Here’s George Will:

In February 2008, President George W. Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who normally were at daggers drawn, agreed that a $168 billion stimulus — this was Stimulus I — would be the “booster shot” the economy needed. Unemployment then was 4.8 percent.

In January, the Obama administration, shiny as a new dime and bursting with brains, said that unless another stimulus — Stimulus II wound up involving $787 billion — was passed immediately, unemployment, which then was 7.6 percent, would reach 9 percent by 2010. But halfway through 2009, the rate is 9.5. For the first time since the now 16-nation “euro zone” was established in 1999, the unemployment rate in America is as high as it is in that region, which Americans once considered a cautionary lesson on the wages of sin, understood as excessive taxation and regulation.

I want you to keep that unemployment-rate-despite-government-action in mind.

As I continue to read The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shales, I’m blown away by two repeated points: (1) Everything I was taught about Hoover, FDR and The Great Depression in school was wrong — Hoover was FDR Lite, not his opposite. And, (2), in many ways the Bush to Obama transition is parallel to the Hoover to FDR transition.

For example, FDR expanded many government construction projects that Hoover started, such as the Hoover Dam, which FDR’s cronies renamed as “the Boulder dam,” in order to take attention away from that fact.

Shales continues:

There were further commonalities. Hoover had spent on public hospitals and bridges; Roosevelt created a post of relief administrator for the Republican progressive Harry Hopkins. Hoover had loved public works; Roosevelt created a public works administration… Hoover had was a problem created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation [RFC]; Roosevelt put Jones’s at the head of the RFC so that he might address the debt…. Hoover had wanted to pass legislation to help farmers. So did Roosevelt. “What it was all over,” [New Deal agriculture adviser Rex] Tugwell would later write,” I once made a list of you deal with ventures begun during Hoover’s years as secretary of commerce and then as president… the New Deal owed much to what he had begun.”

Yet other projects were mere gentle departures from Hoover. Hoover had encouraged families to tend the substance gardens so that they might feed themselves with their own vegetables. Roosevelt instructed [Interior Sec. Harold] Ickes to develop a substance homestead project where families might feed themselves on new farms. Hoover had signed a Glass-Steagall banking act in 1932, to expand credit; Roosevelt now prepared his own Glass-Steagall act.

Hoover had deplored the shorting of Wall Street’s rogues; Roosevelt set his brain trusters to writing a law that would create a regulator for Wall Street. The new securities and exchange commission [SEC] would turn the stock market from a free for all the hazy rules into a more comprehensible game, one of which a small player had a more fairer shot. Hoover had expanded public works to create jobs; Roosevelt too would create jobs and relief programs. Hoover had not cared much about prohibition, and neither did Roosevelt; he now sought to end it.

Much to the chagrin of true economic conservatives, Bush began a stimulus, Obama greatly expanded it; Bush started TARP, Obama expanded it; Bush expanded the scope of government in both size and domain, he advanced expensive legislation such as the new Medicare prescription bill. Despite his power to do so, he never vetoed government spending or bills that hurt private enterprise, from CAFE initiatives to carbon-trading concepts. Bush is Hoover. Obama is FDR. And 7 years from now we might all still be stuck with near (or worse) double-digit unemployment.

In President Obama’s op-ed on the topic of the economy, here are some words you won’t find: profits, investment, incentives, taxes, risk, enterprise or markets. Or freedom, or liberty. So, though he claims to want to build a “foundation for growth,” Obama ignores the real drivers of economic growth. Instead, his vision is that of a bloated and meddling nanny state that would stifle economic opportunity and growth.

– Bill Kristol.

The economics lesson continues via the Wall Street Journal:

Here’s some economic logic to ponder. The unemployment rate in June for American teenagers was 24%, for black teens it was 38%, and even White House economists are predicting more job losses. So how about raising the cost of that teenage labor?

Sorry to say, but that’s precisely what will happen on July 24, when the minimum wage will increase to $7.25 an hour from $6.55. The national wage floor will have increased 41% since the three-step hike was approved by the Democratic Congress in May 2007. Then the economy was humming, with an overall jobless rate of 4.5% and many entry-level jobs paying more than the minimum. That’s a hard case to make now, with a 9.5% national jobless rate and thousands of employers facing razor-thin profit margins.

It’s not rocket science folks. You have two minimum-wage employees, Congress raises minimum wage, you can’t afford both. And so on.

It reminds me of a letter written to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to his New Deal policies. This is from The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shales:

A woman from Connersville, Indiana, wrote to President Roosevelt:

I have been employed as a clerk at E.J. Schlichte Company this city for seven years five months until the NRA [National Recovery Act] went into effect. They let me out said they coulden’ pay me $14 a week. When the NRA went into effect [creating minimum wage], I was so happy I had planned to lay in some coal and pay on some bills I owe, I guess I was too happy.

Indeed. To underscore that point, after the 1929 stock market crash unemployment went from 3 percent to about 9 percent. By 1931, unemployment was 17.4 percent, with big thanks to Hoover’s Hawley-Smoot tariff. By October 1933, well into FDR’s first year, it hit 22 percent. Five years after that (1938), five years of New Deal, it was virtually stagnant — 17.4 percent. By 1940, the year before the Second World War would finally end the Great Depression, and after 7 years of New Deal “experiment,” as FDR termed it, unemployment was still a whopping 14.6 percent.

Funny story via Andrew Roth at Club for Growth:

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan.” All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.

The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that.

Here’s a little more from ABC News’ John Stossel:

Can you name any new drugs or medical devices that are invented in France? Nearly all the world’s innovation comes from the relatively profit-driven American system.  If we relied on government healthcare, the world would still be getting 1950’s quality care.

Also, it is by no means clear that the French get “excellent” care.  When you account for “Fatal Injury” rates (mostly car accidents and murder), US life expectancy is higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation, including France. And this doesn’t even account for the fact that Americans are four times as likely to be obese.

First a video from CNN (via Weekly Standard):

Next, the Wall Street Journal explains the U.K. healthcare rationing system, through an agency with an Orwellian name — N.I.C.E., or the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. “Americans should understand how NICE works because under ObamaCare it will eventually be coming to a hospital near you,” says the Journal.

What’s truly frightening? The U.K. determines a life’s worth — $22,000 for every 6 months. Should the treatment cost more? So sorry. Please go die elsewhere.

In March, NICE ruled against the use of two drugs, Lapatinib and Sutent, that prolong the life of those with certain forms of breast and stomach cancer. This followed on a 2008 ruling against drugs — including Sutent, which costs about $50,000 — that would help terminally ill kidney-cancer patients. After last year’s ruling, Peter Littlejohns, NICE’s clinical and public health director, noted that “there is a limited pot of money,” that the drugs were of “marginal benefit at quite often an extreme cost,” and the money might be better spent elsewhere.

In 2007, the board restricted access to two drugs for macular degeneration, a cause of blindness. The drug Macugen was blocked outright. The other, Lucentis, was limited to a particular category of individuals with the disease, restricting it to about one in five sufferers. Even then, the drug was only approved for use in one eye, meaning those lucky enough to get it would still go blind in the other. As Andrew Dillon, the chief executive of NICE, explained at the time: “When treatments are very expensive, we have to use them where they give the most benefit to patients.”

NICE has limited the use of Alzheimer’s drugs, including Aricept, for patients in the early stages of the disease. Doctors in the U.K. argued vociferously that the most effective way to slow the progress of the disease is to give drugs at the first sign of dementia. NICE ruled the drugs were not “cost effective” in early stages.

Other NICE rulings include the rejection of Kineret, a drug for rheumatoid arthritis; Avonex, which reduces the relapse rate in patients with multiple sclerosis; and lenalidomide, which fights multiple myeloma. Private U.S. insurers often cover all, or at least portions, of the cost of many of these NICE-denied drugs.

NICE has also produced guidance that restrains certain surgical operations and treatments. NICE has restrictions on fertility treatments, as well as on procedures for back pain, including surgeries and steroid injections. The U.K. has recently been absorbed by the cases of several young women who developed cervical cancer after being denied pap smears by a related health authority, the Cervical Screening Programme, which in order to reduce government health-care spending has refused the screens to women under age 25.

We could go on. NICE is the target of frequent protests and lawsuits, and at times under political pressure has reversed or watered-down its rulings. But it has by now established the principle that the only way to control health-care costs is for this panel of medical high priests to dictate limits on certain kinds of care to certain classes of patients.

The NICE board even has a mathematical formula for doing so, based on a “quality adjusted life year.” While the guidelines are complex, NICE currently holds that, except in unusual cases, Britain cannot afford to spend more than about $22,000 to extend a life by six months. Why $22,000? It seems to be arbitrary, calculated mainly based on how much the government wants to spend on health care. That figure has remained fairly constant since NICE was established and doesn’t adjust for either overall or medical inflation.

Proponents argue that such cost-benefit analysis has to figure into health-care decisions, and that any medical system rations care in some way. And it is true that U.S. private insurers also deny reimbursement for some kinds of care. The core issue is whether those decisions are going to be dictated by the brute force of politics (NICE) or by prices (a private insurance system).

The last six months of life are a particularly difficult moral issue because that is when most health-care spending occurs. But who would you rather have making decisions about whether a treatment is worth the price — the combination of you, your doctor and a private insurer, or a government board that cuts everyone off at $22,000?

One virtue of a private system is that competition allows choice and experimentation. To take an example from one of our recent editorials, Medicare today refuses to reimburse for the new, less invasive preventive treatment known as a virtual colonoscopy, but such private insurers as Cigna and United Healthcare do. As clinical evidence accumulates on the virtual colonoscopy, doctors and insurers will be able to adjust their practices accordingly. NICE merely issues orders, and patients have little recourse.

This has medical consequences. The Concord study published in 2008 showed that cancer survival rates in Britain are among the worst in Europe. Five-year survival rates among U.S. cancer patients are also significantly higher than in Europe: 84% vs. 73% for breast cancer, 92% vs. 57% for prostate cancer. While there is more than one reason for this difference, surely one is medical innovation and the greater U.S. willingness to reimburse for it.

* * *

The NICE precedent also undercuts the Obama Administration’s argument that vast health savings can be gleaned simply by automating health records or squeezing out “waste.” Britain has tried all of that but ultimately has concluded that it can only rein in costs by limiting care. The logic of a health-care system dominated by government is that it always ends up with some version of a NICE board that makes these life-or-death treatment decisions. The Administration’s new Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research currently lacks the authority of NICE. But over time, if the Obama plan passes and taxpayer costs inevitably soar, it could quickly gain it.

Mr. Obama and Democrats claim they can expand subsidies for tens of millions of Americans, while saving money and improving the quality of care. It can’t possibly be done. The inevitable result of their plan will be some version of a NICE board that will tell millions of Americans that they are too young, or too old, or too sick to be worth paying to care for.

Whether it’s our hope-n-change (c) president (perhaps as in “our foreign policy is to just hope for change in Iran”), the 535 know-nothings in Congress, or the literally thousands of unelected bureaucrats attempting to justify their existence, you can count on one thing: government’s attempt to inject themselves in every facet of your life.

Here’s the latest government interference: Telecomm

Yesterday, the Journal reported that the Justice Department has begun an informal investigation “to determine whether large U.S. telecom companies such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. have abused the market power they’ve amassed in recent years.” And last month the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on so-called “exclusivity deals” between wireless carriers and handset makers to bring new devices to market….

Hu Meena of Cellular South, a Mississippi-based carrier with about 750,000 subscribers, told Congress that “the industry is trending back towards consolidation and the days of Ma Bell.” Regional and rural carriers, he said, can’t gain access to the latest gadgets because larger carriers have cut these exclusive deals. Mr. Meena is hoping to get some sympathy from Senators who represent rural states, like Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker and Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar.

In fact, the wireless marketplace has never been more competitive. Eight years ago there were 100 million U.S. wireless customers. Today there are more than 270 million. It’s true that AT&T (82 million) and Verizon (72 million) have the lion’s share. But the next two largest carriers, Sprint and T-Mobile, have a combined 82 million, and the five carriers that round out the top 10 have another 18 million among them. Merely because Cellular South doesn’t threaten Verizon’s share doesn’t mean other companies don’t. As for rural areas, 96% of Americans have a choice of at least three carriers.

Gosh, if only we had a choice on that many electric companies, or cable companies, or, say, presidential candidates.

Here’s the top 5 by Stephen Spruiell and Kevin Williamson:

1. The big doozy: Eighty-five percent of the carbon permits will not be sold at auction — they will be given away to utility companies, petroleum interests, refineries, and a coterie of politically connected businesses. If you’re wondering why Big Business supports cap-and-trade, that’s why. Free money for business, but higher energy prices for you.

2. The sale of carbon permits will enrich the Wall Street investment bankers whose money put Obama in the White House. Top of the list: Goldman Sachs, which is invested in carbon-offset development and carbon permissions. CNN reports:

Less than two weeks after the investment bank announced it would be laying off 10 percent of its staff, ***Goldman Sachs confirmed that it has taken a minority stake in Utah-based carbon offset project developer Blue Source LLC. . . . “Interest in the pre-compliance carbon market in the U.S. is growing rapidly,” said Leslie Biddle, Head of Commodity Sales at Goldman, “and we are excited to be able to offer our clients immediate access to a diverse selection of emission reductions to manage their carbon risk.”

3. With its rich menu of corporate subsidies and special set-asides for politically connected industries, Waxman-Markey has inspired a new corporate interest group, USCAP, the United States Climate Action Partnership — the group largely responsible for the fact that carbon permits are being given away like candy at Christmas rather than auctioned. And who is lined up to receive a piece of the massive wealth transfer that Waxman-Markey will mandate? Canada Free Press lists:

Alcoa, American International Group (AIG) which withdrew after accepting government bailout money, Boston Scientific Corporation, BP America Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Chrysler LLC (which continues to lobby with taxpayer dollars), ConocoPhillips, Deere & Company, The Dow Chemical Company, Duke Energy, DuPont, Environmental Defense, Exelon Corporation, Ford Motor Company, FPL Group, Inc., General Electric, General Motors Corp. (now owned by the Obama administration), Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, Inc., National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, NRG Energy, Inc., Pepsico, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, PG&E Corporation, PNM Resources, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens Corporation, World Resources Institute, Xerox Corporation.

One major group of recipients of the free money being given to industry in the form of carbon permits are the electric utilities, represented in Washington by the Edison Electric Institute. Along with the coal and steel businesses, the utilities are positioned to receive a huge portion of the carbon permits — some of which will be disguised as measures for consumers — and have become one of the nation’s highest-spending lobbies, working to ensure that their interests are served by cap-and-trade.

4. To the extent that the allowances actually generate government revenue, that money is going to be used for fraud-inviting projects of dubious environmental or economic value. Example: Some allowance money will be used to “build capacity to reduce deforestation in developing countries experiencing deforestation, including preparing developing countries to participate in international markets for international offset credits for reduced emissions from deforestation.” What are the chances of that being abused?

5. In addition to the permits, the bill also allows for the creation of “offsets” — the medieval-style indulgences of the carbon-footprint world. In fact, nearly all of Waxman-Markey’s carbon-reduction targets can be met with offsets alone through 2050, meaning decades before any actual reduction of greenhouse gases is required. That means huge new expenses for small businesses and consumers in return for basically zero environmental improvement. And how does one earn an offset to sell? Get a farm and cash in through such methods as, and we quote, “improved manure management,” “reduced tillage/no-tillage,” or “afforestation of marginal farmlands.” Translation: Plant some trees around the house and claim some extra credits on the land the government may already be paying you not to farm. And do a better job of handling your B.S. — but you’ll never do as good a job on that one as the authors of Waxman-Markey.

Gotta love the “medieval” descriptor to #5… that’s because they had this in medieval times — we called them paid indulgences. Basically, you could pay money to continue your sinful behavior. Thus, liberals today would have us pay money to offset our guilty consciences for “sinning” against their god — the environment. What’s the old saying? ‘In the absence of God man will create one.’ Indeed, I give you modern environmentalism.

Karen Campbell and David Kreutzer offer some analysis of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade pork-and-tax bill:

An analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill (as reported out of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce) by The Heritage Foundation found that unemployment will increase by nearly 2 million in 2012, the first year of the program, and reach nearly 2.5 million in 2035, the last year of the analysis. Total GDP loss by 2035 would be $9.4 trillion. The national debt would balloon as the economy slowed, saddling a family of four with $114,915 of additional national debt. Families would also suffer, as the bill would slap the equivalent of a $4,609 tax on a family of four by 2035.[1]

Heritage is not alone in its assessment. The National Black Chamber of Commerce[2] and the Brookings Institution[3] also project huge job losses. Proponents of a national energy tax will quickly point to a recent Congressional Budget Office memo[4] and Environmental Protection Agency[5] analysis suggesting low per family costs. Those estimates are grossly inaccurate, as both the CBO memo and the EPA’s analysis contain flaws too serious for use as measures of the economic impact of the Waxman-Markey bill.

Read the rest.

From Dan Balz of Washington Post:

Palin Opens Herself Up to Criticism

Right, right… because lefty journalists weren’t attacking Sarah Palin before last weekend’s resignation announcement.

Frankly, I don’t get the Palin thing either, but don’t act like the press wasn’t hounding her from her dress (slutty stewardess) to her family (hey, let’s make fun of her Down’s kid!) relentlessly before this. If she’s doing it to be with her family than God bless her because the only thing more useless than a journalist is a politician. If she’s doing this to run in 2012, well, like I just said, I don’t really get it. It would stink of the same silly parlor trick McCain tried last fall (I’m suspending campaigning to cure the subprime crisis!).

Anyway, but even in her resignation the leftist loony mosquito fringe can’t stop their blood sucking. Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard finds one blogger buffoon who actually takes individual credit for pushing Palin out.

I don’t have any deep insight into why Governor Palin decided to step down, but I think there is at least one possibility that we can rule out: Max Blumenthal. The blogger takes credit for her decision in a column for the Daily Beast:

On July 1, CBS reported that a story authored by me and journalist David Neiwert for Salon.com in October 2008 about Palin’s ties to a secessionist political party caused her deep personal distress, and provoked a rancorous series of exchanges with her campaign manager, Steve Schmidt. Coupled with a withering profile of Palin published in the August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, the new round of exposés may have been too much for Palin to stomach.

The arrogance of that paragraph, even for a blogger, is striking. There is no evidence of “deep personal distress” from Blumenthal’s shoddy reporting and CNN’s subsequent decision to amplify it. At the time I spoke to a producer at CNN who seemed to be experiencing genuine “deep personal distress” at his network’s decision to run the segment. And I know Governor Palin’s office was bothered by the Vanity Fair piece, but no more so than the countless hit pieces just like it that have come out in the last 10 months.

Blumenthal, however, just can’t help but credit his own Pravda-style reporting with affecting the course of human history. Just a month ago he was personally taking credit for the Israeli government’s decision to demolish an illegal outpost in the West Bank — coupled with other factors, of course. He wrote at the time, “Netanyahu had issued a list of 26 illegal outposts he planned to demolish — an unsuccessful tactic to mollify the Obama administration — but Hilltop 26 was not among them. Dana attributed the sudden demolition to intense coverage of the controversy, particularly my video for the Daily Beast and an editorial he authored for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz.”

I would like to take this opportunity to take credit for President Obama’s decision to continue the Bush administration policy of indefinite detention, to take a harder line on Iran, and to add additional troops to the war in Afghanistan. I’ve written some really awesome stuff on those issues, causing the president “deep personal distress.” Even Continetti says so.