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Thursday, April 28, 2005I did not see the President's press conference tonight, but am mostly pleased with what I have read. The President may not hit all the right notes or hold positions I fully agree with, but he's working in useful directions on the big stuff.I am pleased to see the specter of sliding scale benefits raised. It's about damn time. It is ridiculous that minimum wage workers at McDonald's are forced to watch a meaningful chunk of their checks disappear into Social Security so that wealthy retirees can live a little better off a program that today's younger workers will never see. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are, predictably, making apoplectic. After all, Social Security is a) a cornerstone Democrat "achievement" and b) a something for nothing fraud. It's sold as getting back what you paid in, but that's bunk. It's getting whatever the pols can get the younger generation to cough up transferred to the older generation. If it were really about getting back what was rightfully yours, the Dems wouldn't be upset about personal accounts; they'd celebrate them as a way of making concrete what the government was "helping" you to do. On the energy front, of course, we're screwed until we wake up on nuclear. It's cute to pretend that the government can "do something" about oil prices, but experience shows that it can only push them up in the short term. In the longer term, energy policies can help alter supply sources, affecting the dynamics of energy acquisition and consumption. But in the short term, anything the government does is transparent enough that it will be priced into the market in hours. At that point, any pullback on the price lowering policy will be priced in just as quickly. Short term government interventions in any market are in tough competition with fad diets for good intentions with bad longer term results. Finally, I'd mention Iraq. Looks like they're getting a government together. Who, three years ago, would have predicted a freely elected Iraqi government whose leadership and program were being worked out through political haggling? Color me impressed. As for the mighy insurgency, it seems mostly to be mightily murdering police recruits and ordinary folks on the street. Hard targets are apparently too hard. This stuff makes for great headlines in the U.S., but in an Iraq not so long ago under Hussein, lots of senseless civilian deaths aren't quite so extraordinary a thing. The insurgency is counting on America buckling, because as long as we're there, the Iraqis won't. To bad for the thugs that John Kerry isn't president, though, because this president isn't likely to budge. 
posted by gbarto at 10:45 PM |
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