President Obama’s wooden speech tonight, ostensibly focused on Iraq, actually gave short shrift to the war in Iraq and failed to convincingly articulate a vision of Iraq’s future, his own Iraq policy, or America’s role in the world. The President talked about ending the war, but not of victory. Apparently in a rush to put the war in the past, he gave little attention to why the war was fought, what was at stake, or how the war related to broader U.S. goals in the Middle East. Instead, Obama maintained …
It is not clear what the President meant when he said, “Ending the war was in our interest.” First, wars just don’t end. They are a win, a loss, or a draw. By implying that he simply “ended” the war by just following a plan – as if he were imposing a managerial solution over a public policy problem – Obama gave the American people a very a simplistic and wrongheaded notion of war. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Obama ought to understand this better than anyone. After …
Unfortunately, President Obama missed a valuable opportunity tonight to demonstrate that he is fully committed to success in Afghanistan. Instead he stubbornly reiterated his July 2011 withdrawal date. Obama rightly said Americans should not lose sight of what is at stake in Afghanistan and that the U.S. must prevent the country from again becoming a terrorist safe haven. But his subsequent declarations that U.S. forces will only be in place for a limited time and that “wars cannot go on forever” revealed his impatience with the current counterinsurgency strategy and …
It is understandable that the President wanted to mention the sorry state of the domestic economy in his address to the nation. More Americans are out of work now than when Obama took office. Recent economic news has not been good. Just as the President said, fixing the economy is indeed an “urgent” task.” But that does not mean he now has the luxury to neglect his most urgent task, the one assigned to him by the U.S. Constitution: to “Provide for the Common Defense.”
Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than just buildings. Left with scarce resources and personnel, local government in New Orleans became weak and ineffective in the aftermath of the flooding. Five years later, the rebuilding of New Orleans is far from complete, but reformers can point to at least one major accomplishment: a new school system built around charter schools and parental choice. As a recent Newsweek article explains in some detail, Louisiana established the Recovery School District (RSD) to replace the old school system in New Orleans. Eschewing centralized control, RSD …
In the 1980s and 1990s, Chicken Littles warned that Japan was buying up America. The biggest symbol that our country couldn’t keep up with Japan’s managed-trade policies was the 1989 purchase of New York’s Rockefeller Center by Mitsubishi. Even though the sky didn’t fall, protectionist Chicken Littles are at it again. Only today it’s China that Americans are supposed to fear. According to one writer, Getting tough with China is not protectionist, it’s self defense. Don’t stand up and Beijing will end up owning the National Mall along with the …
Josh Rogin took note when a major Tea Party group rallied against New START, the arms control treaty Obama signed with the Russians. He was right to pay attention. The Tea Parties have said little on defense issues. Some on the left had high hopes, even as they trashed the Tea Parties, that the latter might actually join them in an effort to cut defense spending; bail on Afghanistan; and scale back on America’s overseas footprint. The arms-control left was also probably hoping that Tea Party followers would become part …
In the ongoing discussion on how best to address the nation’s out-of-control deficit spending, one proposal would increase taxes by adding a value-added tax (VAT) on top of the current tax system. Proponents argue that a new tax on consumption would raise the needed revenues to close the deficit gap without the negative economic effects of raising the income tax. However, rather than putting Washington’s fiscal house back in order, a VAT is more likely to grow the size of government and encourage growth in spending—effects that would be counterproductive …
By now it’s obvious that the government’s “stimulus” spending spree has failed to achieve its intended results—just as critics of Keynesian economic theory predicted. Compounding the policy blunder is the failure of officials to properly vet some of the costly public works projects. Case in point is the $7.2 billion broadband deployment scheme: Federal officials failed to determine whether targeted communities actually lack Internet service options. In a number of cases, in fact, the government subsidies will put existing private service providers at a competitive disadvantage.
Yesterday, President Obama insisted that a coalition of Senate Republican legislators is playing partisan politics yet again. He told Americans that he knows exactly what small businesses need in order to start productively hiring, and that’s the Small Jobs Act, which is currently before the Senate. The business community does not need President Obama to lecture to them about partisan politics, and they certainly do not need him to do the same about legislation that replaces the private sector with agencies of the federal government to “promote” entrepreneurship, exporting, and …
