Caroline Glick says: Yes. Worth reading.
Obama
Immigration Policy
The airspace over coastal South Florida is buzzing with police/ICE/USCG helicopters. A buddy of mine pointed out a Coast Guard cutter in the Atlantic off Miami and a highway-patrol Cessna flying along the beach. Apparently the federal govt fears a new wave of Cuban migrants due to rumors that we will soon cancel our “wet foot/dry foot” immigration policy, making it more difficult for Cubans to enter the country legally. Thus the feds are mobilizing all resources to keep Cubans out. Here, at last, is a restrictive immigration policy that the Obama administration can support.
My advice to prospective Cuban migrants is to try to get to Mexico first. And learn Arabic if possible.
Truthtelling
…when a nation’s leader refuses to face reality.
Immediately following the German attack on Poland, on September 1 of 1939, Neville Chamberlain’s government temporized. A message to was sent to Germany proposing a ceasefire and an immediate conference, promising that “If the German Government should agree to withdraw their forces, then His Majesty’s Government would be willing to regard the position as being the same as it was before the German forces crossed the Polish frontier.”
According to General Edward Spears, who was then a member of Parliament, the assembly had been expecting a declaration of war. Few were happy with this temporizing by the Chamberlain government. Spears describes the scene:
Arthur Greenwood got up, tall, lanky, his dank, fair hair hanging to either side of his forehead. He swayed a little as he clutched at the box in front of him and gazed through his glasses at Chamberlain sitting opposite him, bolt-upright as usual. There was a moment’s silence, then something very astonishing happened.
Leo Amery, sitting in the corner seat of the third bench below the gangway on the government side, voiced in three words his own pent-up anguish and fury, as well as the repudiation by the whole House of a policy of surrender. Standing up he shouted across to Greenwood: “Speak for England!” It was clear that this great patriot sought at this crucial moment to proclaim that no loyalty had any meaning if it was in conflict with the country’s honour. What in effect he said was: “The Prime Minister has not spoken for Britain, then let the socialists do so. Let the lead go to anyone who will.” That shout was a cry of defiance. It meant that the house and the country would neither surrender nor accept a leader who might be prepared to trifle with the nation’s pledged word.
Greenwood then made a speech which I noted that night as certain to be the greatest of his life; a speech that would illuminate a career and justify a whole existence. It was remarkable neither for eloquence nor for dramatic effect, but the drama was there, we were all living it, we and millions more whose fate depended on the decisions taken in that small Chamber.
I was reminded of this occasion by the upcoming Bibi Netanyahu speech to Congress and the hostile political reactions to it. The reality is that Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons represents a severe threat not only to Israel but to the entire world, and by speaking to this point, he is serving not only his own country, but all of us.
Obama’s plan for an alliance with Iran.
There has been considerable curiosity about Obama’s foreign policy goals in the middle east. He has picked a major fight with Israel and the PM, Netanyahu. It has been known for years that Obama and Netanyahu loathe each other. Obama withdrew US forces from Iraq while American military leaders kept silent but were disapproving. The CIA Director, General Petraeus, was removed after a scandal that had administration fingerprints all over it. Senior generals who opposed Obama’s plans and let it be known, were relieved like like General McChrystal, who had permitted other officers in his commend to talk disrespectfully about the administration in front of a reporter.
As for McChrystal: In a press conference on June 24 of this year, Adm. Mike Mullen said, succinctly, “It was clear that … in its totality, it challenged civilian control … .”
Mullen’s “it” refers to the disrespect for civilian authority by now-former U.S. Afghanistan commander McChrystal’s staff, as portrayed in an article in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine. President Obama, whose wife until his candidacy was never proud of her country, relieved McChrystal for this disrespect — not so much for what McChrystal had said, but for his staff’s biting criticism of other members of the administration, including Vice President Joe Biden.
Not long after this, General Petraeus resigned from the CIA but is still being harassed by the FBI.
“All of us who know him and are close to him are mystified by the fact there is still this investigation into him,” Jack Keane, a retired four-star U.S. Army General said in an interview. Keane has been both an adviser to and mentor of Petraeus since he saved Petraeus’s life during a live-fire training exercise in 1991.
It may be as simple as an effort, so far successful, to keep Petraeus from talking about the Obama Administration’s most important foreign policy initiative.
How eager is the president to see Iran break through its isolation and become a very successful regional power? Very eager. A year ago, Benjamin Rhodes, deputy national-security adviser for strategic communication and a key member of the president’s inner circle, shared some good news with a friendly group of Democratic-party activists. The November 2013 nuclear agreement between Tehran and the “P5+1”—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—represented, he said, not only “the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the Iranian [nuclear] issue,” but “probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.”
Unemployment and Jobs.
The Pelosi Congress extended unemployment benefits in 2009 to a maximum of 53 weeks. This has been renewed until the new Republican Congress after 2010, unable to get Obama to negotiate, allowed the extra benefits to lapse.
Federal unemployment benefits that continue for 26 weeks after a person uses up the 26 weeks of state unemployment benefits ended Saturday, so now some 1.3 million people won’t be getting their $1,166 (on average) monthly check. By June, another 1.9 million will be cut off.
Many in the federal government are talking about the need to extend benefits. President Obama labelled it an “urgent economic priority” and called a couple of senators to pressure them to bring the matter up when the Senate reconvenes next week, and is urging Congress to extend the benefits for another three months. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised a vote no later than January 7 for the three month extension. Gene Sperling, the head of Obama’s National Economic Council, lamented the end of the federal aid…
Disaster was predicted.
Amazingly, the disaster did not happen. In fact, job growth went up.
Just looking at the economy’s overall size, you wouldn’t think that the last year was much different from any of the others since the recession. The U.S. economy grew at about the same rate in 2014 as it did in the previous four years — less than 2.4 percent, according to the Federal Reserve’s most recent projection. Yet last year was different. People started going back to work. The percentage of Americans working, more or less stuck in a ditch since 2009, increased from 58.6 percent in December 2013 to 59.2 percent last month. Employers added an average of 246,000 positions a month, about 3 million jobs overall.
What happened ?
Economists will debate what happened, but one of the more controversial theories is that Congress’s decision not to extend federal unemployment benefits at the end of 2013 encouraged those out of work to settle for more poorly paid jobs, giving firms a better reason to expand and hire new workers. That’s the conclusion of a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The authors, Marcus Hagedorn of the University of Oslo, Iourii Manovskii of the University of Pennsylvania and Stockholm University’s Kurt Mitman concluded that the reduction in benefits created 1.8 million jobs last year — more than half of the total.
That article is from the Washington Post so, of course, they provide rebuttals.
This is an interesting result which contradicts much prior research indicating that shortening benefit duration had little impact on employment growth (e.g. here, here, here, and here). It is worth testing this result with an alternative data series. HMM use the Current Population Survey for the state level data and the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) for the county level data. These series are both problematic for this sort of analysis.
Oh yes, other interpretations can be found. The leader of this new (1999) Democrat think tank is a leftist economist with a reliable view for the Washington Post to cite. His credits include: “He writes a weekly column for the Guardian Unlimited (UK), the Huffington Post, TruthOut, and his blog, Beat the Press, features commentary on economic reporting. His analyses have appeared in many major publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the London Financial Times, and the New York Daily News. He received his Ph.D in economics from the University of Michigan.”
The Wall Street Journal also weighs in on the report.
Assuming that the pre-2014 trends would have continued among the two groups, the authors find that “the cut in unemployment benefit duration led to a 2% increase in aggregate employment, accounting for nearly all of the remarkable employment growth in the U.S. in 2014.” They then confirm these results with a second experiment that compares adjacent counties in different states whose economies are otherwise equal except for their unemployment benefits.
Notably, job growth improved most in states and counties that offered the most generous benefits before Congress took away the punch bowl. This suggests that the extra jobless benefits reduced the incentives for businesses to create jobs and for jobless workers to fill the vacancies.
Of course, Obama is now bragging about the new job growth.
Mr. Obama is now taking credit for 2014’s job gains that his policies inhibited, much as he is for the boom in oil and gas drilling that his Administration resisted. Thus comes the opportunity for a late-term “Seinfeld” economic epiphany. Imagine the possibilities if the President realized that everything he thought about economics is wrong.
Unlikely.