As published for The Wall Street Journal on February 8th, 2010:

Tax increases can’t plausibly address the coming entitlement crisis.

Moody’s Investors Service’s warning last week that the AAA credit rating of the United States is in jeopardy raises fresh concern about the nation’s fiscal health. The question to ask about the president’s eye-popping budget, also rolled out last week, is whether it prepares the country for its future—or shackles it to past decisions that our leaders would rather not confront.

President Obama’s blueprint gave us a federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2010 of $1.6 trillion, about 10.6% of GDP. While one expects bigger budget deficits in a downturn, the administration expects the deficit and debt buildup to persist. By 2013, it forecasts that deficits will bring about a debt-to-GDP ratio of 72%, unprecedented in our experience except during a major war.

The problem is spending. Despite Mr. Obama’s words about restraint, the new budget proposes more spending—1.8% of GDP for 2011 to be precise—and a higher level, roughly one percentage point of GDP higher, in subsequent years.

Debates about the budget traditionally revolve around these numbers. There is another way to look at the federal budget, however, and that is to focus on its effect on our economic health, not just the government’s fiscal health. Focusing on economic health means setting our sights on productivity growth—our future living standards.

To understand what this means, consider the famous “kitchen debates” between Soviet President Nikita Khruschev and Vice President Richard Nixon in 1959 about the merits of capitalism and socialism. Nixon famously pointed to color television as a milestone in American innovation. The Soviet leader replied by trumpeting his nation’s lead in rocket thrust. The issue resurfaced in the televised 1960 presidential debates, when Sen. John F. Kennedy attacked Nixon for wanting to lead a nation No. 1 in color TV, but not in rockets.

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As published for The Wall Street Journal on February 9th, 2010:

‘We’re not handling any of these cases any different from the Bush administration.’

This weekend, Americans were treated to something new: Barack Obama defending his war policies by suggesting they merely continue his predecessor’s practices. The defense is illuminating, not least for its implicit recognition that George W. Bush has more credibility on fighting terrorists than does the sitting president.

Mr. Obama’s explanation came in an interview with Katie Couric just before the Super Bowl. Ms. Couric asked about trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York. After listing some of the difficulties, the president offered a startling defense for civilian trials:

“I think that the most important thing for the public to understand,” he told Ms. Couric, “is we’re not handling any of these cases any different than the Bush administration handled them all through 9/11.” Mr. Obama went on to add that “190 folks”—folks presumably just like the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks—had been tried and convicted in civilian court during Mr. Bush’s tenure.

Leave aside, for just a moment, the substance. Far more arresting is that Mr. Obama now defends himself by invoking a man he has spent the past year blaming for al Qaeda’s growth. You know—all those Niebuhrian speeches about how America had gone “off course,” “shown arrogance and been dismissive,” and “made decisions based on fear rather than foresight,” thus handing al Qaeda a valuable recruiting tool.

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As published for The Corner on nationalreview.com on February 8th, 2010:

Matthew Yglesias has a post up over at Think Progress once again raising the canard that there is even a remote comparison between the CIA’s lawful interrogation techniques and the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition.

Apparently, Yglesias has not bothered to read Courting Disaster. If he had, he would know better than to make this ridiculous argument. Even a basic review of the facts makes clear Yglesias is completely uninformed.

Take this description, which I quote in the book, from Henry Charles Lea’s 1906 volume, A History of the Inquisition in Spain:

The patient was placed on . . . a kind of trestle with sharp-edged rungs across it like a ladder. It slanted so that the head was lower than the feet and, at the lower end was a depression in which the head sank, while an iron band around the forehead or throat made it immovable. Sharp cords, called cordeles, which cut into the flesh, attached the arms and legs to the side of the trestle and others, known as garrotes, from sticks thrust in them and twisted around like a tourniquet till the cords cut more or less deeply into the flesh, were twined around the upper and lower arms, the thighs and the calves. . . .

The cords on the rack, Lea writes,

were carried to a maestro garrote by which the executioner could control all at once. These worked not only by compression, but by traveling around the limbs, carrying away skin and flesh. Each half round was reckoned a vuelta or turn, six or seven of which was the maximum, but it was usual not to exceed five. Formerly the same was done with the cord around the forehead, but this was abandoned as it was apt to start the eyes from their sockets.

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As published for Shadow Government on foreignpolicy.com on February 8th, 2010:

Which is worse: getting mentioned in a comprehensive analysis of what is wrong with the Obama White house or not getting mentioned? I guess it depends on your level of seniority. But I am guessing that National Security Advisor Jim Jones is done no favors by going unmentioned in this Financial Times story.

The FT article claims that President Obama’s tight-knit core leadership team, primarily drawn from the campaign and from old Chicago hands, is responsible for the tactical and strategic missteps that have dogged the first-year of the administration. I was drawn to the Financial Times story by Steve Clemons’s discussion of it on his blog. Clemons has very good sources within the Democratic Party and is a generally reliable bellwether for the mood of establishment Democrats on foreign policy. By blogging about the FT article and adding dishy tidbits of his own (such as catching Valerie Jarrett bowing out of a public speaking engagement because of “urgent duties” back at the White House only to turn up a few minutes later at a different Washington watering hole), Clemons explicitly endorses the central thesis and calls on President Obama to shake up his staff. If the underlying FT article is truly based on “dozens of interviews,” apparently none of which is favorable to the White House team, and if Steve Clemons (and the faction he represents) is piling on, then things are in a bad way.

That’s the bigger story. But when I read the underlying FT article, my eye was drawn to a smaller story, one that Clemons does not comment upon: General Jones is not mentioned at all in the FT article, neither favorably nor unfavorably. The article discusses national security — specifically, the White House team’s travails during the Afghan Strategy Review, the botched effort to close Guantanamo Bay, and the big trip to China — but does not discuss the national security advisor.

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Budget Director Peter Orszag wrote a blog post last Tuesday titled “A Short History of Deficit Reduction” in which he wrote:

The President’s Budget represents an important step towards fiscal sustainability: it put forward $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years, even excluding savings from the assumed ramp-down in war funding over time. Including these war savings, the deficit reduction proposed in the President’s Budget rises to $2.1 trillion.

This provokes an important question:  should we care about how much proposed policy changes reduce future projected budget deficits?  Or should we care about the deficits that result after those policy changes are made?

I think this is easiest to explain with an example.  We will look at FY 2012, which begins 20 months from now in October 2011.

• You remember that any number above 3% means that our debt will expand as a share of the economy.
• You know that the average budget deficit since the end of World War II is 1.8% of GDP.
• You know that this 5.1% will be tied for the fifth-largest deficit since the end of World War II.
• You therefore conclude that this is a bad outcome.

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As published for Critical Condition on healthcare.nationalreview.com on February 8th, 2010:

A White House official told the Washington Post that President Obama’s Blair House summit on health care “is not starting over . . . Don’t make any mistake about that.” The official added that “we are coming with our plan. They can bring their plan.” If they are not willing to start over, I am not sure what they hope to accomplish substantively from the summit. Politically, however, the intent is clear: The president is looking to reprise his Baltimore debate with the Republicans, but not to give any ground on substance. If this is the case, Republicans should treat the upcoming exercise as a debate, and come prepared with arguments in favor of their own plans, as well as rebuttals of the Obama plan.

While it would be great if the president and the Democrats were serious about finding a bipartisan alternative, they do not appear ready to take those steps yet. Still, it was not long ago that even a bipartisan summit was unexpected, and the White House is effectively acknowledging, after a long “party of no” campaign, that there are other ideas on health care out there besides their own. Republicans should bring their A game on the 25th, and be prepared to show — politely, but with conviction — why their ideas on health care are superior.

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As published for The Corner on nationalreview.com on February 8, 2010:

Yesterday on Meet the Press, Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan lashed out at Republicans for daring to criticize the Obama administration’s bungling of the interrogation of Abdulmutallab, the Christmas bomber — and said Republicans should have known he would automatically be Mirandized once the FBI began questioning him.

Brennan claimed that he spoke with four Republicans on Christmas night — Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Kit Bond, and Pete Hoekstra — and told them that Mr. Abdulmutallab “was in F.B.I. custody” and that they should have understood that “F.B.I. custody” meant reading Miranda rights in a civilian process.  “None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point,” Brennan said.

The problem with Brennan’s claim?

As I point out in Courting Disaster, just a few months earlier, the Obama administration announced that its new FBI-led “High-Value Interrogation Group” (HIG) would not necessarily Mirandize suspects it was questioning.

In its story on the announcement, the Washington Post reported:

Interrogators will not necessarily read detainees their rights before questioning, instead making that decision on a case-by-case basis, officials said. . . . “It’s not going to, certainly, be automatic in any regard that they are going to be Mirandized,” one official said, referring to the practice of reading defendants their rights. “Nor will it be automatic that they are not Mirandized.”

In other words, Republicans were assured by the Obama administration that the decision on reading Miranda rights to captured terrorists would be made a on “case-by-case” basis.

So if Brennan is wondering why the Republicans he spoke with did not just assume Abdumutallab would be automatically Mirandized, it is because the Obama administration told them so.

Of course, the HIG was not interrogating Abdulmutallab because — despite all the fanfare with its announcement — it had not yet been stood up. But how were Republicans to know that? Especially since Obama’s own director of national intelligence didn’t know that either?

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The most encouraging item in todays jobs report was the sharp drop in underemployment (which includes not only those who are unemployed but also marginally attached workers and those who are part time for economic reasons). The underemployment rate fell to 16.5%, down from its peak of 17.4% last October and from 17.3% in December:

The headline unemployment rate also declined; it now stands at 9.7%, down from its 10.1% peak in October and from 10.0% in December.

These declines are encouraging, but the labor market obviously has a long way to go. Just how far was reinforced by BLS’s updated figures on the number of payroll jobs. Total job losses now stand at 8.4 million since the recession began at the end of 2007.

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As published for The Washington Post on February 5th, 2010:

Former community organizer Barack Obama once seemed to recognize the important role of community institutions. It was among his few credible claims to ideological outreach. On the eve of his inauguration, cameras in tow, Obama took a paint roller to the walls of a D.C. homeless shelter. He retained the White House office that promotes community and faith-based charities. In June, during a speech saluting nonprofits, he said, “Solutions to America’s challenges are being developed every day at the grass roots. And government shouldn’t be supplanting those efforts, it should be supporting those efforts.”

But alliteration carries little weight in the budget process (to the disappointment of speechwriters everywhere). For the second budget in a row, President Obama has proposed to reduce the tax deductions on donations by the wealthy, making it about 10 percent more costly for them to give to charity — and gaining the federal government about $300 billion in revenue over 10 years.

The public justification for this tax increase is fairness. The budget reads: “Currently, if a middle-class family donates a dollar to its favorite charity or spends a dollar on mortgage interest, it gets a 15-cent tax deduction, but a millionaire who does the same enjoys a deduction that is more than twice as generous.” In the last budget season, Obama argued this tax increase would “equalize” a disparity and “raise some revenue from people who benefited enormously over the past several years.”

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