining question of our era may be this: What do we do if incremental change isn’t equal to renewing American competitiveness, but our political system isn’t capable of producing more than incremental change?

[16]
What if waiting for our “Sputnik moment” turns out to be a lot like waiting for Godot?

2010-09-10-NYT-Uchitelle-Bloom

Ron Bloom Is Obama’s Manufacturing Emissary
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
New York Times, 2010-09-10

Several [of the Ohio executives] seemed to nod in agreement
when William N. McCreary, a vice president of the NSG Group,
said that

private equity firms and other financiers frequently asked for an American manufacturer’s “China strategy,” meaning that having an operation in China made a company more worthy of financial support.

The NSG Group, which makes flat glass of the sort used in auto windshields,
operates in many countries, including China, and is based in Japan.
Even so, Mr. McCreary, who is based in Toledo, Ohio, sounded perplexed by
this lack of faith in American producers.

“The private equity world is heavily on the side that you have to be in China,”
he said.
“It thinks the U.S. is not a place you make things.”

[What traitors!
Is it American money these Wall Street financiers are allocating?

A story is really demanded on the details behind this situation.]

2010-11-29-WP-Zakaria-debt

Economic policy needs common sense, not Fed magic, for long-term growth
By Fareed Zakaria
Washington Post Op-Ed, 2010-11-29

...

The investment manager and guru Jeremy Grantham ... points out that
over the last generation,
American government has created conditions that
encouraged everyone to keep accumulating debt.
But far from getting a bang,
the country’s growth rate actually slowed down over that period.
In fact,
the effect of all this government-subsidized debt has been deeply destructive.
It created asset bubbles in stocks, bonds, commodities and more.
One stunning chart in his letter underscores the extent to which
the Fed created what he calls “the first housing bubble in history,”
meaning the first time that
U.S. house prices rose dramatically across the board -
and are now falling just as dramatically.

Debt-fueled growth “is, in an important sense, not the real world,”
Grantham writes.
“In the real world, growth depends on real factors:
the quality and quantity of education, work ethic, population profile,
the quality and quantity of existing plant and equipment,
business organization,
the quality of public leadership (especially from the Fed in the U.S.),
and the quality (not quantity) of existing regulations
and the degree of enforcement.”

[Thank you, thank you, thank you for saying that.]

This strikes me as the common-sense view of economics.
We can push and pull fiscal and monetary policy all we want,
but long-term growth depends on these broader and deeper factors.

...

2011

2011-08-17-WP-Meyerson-Rick-Perry-as-Manchurian-candidate

The sad facts behind Rick Perry’s Texas miracle
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post Op-Ed, 2011-08-17

[Here Harold Meyerson states with admirable clarity
why America has lost so many jobs over the last decades.
Unfortunately, while he states the problem clearly,
I do not see where he proposes a viable solution to the problem.
For what I do consider viable solutions,
see, e.g., the recent books
Clyde Prestowitz, The Betrayal of American Prosperity and
Eamonn Fingleton, In the Jaws of the Dragon.]

[1]
Rick Perry’s Texas is Ross Perot’s Mexico come north.

Through a range of enticements
we more commonly associate with Third World nations —
low wages, no benefits, high rates of poverty,
scant taxes, few regulations and generous corporate subsidies —
the state has produced its own “giant sucking sound,”
attracting businesses from other states
to a place where workers come cheap.

[2]
Perry’s calling card in the presidential race
is his state’s record of job creation
at a time when the national economy floundered.
Yes, Texas has created lots of jobs,
though that’s partly a reflection of the surge in oil prices,
which in turn created tens of thousands of jobs in the oil and gas industries.
What Perry touts in his stump speech, however, isn’t the oil boom
but, rather,
the low-tax, low-reg, handouts-to-business climate that prevails in Texas.
It’s the kind of spiel that businesses hear every day
from leaders of developing nations — Mexico and, even more, China.

[3]
Consider the Texas that Perry holds up to the rest of the nation for admiration.
It has the fourth-highest poverty rate of any state.
It tied with Mississippi last year
for the highest percentage of workers in minimum-wage jobs.
It ranks first in adults without high school diplomas.
Twenty-six percent of Texans have no health insurance —
the highest percentage of medically uninsured residents of any state.
It leads the nation in the percentage of children who lack medical insurance.
Texas has an inordinate number of employers
who provide no insurance to their workers,
partly because insurance rates are high, thanks to an absence of regulations.

[4]
Perry seems quite comfortable with the state’s lagging performance
in what we might term the pursuit-of-happiness index.
Consider his indifference toward education:
In 2008, the state comptroller found that
12 percent of Texans lacked high school diplomas
and that the level would rise to 30 percent by 2040
unless the state’s commitment to education was considerably increased.
This year, though, when confronted with a $27 billion budget deficit,
Perry did not raise taxes but instead slashed $4 billion from K-12 schools.
In this regard, the equation of Perry with China’s leaders is unfair to China:
The Chinese understand that the better educated their people become,
the more high-skill and high-compensating jobs their nation will attain.
No such understanding seems to have permeated Perry’s brain.

[5]
In one significant particular, though, Perry’s policies fairly ape the Chinese.
Over the past eight years, the state has given businesses
nearly $500 million in grants and financial incentives to help them expand.
Perry’s economic vision is the kind of race-to-the-bottom mercantilism
we’ve come to expect from developing nations in the globalized economy,
although, as China, Brazil and India illustrate,
many such nations have begun to provide citizens with
more schooling and better jobs as they grow wealthier.

[The important point is that,
in the eyes of the leadership, and no doubt many of the people,
of the nations Meyerson mentions,
the race they are pursuing, and indeed have largely won,
is not a “race to the bottom”
but rather a race to see which nation can master and control
the manufacturing and technological lead
that will determine their future success.]

No comparable developments can be seen in Rick Perry’s Texas.

[6]
Now Perry wants to take his model national.
In “Fed Up,” his campaign manifesto,
he says the federal government has gone too far by passing laws
“regulating the environment, regulating guns, protecting civil rights,
establishing the massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid,
[and] creating national minimum wage laws.”
These are all endeavors, he argues, that should be left to the states.

[7]
I could understand how
a governor with a good record on providing medical insurance, for instance,
could argue that his state’s plan is one the nation should emulate.
But when the governor of the state with the highest level of medical uninsurance
calls for dismantling the national programs
and letting states go their own way,
that’s industrial-strength chutzpah.

[8]
What Perry either ignores or doesn’t know is
how greatly Texas has benefited from
the investments and regulations of the federal government he despises.
He grew up, he tells all who will listen, on a small, hardscrabble Texas farm.
But it was Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration
that brought electricity to those farms,
which, left to the mercies of the market,
would have remained dark for decades.
The New Deal threw money at Texas,
bringing it dams, highways and schoolhouses.
The cumulative effect of policies such as the federal minimum wage
has been to diminish the disparity that long existed between
the industrialized North and the more poverty-stricken South.

[9]
Perry wants to unravel the national social contract
and once again have us go state by state,
with the low-wage, low-reg states dragging down the others,
much as Chinese mercantilism has dragged down wages and living standards
across the United States.
He is the 21st-century, homegrown version of the Manchurian candidate.