President Barack Obama returned from Asia yesterday, and the headlines greeting him home are not kind. “Obama’s economic view is rejected on world stage,” reads The New York Times; “Obama, weakened after midterms, reveals limited leverage in failed S. Korea deal,” says The Washington Post; and ABC News declares, “President Obama Falls Short on G-20 Goals: Failure to Deliver on Key Trade Goals Reveals Limits of American Influence.” These headlines are only half-right: Yes, President Obama did fail to deliver on his agenda in Asia, but the culprit is not …
20 people with very different backgrounds are unlikely to reach consensus on anything substantial. To forge such a consensus requires leadership. This week’s G-20 meetings produced nothing of substance, which is no surprise because the United States did not lead. First, let’s dispense with the idea that America can’t lead. The American economy is more than one-third larger than the second- and third-largest, China’s and Japan’s, combined. The dollar is the world’s currency. When they get nervous, central bankers all over the globe buy U.S. Treasuries, no matter how low …
Liu Xiaobo, a primary author of the Charter 08 document calling for better human rights and democracy in China, has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. At the G-20 Summit this November in South Korea, President Obama, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, will meet with President Hu Jintao, the leader of China and the country where Liu Xiaobo is in jail. It’s a perfect opportunity for President Obama to put America’s actions where its mouth is. Members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and some their colleagues in …
Responding to North Korea’s torpedoing of a South Korean warship in March, I blogged a series of recommendations – one being that we should ratify the long shelved Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS). It has many economic benefits, and would demonstrate “no retreat by the U.S. from Northeast Asia,” I argued. One skeptical reporter responded with a “like that will happen.” Well, this weekend KORUS got a shot of life. At the G20 summit in Toronto, President Obama and South Korean President Lee vowed to get it done over the …
The willingness of some in the media to accept even the most vapid of statements from international leaders as evidence of major policy change provides evidence daily that reporters, like the rest of us, can let their hopes get in the way of their judgment. A case in point is today’s editorial in the Washington Post by David Ignatius on the G-20 summit getting underway in Toronto. For Ignatius, President Obama’s recent letter to his G-20 counterparts, in which he called for restraint in easing government spending, fewer exports by …
In the often Orwellian world of government policy pronouncements, the Obama economic team is trying for new ground, with “self-sustaining” recovery, understood at least by the dictionary to mean “maintaining itself by independent effort,” now understood, according to Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, as requiring extensive government support and intervention. In an op-ed published June 23 in The Wall Street Journal, the two most senior Administration economic officials call on their G-20 colleagues to maintain government spending, establish a global framework for financial regulation, and to make efforts in agricultural …
A page on the Canadian Government’s G-20 Toronto Summit website promises payments to citizens “to mitigate adverse financial consequences” as a result of the meeting of world leaders June 26-27. Unfortunately, the adverse consequences being referred to are only those incurred as a result of the security precautions that shut down cities when the world’s power brokers come to town. Those economic costs can run into the millions, as the citizens of Pittsburgh found out when they hosted G-20 leaders last year. The real economic damage to fear, of course, …
Back in April, after the G20 Summit, we at Heritage warned that the Summit’s attack on tax havens was, at best, an irrelevancy. At worst, it was “the start of a broader campaign to find new sources of money to tax and stigmatize as international wrongdoers states that, as an expression of their national sovereignty, have chosen to have lower taxes.” The idea that states that have lower taxes are committing a crime could not be more wrong. These states are using their political freedom to promote economic freedom. They …
President Obama’s trip to Europe has been revealing. Many people had high hopes that Obama may turn out to be a closet moderate. After all, his position on Afghanistan wasn’t all that bad, some said. Unfortunately, the picture is now clearer; his statements and actions in Europe show just how unrealistic those hopes were. Consider what Obama did in Europe: 1. The day after North Korea launched a missile that someday may be capable of delivering a nuclear weapon against the United States, who did he put in the nuclear …
Unraveling the meaning of the G-20 summit will be the work of months, if not years. Many of the announced measures are vague, and the ones that are less vague are not encouraging. The promise to continue “expansionary policies for as long as needed” is an open-ended invitation to tax, borrow, and spend, while the pledge to “support sustainable compensation schemes and the corporate social responsibility of all firms” is foolhardy. The responsibility of firms is to obey the law and make profits for their shareholders, not to be subject …
