Hu’s Visit and U.S.-China Tensions
Chinese President Hu Jintao arrives in Washington today for a summit meeting with President Obama following spats over economic and military issues that have created a chill in bilateral relations. This follows Secretary Gates’s visit just last week to Beijing for discussions with Defense Ministry officials. On the Huffington Post, I have a piece that looks at the current state of U.S.-China relations in the context of these visits:
“The process of repairing [the U.S.-China relationship] appears to be off to a rocky start. A key objective of Secretary Gates was to get China’s military leadership to agree to a wide-ranging dialogue on strategic issues, including nuclear weapons, ballistic missile defenses, space weapons, and cyber warfare. His hosts rebuffed his initiative, agreeing only to a very limited dialogue on such second-tier issues as combating piracy and cooperating on international peacekeeping missions. Chinese officials indicated that Washington would need some policy changes — especially moderate its willingness to sell arms to Taiwan — before a dialogue on larger strategic issues could take place. The most the Defense Ministry would agree to do in the meantime was “study” Gates’ broader proposal.
“The lack of a meaningful military dialogue frustrates a persistent U.S. goal — to get Beijing to be more transparent regarding both the level of its military spending and the extent of its geopolitical ambitions — especially in East Asia and the Western Pacific. Recent reports of China’s possible breakthroughs in nuclear technology and stealth aircraft have intensified Washington’s concerns.”
The complex U.S.-China relationship has always had elements of both partnership and rivalry. The partnership component has tended to figure more prominently, especially in the economic arena where the benefits to both parties are substantial and widely appreciated. But the balance is now shifting toward the competitive end of the spectrum. There are many reasons for this, including the stress that arises whenever the dominant economic and military player in the international system encounters a rapidly rising great power. However, the current tensions between the United States and China also are the product of the sharply different political systems, histories, cultures, and agendas of the two countries.
The shift to a relationship in which rivalry may top cooperation poses serious challenges for leaders in both countries. Strategic and economic rivalry can easily escalate into viewing the competitor as an adversary, and even an outright enemy. Given the importance of the bilateral relationship, not only for the United States and China, but for the health of the international economic system and the future of global peace, it is imperative that both sides seek to manage and contain their disagreements. The Hu-Obama summit offers an opportunity to advance that process, and one hopes that the two leaders do not waste the opportunity.
The President’s Fiscal Commission: It’s a Start
Today POLITICO Arena asks
Will implementing President Obama’s Fiscal Commission recommendations require that everyone take a hit?
My response (with tax insights from Jagadeesh Gokhale):
President Obama’s Fiscal Commission Report offers a useful start in reducing our budget deficits and national debt, but it hardly goes far enough. As several of my Cato colleagues have just noted here, here, here, and here, the report recognizes, to its credit, that our corporate income tax structure puts U.S. corporations at a considerable competitive disadvantage against their foreign competitors. And the report keeps military spending cuts on the table, even if there is much more to be cut. Yet by proposing a reduction in government spending from 24.3 percent of GDP today to 21.8 percent over the next 15 years — total federal spending as recently as 2000 was just 18.4 percent of GDP – it plays the old Washington game of calling a slower increase than previously projected a “cut.”
As for taxes, this report should be read in the context of a powerful argument in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal to the effect that over the past six decades, tax revenues as a percentage of GDP have averaged just under 19 percent, regardless of the top marginal personal income tax rate or whether taxes were cut or raised. What this suggests is that low tax rates spur income growth to leave the government’s revenues undiminished over the long-term. High tax rates do the opposite. It doesn’t take a large leap of faith to believe that this effect would be stronger for those who earn more and pay more in taxes. Indeed, among high earners are the nation’s business leaders – innovators who create new products and jobs – who would respond positively to the growth opportunity provided by a stable, low-tax-rate environment. So those who believe that we help ourselves by more heavily taxing the rich need to ask themselves whether it might not be better to cut rates and keep them stable instead. Wouldn’t that promote a robust economy and lift all boats – with the government continuing to generate 19 percent in revenues?
None of this has anything to do, of course, with whether our current out-of-control federal government is constitutionally authorized to do all it is doing. But it’s a start toward returning the government to within its constitutional limits. Had those limits been respected – as the Framers understood, unlike New Deal progressives — we wouldn’t be in this mess.
A New Day? Obama Faces Reality
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
The president will address this new political reality at a 1 p.m. news conference. What should President Obama say to reckon with the reality of the Democratic debacle?
My response:
What the president should say and what he will say at his press conference this afternoon are likely to be two different things. He should say that he and his party seriously misread the 2008 election results: Americans were rejecting the Bush administration’s eight years of expansive government. But he can hardly say that without repudiating the last two years: After all, he doubled down on Bush’s policies. Yesterday the vast majority of Americans said, in effect, “And we mean it!”
Not everywhere, to be sure, but look at the House map this morning: It’s almost all red, with scattered pockets of blue. Obama should recognize that reality, but to do so would be to abandon the dream, and he is nothing if not a dreamer. Throughout this campaign administration apologists kept saying that the problem was not in the product but in the packaging – in the delivery. No. It was the product. Americans didn’t want it.
So Obama will doubtless give lip service to yesterday’s results and talk about the need for all to work together “to solve America’s problems” – as though we were all on some grand collective mission. But in his subsequent actions he will likely turn to the elites in those isolated urban and academic blue pockets on the map to try to fashion a comeback consistent with his dream, because a Bill Clinton pivot would be wholly out of character with a man who branded opponents as “the enemy.” We’re probably in for two years of gridlock before we can return to fundamental principles of limited government, and that’s good.
Enough Community College PDA
Yesterday, President Obama hosted the White House Summit on Community Colleges, and in-your-face love was in the air. President Obama and Second Lady Jill Biden, a community college professor, couldn’t keep their hands off their signficant other, lavishing all sorts of praise on their favorite little schools.
Swooned Dr. Biden about the dreamy things community colleges do for their students:
They are students like the mother who shared her experience with us on the White House website of working towards a degree while raising three children and straddling financial challenges. Now employed and the holder of a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree, she wrote, “Community colleges didn’t just change my life, they gave me my life.”
Community colleges do that every day.
Ick!
The President, too, couldn’t hide his affection:
So I think it’s clear why I asked Jill to travel the country visiting community colleges -– because, as she knows personally, these colleges are the unsung heroes of America’s education system. They may not get the credit they deserve. They may not get the same resources as other schools. But they provide a gateway to millions of Americans to good jobs and a better life.
Like the guy with the locker next to Mr. and Mrs. Lovebird, all I can say is “oh, come on!”
Community colleges might be a good option for some people, but they are hardly paragons of educational success. Quite the opposite: According to the U.S. Department of Education, they have the worst graduation rates of any two-year sector of higher education. Only around 22 percent of public, two-year college students graduate within three years, versus roughly 49 percent of private, not-for-profit attendees and about 59 percent of private, for-profit students.
Wait! What’s that? Private, for-profit institutions outperform super-cute community colleges…by a lot? But they’re the ugliest, meanest, least popular kids in school! Nobody likes them!
Oh, I know what’s going on here! For-profit schools cost a lot more than community colleges, right? That’s why they’re so disliked.
That’s true if you look at tuition prices. But community colleges get big subsidies from government, especially state and local taxpayers. So they might actually cost a lot, it’s just that they sneak the money out of your back pocket and then congratulate themselves for charging students so little.
When you look at government expenditures per-pupil, including aid to schools and students, it becomes clear that community colleges are, in fact, just as mean and greedy as for-profits. Indeed, former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro has calculated that they are actually more costly to taxpayers than for-profit schools (see table 24). According to his calculations, two-year public schools cost taxpayers $6,919 per student, while private, for-profits cost just $3,628.
No wonder the summit turned my stomach! At the same time the administration and its allies in Congress are bashing for-profit schools, the President has a love fest with community colleges that are generally much worse. Unfortunately, it leaves you concluding that for-profits could walk on water and it wouldn’t matter: As long as they’re honest about trying to make a buck, they’ll be beaten up in the parking lot and never invited to any of the cool summits.
The Professional Left
As a former conservative (and a former leftist; I got around), I have noticed that the mainstream media often use the term “ultra-conservative” but rarely apply any equivalent term to extremists on the Left. (I use Left/leftist because I mean to reclaim the term “liberal” for libertarians.) Evidently, there are no left-wing extremists, only right-wing extremists.
But maybe President Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs gave the mainstream media a term they can use: “the professional left.” Venting about these left-wing extremists in his own party, Gibbs said:
They will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.
President Obama has repeatedly stated his preference for a single-payer health care system, such as they have in Canada. Does that make him a semi-professional leftist?
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics; Health Care
Obama on the Ground Zero Mosque
Politico Arena asks for comments today on President Obama’s Ground Zero Mosque remarks:
My response:
Speaking expressly “as President” last evening [Friday], Mr. Obama has weighed in on the Ground Zero Islamic mosque controversy — and blatantly misstated it.
This controversy has nothing to do with Muslims having “the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country” or with their ”right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan,” as Obama put it. Nor does it have anything to do with the First Amendment. Rather, the issue is simply one of common decency and sensitivity to the feelings of others.
The president is right about one thing: Ground Zero is “hallowed ground.” It is the ground where some 3,000 people of all faiths lost their lives in a brutal attack by radical Muslims acting in the name of their religion, however distorted their beliefs may have been. Those who lost loved ones that day, to say nothing of the rest of us, cannot be indifferent to that fact — as those who support the mosque’s location near Ground Zero seem to be.
President Obama’s Incomplete Speech on Immigration
President Obama spoke this morning at American University on the need for comprehensive immigration reform. The president deserves credit for turning his attention to a thorny problem that desperately needs action from Congress, but the speech failed to hit at least one important note.
While the president called for comprehensive reform, he neglected to advocate the expansion of legal immigration in the future through a temporary or guest worker program for low-skilled immigrants. Even his own Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has said such a program is the necessary “third leg” of immigration reform, the other two being legalization of undocumented workers already here and vigorous enforcement against those still operating outside the system.
As I’ve pointed out plenty of times, without accommodation for the ongoing labor needs of our country, any reform would repeat the failures of the past. In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized 2.7 million workers already here illegally, while beefing up enforcement. But without a new visa program to allow more low-skilled workers to enter legally in future years, illegal immigration just began to climb again to where, two decades later, we are trying once again to solve the same problem.
On the plus side, President Obama reminded his audience of the important role immigrants play in our open and dynamic country. And he rightly linked immigration reform to securing our borders:
“[T]here are those who argue that we should not move forward with any other elements of reform until we have fully sealed our borders. But our borders are just too vast for us to be able to solve the problem only with fences and border patrols. It won’t work. Our borders will not be secure as long as our limited resources are devoted to not only stopping gangs and potential terrorists, but also the hundreds of thousands who attempt to cross each year simply to find work.
Unfortunately, given the political climate in Washington, an election looming only four months away, and the president’s unwillingness to press for an essential element of successful reform, the illegal immigration problem will still be on the agenda when a new Congress comes to town in 2011.
Does McChrystal Rhyme with MacArthur?
Apparently not. Unlike Douglas MacArthur, Stanley McChrystal has tendered his resignation. President Obama should accept it, and move swiftly to put this unfortunate incident behind him.
This story moved so quickly that I wasn’t able to keep up. In the early morning, we learned that McChrystal had been called to Washington for face-to-face meetings with President Obama (aka The Commander in Chief), and Robert Gates (the SecDef who has built a reputation for sacking generals). McChrystal’s press aide was fired. By early afternoon, others, including those sympathetic to the general, were predicting that he would step down, or that he should be fired if he did not (Eliot Cohen “This is a firing offense”; Peter Feaver “This is clearly a firing offense”).
I won’t repeat what Justin Logan, Malou Innocent, and I said in our statements this morning. It is obvious that Gen. McChrystal showed very poor judgment, and this is not the first time. When his assessment of what was required in Afghanistan (More Forces or “Mission Failure”) was leaked before the president had settled on a strategy, the White House was furious. They felt that he was trying to bully them. Strike one. When he challenged the chain of command with his remarks in London in October, dismissing Vice President’s Biden’s preferred counterterrorism approach as “shortsighted,” Obama summoned him for a private meeting on Air Force One. Strike two. There was more than enough material in the Rolling Stone story to constitute strike three. And four, five, and six.
I urge people to read the story. It might be remembered as the article that put an end to Stanley McChrystal’s storied career. I wonder if the article might serve a broader purpose: undermining the already wavering support for COIN. Look past McChrystal, a man who has given his life to the military, and has much to show for it. Look at the enlisted guys who are just beginning their careers, or the NCOs or junior officers who are in the third or fourth tours (in either Iraq or Afghanistan). They’re growing frustrated. They’re in an impossible situation. They are fighting a war that depends upon strong support here in the United States, and that aims to boost support for a government that no one believes in. And while they understand COIN as preached by McChrystal, they struggle with the rules of engagement that COIN requires.
One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force,” the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that’s like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won’t have to make arrests. “Does that make any [expletive] sense?” asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. “We should just drop a [expletive] bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?”
I give up. What are we doing there?
Unfortunately, One Man’s “Paranoia” Is Everyone Else’s “Reality”
Finished with my woman
‘Cause she couldn’t help me with my mind
People think I’m insane
Because I am frowning all the time
- Black Sabbath, “Paranoid”
According to the Fordham Institute’s Chester Finn, I and others like me are “paranoid.” So why, like Ozzy Osbourne, am I “frowning all the time?” Because I look at decades of public schooling reality and, unlike Finn, see the tiny odds that “common” curriculum standards won’t become federal standards, gutted, and our crummy education system made even worse.
Finn’s rebuttal to my NRO piece skewering the push for national standards, unfortunately, takes the same tack he’s used for months: Assert that the standards proposed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative are better than what most states have produced on their own; say that adopting them is “voluntary;” and note that we’ve got to do something to improve the schools.
Let’s go one by one:
First, as Jay Greene has pointed out again and again, the objection to national standards is not that the proposed CCSSI standards are of poor quality (though not everyone, certainly, agrees with Finn’s glowing assessment of them). The objection is that once money is attached to them — once the “accountability” part of “standards and accountability” is activated — they will either be dumbed down or just rendered moot by a gamed-to-death accountability system.
This kind of objection, by the way, is called “thinking a few steps ahead,” not “paranoia.”
It’s also called “learning from history.” By Fordham’s own, constant admission, most states have cruddy standards, and one major reason for this is that special interests like teachers’ unions — the groups most motivated to control public schooling politics because their members’ livelihoods come from the public schools — get them neutered.
But if centralized, government control of standards at the state level almost never works, there is simply no good reason to believe that centralizing at the national level will be effective. Indeed, it will likely be worse with the federal government, whose money is driving this, in charge instead of states, and parents unable even to move to one of the handful of states that once had decent standards to get an acceptable education.
Next, let’s hit the the “voluntary” adoption assertion. Could we puh-leaze stop with this one! Yes, as I note in my NRO piece, adoption of the CCSSI standards is technically voluntary, just as states don’t have to follow the No Child Left Behind Act or, as Ben Boychuk points out in a terrific display of paranoia, the 21-year-old legal drinking age. All that states have to do to be free is “voluntarily” give up billions of federal dollars that came from their taxpaying citizens whether those citizens liked it or not!
So right now, if states don’t want to sign on to national standards, they just have to give up on getting part of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund. And very likely in the near future, if President Obama has his way, they’ll just have to accept not getting part of about $14.5 billion in Elementary and Secondary Education Act money.
Some voluntarism….
Finally, there’s the “we’ve got to do something to fix the schools” argument. I certainly agree that the education system needs fixing. My point is that it makes absolutely no sense to look at fifty centralized, government systems, see that they don’t work, and then conclude that things would be better if we had just one centralized, government system. And no, that other nations have national standards proves nothing: Both those nations that beat us and those that we beat have such standards.
The crystal clear lesson for those who are willing to see it is that we need to decentralize control of education, especially by giving parents control over education funding, giving schools autonomy, and letting proven, market-based standards and accountability go to work.
Oh, right. All this using evidence and logic is probably just my paranoia kicking in again.
John Brennan on Countering Terrorism
Earlier today, I attended a lecture at CSIS by John Brennan, a leading counterterrorism and homeland security adviser to President Obama. His speech highlighted some of the key elements of the administration’s counterterrorism strategy, in advance of tomorrow’s release of the National Security Strategy (NSS).
I hope that many people will take the opportunity to read (.pdf) or listen to/watch Brennan’s speech, as opposed to merely reading what other people said that he said. Echoing key themes that Brennan put forward last year, also at CSIS, today’s talk reflected a level of sophistication that is required when addressing the difficult but eminently manageable problem of terrorism.
Brennan was most eloquent in talking about the nature of the struggle. He declared, with emphasis, that the United States is indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates, but not at war with the tactic of terrorism, nor with Islam, a misconception that is widely held both here in the United States and within the Muslim world. He stressed the positive role that Muslim clerics and other leaders within the Muslim community have played in criticizing the misuse of religion to advance a hateful ideology, and he lamented that such condemnations of bin Laden and others have not received enough exposure in the Western media. This inadequate coverage of the debate raging within the Muslim community contributes to the mistaken impression that this is chiefly a religious conflict. It isn’t; or, more accurately, it need not be, unless we make it so.
Sunlight Before Signing: Slow Improvement
It’s about time for an update on President Obama’s Sunlight Before Signing promise. On the campaign trail and on his campaign web site, the president said he would post all bills he received from Congress online for five days before he signed them.
He hasn’t fulfilled that promise every time. In fact, so far in 2010 he’s only done it about a quarter of the time, but that’s a big improvement over 2009!
Here’s a table that summarizes the Sunlight Before Signing status of the 163 bills President Obama has signed.
| Number of Bills | Bills Held 5 Days | Bills Posted Five Days | Emergency Bills | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 163 | 113 | 16 | 1 |
| 2009 | 123 | 90 | 6 | 0 |
| 2010 | 40 | 23 | 10 | 1 |
Of 163 bills, 113 have been held for five days as a matter of course, but only 16 have been posted on Whitehouse.gov for five days before signing. Five of the six bills posted for five days were in December, after Whitehouse.gov put a link on its home page pointing to pending legislation. The remaining ten so far in 2010 bring the president’s overall Sunlight Before Signing average to .098. Let’s round it up to 10%.
If you drop the administration’s first year, things start to look pretty good. (Hey, everything is relative…) The president is 10 for 40 in 2010—a straight .250 batting average. There have been 23 bills held five days, of course. The average could be above 50%!
Part of what is dragging the numbers down is the policy not to post bills that rename post offices. They’re not very important—that’s for sure—but the president’s promise wasn’t to post just the important bills online.
The public might benefit from knowing that Congress and the president spent time naming a post office in Saint Louis after Coach Jodie Bailey. (Coach Bailey had a record of 828 wins and 198 losses in his 42 seasons—quite a bit better than President Obama’s record on Sunlight Before Signing!)
Interestingly, the most recent new law—renaming a Department of Veterans Affairs facility—was posted online for five days. Perhaps the White House is going to start going after Sunlight Before Signing’s lowest-hanging fruit. Then things will really pick up!
After the jump, the table showing the Sunlight Before Signing treatment for all 163 laws President Obama has signed.
What Do The Economist‘s Bloggers Think a Free Market Is, Anyway?
A correspondent for The Economist, whose initials are M.S., posts this on the Democracy in America blog:
[T]he new health-care-reform law passed in March is an entirely private-insurer, free-market-based reform. If someone were to refer to it as a “government takeover of the health-care sector”, that person would hold a factually incorrect ideological belief.
I wonder what convinced M.S. that the new health care law is an entirely free-market-based reform. Was it the expansion of the government’s Medicaid program to another 16 million Americans? Was it the 19-million-plus other Americans who will receive government subsidies to purchase private health insurance? Was it the new price controls that the law imposes on health insurance? Or the price and exchange controls that it will extend to even more of the market? Was it the dynamics those regulations set in motion, which will reduce variety and innovation in health insurance? Was it the mandates that require private actors to spend their resources according to the wishes of the state? Or the new federal regulations that will shape every health insurance plan in the United States, whether purchased through the employer-based market, the individual market, or the new health insurance “exchanges”? Was it the half-trillion dollars of (explicit) tax increases over the next 10 years?
I wonder what it is about this law that M.S. thinks is consonant with the principles of a free market. Perhaps we have a different idea of what “free” means.
M.S. lists other “factually incorrect beliefs,” including:
that the Clinton plan would deny patients their choice of doctor, and that the health-care-reform bills in Congress at the time involved government “death panels” that could decide to withhold care from elderly patients on a cost-benefit basis.
I won’t dredge up the Clinton health plan. But I have previously demonstrated that, when Sarah Palin claimed that President Obama wanted to give a government panel the power to deny medical care to the elderly and disabled based on cost-effectiveness criteria, the president had in fact proposed a panel with the power to do exactly that.
I agree with M.S. about this much: “once people are exposed to false information, it’s extremely difficult to convince them it’s false.”
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