Pics and toons 8/25/11 (1)

 

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On War, Obama has been Worse than Bush

On War, Obama has been Worse than Bush
Thursday, August 25, 2011
by Anthony Gregory

Obama said he would divert resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. To his everlasting shame, he has not broken this promise.

[This is a transcript of a lecture given at the Austrian Scholars Conference, March 7, 2011]

The real critique of the wars certainly goes beyond the numbers. It is good, however, to look at the figures. Most people in the country know that Obama hasn't exactly ended the wars. I'm sure people say, Yeah, but Obama is ending the wars.

This claim is not obviously 100 percent false in every respect, perhaps. And so we need to be careful when we get into the details.

So, during the run-up to the ascension of Obama to the throne, he was critical of the Iraq war. He said things like This war's lasted longer than World War I, II, the Civil War; 4,000 Americans have died (and of course Americans are the only people that matter in the war). More than 60,000 have been injured; we spent trillions of dollars; we're less safe.

These were very sound critiques of the Iraq war. A lot of us made these kinds of utilitarian critiques. They're almost utilitarian anyway. I don't think they are the most important reasons to oppose the Iraq war, but they are important reasons; they are sufficient reasons on their own, certainly. And Obama did sound better on the Iraq war than Bush or McCain.

At the same time ­ and this is forgotten -- he always was worse on Afghanistan. The Democrats, from Kerry to Obama, were always worse on Afghanistan. Obama's position paper said he's been calling for more troops and resources for the war in Afghanistan for years; he would divert resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. To his everlasting shame, he has not broken this promise.

Another point I want to make is on Iraq. He wasn't antiwar; he was always slippery on this war. I want to just relay a couple of interesting points.

In 2004, the position of the Democrats was always We shouldn't have gone in; now we're in, we're going to have to get out one day, but it sure isn't responsible to talk about getting out now, because we need to be responsible; we need to fix the country, and then we'll get out.

In '04, in the Chicago Tribune, Obama said, "There's not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush's position at this stage."

Throughout the years, he voted for war funding once he was senator, and he defended his votes. Presumably it would be wrong to defund an immoral war. And in 2008, Obama hailed the Iraq surge -- a controversial policy harshly criticized by many Democrats the year before -- going so far as to tell Bill O'Reilly that the surge "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

In December of '08, when he was the lame-duck president, Bush signed the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi leadership, which set the timetable for withdrawal. It was almost precisely the timetable for withdrawal that Obama had proposed, within a couple months.

So the official US policy, by the time Obama took office, was that the United States would withdraw the troops from the cities by June of 2009; and by the end of this year, 2011, the troops would leave Iraq entirely. That was the policy when Obama took power. He did not expedite that.

To his credit, he hasn't put all his political capital into stopping it, although even there I would qualify my statements.


Boots on the Ground

In Iraq, at the height of the surge, which worked beyond our wildest dreams, there were 170,000 US troops in Iraq, and now there are fewer than 50,000. Which, by the way, is about the number that Rumsfeld and those clowns said that we would need for the war. So, now that the war is kind of wrapping up, we're at the level that they thought we'd need to invade and conquer and occupy and win.

In Afghanistan, meanwhile, Obama has fulfilled his promises, unfortunately. Before 2006, except for a blip in July, there were about 10 to 20,000 troops. And then by the time Bush left office, unfortunately he ramped it up to 33,000 troops. By mid-2010, there were almost three times as many -- 91,000 troops. Throughout 2009, Obama has almost tripled the presence in Afghanistan.

Obama's first defense secretary, Robert Gates, who by the way was Bush's defense secretary too, floated the idea the United States might have to stay beyond 2011. And some Democrats on the Armed Services Committee have said, Yeah, we can't just withdraw. (I suppose you can't just go into a country and bomb it and stay there for only eight years ­ that would be reckless.)

Figure 1. US Military Fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq, Per Year



Source: Calculated from data gathered at icasualties.org.

The total number of troops fighting wars under Obama has been higher than it was under Bush except at the end of Bush's term. At the first half of the Bush administration, which is when there were people in the streets shouting, "Bush is a war criminal" -- when the Left was correct about something -- there were fewer troops.

There were more US fatalities in Iraq under Bush, although the total number of US fatalities in 2009 and 2010 was higher than it was in 2003, and higher than it was in 2008, the last Bush year.

Let's say we had a third Bush term. If he was planning to withdraw gradually from Iraq and leave Afghanistan alone, I think the trajectory would have been much better than it is today, where Iraq is about where I think it would have been, and Afghanistan is much worse.

Obama also boosted private contractors by about a quarter in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As of January 2011 -- of course, this is government data and you'd be surprised how much they don't know what they are talking about ­ there are 87,000 contractors in Afghanistan; 71,000 in Iraq.

There were more civilian contractors (including foreigners) that died in the first half of 2010 than there were soldiers. And some people are pointing out that shifting some of the burden to contractors obscures what is going on.


Costly Wars

Obama always said that we are spending way too much; we're going to go line by line in the budget. And one of the only good promises he made was to save money on Iraq. That's how he was planning to support everyone from cradle to grave. It doesn't really add up that way, but at least he wanted to cut spending on something big.

And he did cut the spending in Iraq. But the spending has gone up enormously in Afghanistan. Even adjusted for inflation, we see that, other than Bush's last two years with the surge, total spending was lower for most of the Bush term on the two wars.

Figure 2. Estimated War Funding by Operation FY2001–FY2011
(in billions of dollars, adjusted for in!ation in constant 2011 dollars, as of Feb 2011)



* Calculated using FY02 metrics.
Note: CPI years and budget fiscal years might be off by a few months, but this chart is still illustrative of trends with inflation.
Source: Amy Belasco, "The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11," Congressional Research Service, March 29, 2011, p. 3. Consumer Price Index inflation calculated using the Bureau of Labor Statistics's Inflation Calculator, available online.

Obama criticized Bush for financing wars off budget. In his first year Obama had a big supplemental-funding bill ­ another broken promise.

The Afghanistan war has expanded out of control, and the war makes no sense. The government says there are 100 Al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and so the troop levels are higher, more people are dying and they want to stamp out the opium trade. They can't even stop people from buying crack four blocks from the White House, not that they should try. This is the most ridiculous war. It's even a more ridiculous war than the Iraq war in terms of the idea behind it.

Meanwhile, Obama is drone-attacking Pakistan. He's expanded this war greatly. One or 2 million Pakistani refugees have had to leave the Swat Valley. It's one of the greatest refugee crises since Rwanda. Obama's bombed Yemen; he's bombed Somalia; he even threatened Eritrea, this tiny little country near Ethiopia, with invasion.

In a normal country, when your government says it might invade another country, people have a clue, but we're at war so much with so many countries no one even knows any of this stuff.

And on Iran, Obama continues to be belligerent when he caught Iran "red-handed" with that Qom nuclear facility. Iran reported that they had this facility that they hadn't really started working on yet, according to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which the National Intelligence Estimate, the administration, and the International Atomic Energy Agency all say Iran's basically following the law.


Civil Liberties

Warrantless surveillance has continued, and it's been normalized. The TSA outrages have gotten worse. Now the Left thinks that you're crazy if you oppose the police state, and the Right is finally realizing the federal government shouldn't get to touch us like this.

Detention without charge has continued. Habeas corpus is gutted. Obama was supposed to close Guantanamo within a year; now it looks as if they are never going to close it. And even at their best they'll say we'll have a "Guantanamo Lite" within the United States.

Even when they said they would try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civil court, the administration's position was We'll try him, and we'll convict him, and if we don't convict him we'll still detain him. So of course the American Right goes crazy because how dare he be soft on terrorism.

Renditioning, this outsourcing of people to be tortured, has continued, at least on some level. In 2009, they renditioned a guy who wasn't even accused of terrorism. He was accused of knowing about supposed fraud related to defense contracting.

So they tied him to a chair; they deprived him of sleep; they told him his family was in danger, that he'll never see them again ­ all the horrible stuff that happened under Bush, but he was basically a white-collar criminal at worst.

The drone attacks are through the roof; there's robot killing. Bradley Manning, the likely whistleblower with WikiLeaks, has been detained. And Obama used to say his administration would protect whistleblowers. I guess he meant protect them with steel cages.

We have the same basic trajectory on war, on spending, on civil liberties, on foreign policy; the Defense Department is as bloated as ever. People forget that both parties are the same on pretty much everything, and foreign policy maybe more than anything else.

For the full research, including a discussion of the Libya war, see the policy report, "What Price War?: Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Costs of Conflict."



Anthony Gregory lives in Oakland, California. He is research editor at the Independent Institute. See his website for more articles and personal information. Send him mail. See Anthony Gregory's article archives.


This article is based on a talk delivered at the Austrian Scholars Conference, March 7, 2011. The research culminated in the Independent Institute policy paper, " What Price War?: Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Costs of Conflict." Thank you to Jennifer Lewis for providing the transcript.


http://mises.org/daily/5231/On-War-Obama-has-been-Worse-than-Bush

What Do We Mean by “Big Government”?

The Calling
What Do We Mean by "Big Government"?
Size and scope
Steven Horwitz
Posted August 25, 2011

In the comments on last week's column, there was an interesting exchange over just how big President Hoover's expansion of government really was after the 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression.  One commenter criticized my measuring expenditures and the budget deficit according to their percentage of GDP. Since GDP was falling, the critic wrote, those percentages may exaggerate the growth in expenditures and the deficit.

There are several responses to that criticism, the first being that the growth in government expenditures might have been part of the cause of the fall in GDP (by reducing investment more than government grew), which would bolster the point that government was growing in a harmful way.  However, the deeper and related response is that measures of the impact of government that focus only on the scale of government are an incomplete way of understanding the full effect that government can have on an economy.


Scale and Scope

To see that larger impact, we need to adopt a distinction that Robert Higgs effectively uses in his book Crisis and Leviathan.  Higgs differentiates between the scale of government and the scope of government.  Scale simply refers to the kinds of measures noted above. Higgs points out that we would expect there to be a strong correlation between, say, population and the size of government.  Even in a world of very limited government and economies of scale, a larger population will require more police and a larger legal apparatus.  A larger, more complex economy might also require a somewhat larger scale of government, even if it is strictly limited in its powers.  The scale of government is indicated by the size of total expenditures and other traditional measures.

By contrast scope refers to the range of government powers.  The important point is that giving government more power need not mean a significant increase in expenditures.  For example, the Federal Reserve System is not even on the map in terms of the expensive things the federal government does, yet giving the Fed the various powers, especially the monopoly powers, it possesses has had a significant -- and damaging -- effect on the economy.  One might say the same thing about laws like the minimum wage or occupational licensure.  They don't necessarily cost much to implement or enforce, but they can have highly significant consequences.

Thus the ability of government to inflict economic harm by being "big" is a matter of both scale and scope, and we often forget to recognize the latter.


Great Depression

This point is nicely illustrated by the Great Depression.  In arguing that Hoover was no friend of laissez faire last week, I used quantitative measures to emphasize questions of scale, but my list of interventions contains both scale and scope items.  Public works and government loan programs certainly expand government budgets and thus scale, as well as increasing the scope of its powers.

Other items, however, are not very costly but still very damaging.  The big three here would be Hoover's attempt to keep wages from falling, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and his stricter enforcement of antitrust laws.  None of these involved significant increases in government expenditures, yet all three were damaging to employment and the business environment, especially the first two, and thereby substantially worsened the Great Depression.

The same could be said of many policies of the Roosevelt administration, as well as its antibusiness rhetoric, which is one major source of the regime uncertainty that Higgs argues extended the depression.


Obamacare

The scale versus scope distinction is relevant in our own time as well.  The recently passed health care "reform" will certainly increase the scale of government, but it will also increase its scope, as government will have more power over individual decision-making.  Business leaders are already reporting that uncertainty about its effects, and not its impact on the federal budget, is a major reason they are not hiring.

The Dodd-Frank financial "reform" law probably won't add that much to the federal budget, but the increased scope of intervention it creates is already making life miserable for the financial sector, and the damage it causes will be well out of proportion to its cost.  And in a repeat of the 1930s, the Obama administration's frequent antibusiness, or at least anticorporate, rhetoric has been a cheap but effective cause of reduced private-sector investment.

The scale of government matters, but we cannot get so tangled up in debates about the size of federal government expenditures that we overlook the effects of changes in the scope of government power.  Changes in scope are often more damaging to economic growth ­ and individual freedom ­ than are changes in scale.  We forget about them at our peril.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/what-do-we-mean-by-%E2%80%9Cbig-government%E2%80%9D/

Fwd: [New post] Who's Afraid of Ron Paul?

Who's Afraid of Ron Paul? Eowyn | August 25, 2011 at 5:25 am | Tags: 2012 presidential election, Barack Obama, conservative, Constitutionalist, Federal Reserve, libertarian, media bias, TEA Party | Categories: 2012 Election, Constitution, Culture War, Economy, Liberals, Media, Republican Party, Taxes, Tea Party, United States, US Presidents | URL: http://wp.me/pKuKY-8Wd

Ron Paul, M.D., is a longtime Congressman serving the state of Texas. Described as conservative, Constitutionalist, and libertarian, Paul has been termed the "intellectual godfather" of the Tea Party movement.

He is also one of the Republicans competing to be the GOP presidential nominee for 2012. In fact, a recent (August 23) Rasmussen Reports poll finds that Obama and Ron Paul are running almost dead even in a hypothetical 2012 election matchup.

This is the media's coverage of Ron Paul compared to other 2012 candidates:

Source: Journalism.org

Here's the chart presented as number of campaign stories:

Candidate               # of Campaign Stories

Barack Obama                    221
Mitt Romney                        120
Newt Gingrich                     112
Michele Bachmann            108
Donald Trump                      94
Sarah Palin                            85
Tim Pawlenty                        52
Jon Huntsman                      44
Rick Perry                               33
Ron Paul                                 27
Rick Santorum                      21
Herman Cain                         11

Tim Pawlenty got more media coverage than Ron Paul? Puleeze!!!!!

Why is that?

Is it because of Ron Paul's adamant insistence that the "creature from Jekyll Island," aka as the U.S. Federal Reserve System, be audited?

Or is it because Ron Paul recently warned that "They're setting up the stage for violence in America"?

H/t beloved fellow Joseph.

~Eowyn

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Which Strategy Really Ended the Great Depression?

Our Economic Past
Which Strategy Really Ended the Great Depression?
Burton W. Folsom Jr.
September 2011 • Volume: 61 • Issue: 7 •

"World War II got us out of the Great Depression." Many people said that during the war, and some still do today. The quality of American life, however, was precarious during the war. Food was rationed, luxuries removed, taxes high, and work dangerous. A recovery that does not make­as Robert Higgs points out in Depression, War, and Cold War.

Franklin Roosevelt recognized that the war only provided a short-term fix for the economy -- and a very costly one at that. What would happen after the war­when 12 million troops came home and the strong demand for guns, bullets, tanks, and ships ceased?

Roosevelt envisioned a New Deal revival. He had created the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) in 1939 and urged it during the war to plan for peacetime. The NRPB leaders believed that government planning was necessary to promote economic development. They consciously (and sometimes unconsciously) followed ideas popularized in 1936 by John Maynard Keynes in his bestselling book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

Capitalism was inherently unstable, Keynes argued, and would rarely provide full employment. Therefore government intervention was needed, especially in recessions, to spend massive amounts of money on public works, which would create new jobs, expand demand, and rebuild consumer confidence. Yes, government would need to run large deficits, but economic stability was society's reward. If government planners could manage aggregate demand through public works, the boom-bust business cycle could be flattened and economic development could be managed in the national interest. No more Great Depressions. Man could indeed be master of his economic future.

Before and during the war Keynes's ideas swept through the United States and first transformed the universities, then the political culture of the day. With statistics in hand and a near reverence for government, the Keynesians were the new generation of planners. They wanted to remake society. Not entrepreneurs, but economists were needed to gather data, plan government programs, and regulate economic development. Paul Samuelson, for example, a 21-year-old economics student, was cautious at first, but then euphoric after Keynes's book was published. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven," Samuelson wrote. Other economists soon accepted Keynes, and by the 1940s his ideas dominated the economics profession. In 1948, Samuelson would defend Keynes by writing the best-selling economics textbook of all time.


Planning for Peace

Those on the NRPB were among the excited disciples of Keynes and economic planning. The war itself seemed to be evidence that government jobs had pulled the U.S. economy out of the Depression. Now the economists and planners needed to take the nation's helm to plan for peace.

According to Charles Merriam, vice president of the NRPB, "[I]t should be the declared policy of the United States government, supplementing the work of private agencies as a final guarantor if all else failed, to underwrite full employment for employables. . . ." That idea launched what Merriam and the NRPB dubbed "A New Bill of Rights." FDR would call it his Economic Bill of Rights. Included was a right to a job "with fair pay and working conditions," "equal access to education for all, equal access to health and nutrition for all, and wholesome housing conditions for all."


New Bill of Rights

FDR viewed this Economic Bill of Rights as his tool for guaranteeing employment for veterans (and others) after World War II. But it was more than a mere jobs ploy; it had the potential to transform American society. The first Bill of Rights, which became part of the Constitution, emphasized free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion and assembly. They were freedoms from government interference. The right to speak freely imposes no obligation on anyone else to provide the means of communication. Moreover, others can listen or leave as they see fit.

But a right to a job, a house, or medical care imposes an obligation on others to pay for those things. The NRPB implied that the taxpayers as a group had a duty to provide the revenue to pay for the medical care, the houses, the education, and the jobs that millions of Americans would be demanding if the new bill of rights became law. In practical terms this meant that, say, a polio victim's right to a wheelchair properly diminished all taxpayers' rights to keep the income they had earned. In other words, the rights announced in the Economic Bill of Rights contradicted the property rights promised to Americans in their Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution.

FDR promoted his Economic Bill of Rights in his State of the Union message in 1944, but he died before the war ended. Shortly before his death, Senator James Murray (D-Mont.) introduced a full-employment bill into the Senate for discussion. The bill committed the government in a general way to provide jobs if unemployment became too high. Many leading Democrats and economists supported Murray's bill. "In this session of Congress," The New Republic reported, "one of the first bills to be introduced will no doubt be the full employment bill of 1945, designed to carry out item number one in the Economic Bill of Rights." The Nation joined The New Republic in endorsing the full-employment bill. "Mr. Roosevelt's program," it concluded, "is squarely based on the best economic authority available. It is entirely consistent with the economic doctrines of the distinguished British economist Lord Keynes."

On September 6, 1945, President Harry Truman gave a major speech in which he supported the Economic Bill of Rights, especially a full-employment bill. Most congressmen, however, rejected both. Rep. Harold Knutson (R-Minn.) said, "Nobody knows what the President's full employment bill will cost American taxpayers, but the aggregate will be enormous."

Instead, Knutson and many other congressmen favored cutting tax rates and slashing the size of government as the best measure to restore economic growth. Senator Albert Hawkes (R-N.J.) even argued that "the repeal of the excess-profits tax, in my opinion, may raise more revenue for the United States than would be raised if it were retained." Hawkes proved to be prophetic. After vigorous debate Congress scrapped the Economic Bill of Rights and cut tax rates instead. American business then expanded, revenues to the Treasury increased to balance the federal budget, and unemployment was only 3.9 percent in 1946 and 1947. The Great Depression was over.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past/which-strategy-really-ended-the-great-depression/