The (unsucceesful) FAA gambit

The administration has tried its best to make the sequester cuts as painful as possible so as to garner political capital for their fight to increase government spending even more. But no agency has been more obvious about this than the FAA with it's furlough of air traffic controllers. As an article today in the Wall Street Journal mentions (Flight Delay Rebuke):

 The FAA's all-hands furloughs managed to convert a less than 4% FAA budget cut into a 10% air-traffic control cut that would delay 40% of flights. The 6,700 flights that the FAA threatened to force off schedule every day is twice as many delays as the single worst travel day of 2012.

and

 The Senate bill clarifies that the FAA has the authority to cut waste and nonessential items before it lays off controllers—which the White House falsely claimed the sequester law prohibited it from doing. The six-page bill also specifically identifies $253 million in discretionary unspent airport grants that can be used for air control instead. That's among the $34 billion in so-called "unobligated funds" that the Department of Transportation has on hand this year despite sequestration.

 Pretty obvious!!

Recommended: Fault Lines Loom for "Dominant" Dem Majority.

Sean Trende has a provocative piece on RealClear Politics today, Fault Lines Loom for "Dominant" Dem Majority. He argues that the current dominate Democratic coalition contains serious internal contradictions which will sooner or later - probably sooner - pull it apart.

....Democrats are increasingly confronted with either raising taxes on their suburban constituents or cutting spending on their downscale voters to deal with debt; either move will likely enrage the affected group.

It comes back to the old saying, "there is no free lunch".  Democrats want to offer a wide range of expensive government services to the less affluent (one part of their coalition), but the only way to do that is to tax more heavily the liberal middle class (the other part of their coalition).

This is an interesting piece.

Observations on terrorists

The quick apprehension of the Boston bombers brings to mind the following observations about terrorists, and especially terrorists in America:

1) In general, terrorists tend to be pretty dumb. Set aside the fact that their act of terrorism didn't do anything to advance their cause, whatever it was. That they were still in Boston four days after the attack, and that they were apparently unaware of how many people had their photos, displays a pretty amateurish understanding of the world. One can make similar observations about some of the other terrorists we have had, both Islamic and non-Islamic. In general they seem to be stupid thugs, rather than the masterminds of fiction.

But then, I notice in general that terror organizations operate by keeping the masterminds safe and sending only the expendable young, dumb, deluded ones out to do the dirty work.

2) For all the carping about the amount of money spent on anti-terrorism since 9/11, it was evident that we were far better prepared to deal with a terrorist incident like this than we were, for example, when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, or when 9/11 occurred. The fact that we have had so few of these incidents in America is another indication that we have gotten a lot better at stopping these sorts of things.

3) Nevertheless, America has an abundance of "soft" targets, large gatherings of people in conditions where it is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain tight security. These will continue to tempt fringe terrorist groups and deluded loners. It would help if the media could bring itself to ignore these sorts of things, as the British media did with IRA bombings, because it is precisely the widespread media coverage of their acts that the terrorists seek. But I suppose that is too much to ask.

4) Terrorists groups like Al Qaeda claim that their intention with terrorist acts is to demoralize America and force it to spend so much money combating it that the country will go broke. Well, after a decade of trying, there is no evidence that either is occurring.

We have spent billions in our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hundreds of millions in beefing up security in this country, but our economy is so large, the nation as a whole so wealthy, and our economy - even in recession - so healthy and vibrant that it made little difference to us economically. Soaring health care costs are a far worse drain on the economy than anything the terrorists have done.

Nor is there any sign of demoralization in the country. In fact as near as I can tell each terrorist act just makes us madder, and more determined. Clearly the terrorists don't understand the America psyche very well.

Recommended: The World is Marching Toward Anarchy

Robert Kaplan of STRAFOR has an interesting piece, The World is Marching Toward Anarchy. As he points out, liberal forces throughout the world oppose hierarchy,  hegemony, and imperial power because they foster inequality.  Yet a study of history shows that the world is most peaceful precisely when some imperial power is keeping the peace.  And it is most troubled and unsafe when there is no “big dog” enforcing order.

I’m reminded that Las Vegas, when the mob ruled it, had almost no petty crime.  It was bad for business, so petty criminals who disturbed the customers of the mob’s profitable gambling business tended to get found  dead out in the desert.  Similarly, when Rome ruled the Western world, things were pretty peaceful within the empire. It was said a woman alone could travel the breadth of the empire and not be molested.  Much the same can be said about the British Empire when it ruled the Western world.

So while liberal forces may wish for the abolition of powerful empires like the US empire in the name of “more equality”, they should be careful what they wish for. A world without a “top dog” to keep order is likely to be a world in anarchy.  And indeed, Kaplan argues we are headed for just such a world.  The growing chaos in Afghanistan and Iraq, as the US withdraws its forces, may be a harbinger of things to come elsewhere if and as US power wanes in the world..

Gun control and self-delusion

One of the remarkable things about the last presidential election is that the Republicans were sure right up to election day that they were ahead, despite worrisome poll results.  Their ability to delude themselves was really remarkable.

Now liberals have repeated the feat with their self-delusion about gun control. After the Newtown shootings liberals convinced themselves that the country as a whole had done a U-turn on the issue.  As the recent defeat in the Senate shows, they too managed to delude themselves.  Of course there will be a lot of finger pointing and cries of "shame, shame", and accusations that the NRA blocked any meaningful reforms.  And truth to tell, the NRA did exert as much influence as it could in this debate, but it was able to have as much influence as it has because it has a solid majority of the public behind it, a point not lost of lots of politicians in both parties.

Personally I think it would be sensible to have more controls on guns, better background checks, and limits on the ownership of military weapons. But in fact despite Newtown that is a minority position in the nation at the moment, though not in the liberal enclaves on both coasts, nor in the media. Just as legal gay marriage will almost inevitably become the law of the land in the next few years, new gun control legislation will almost inevitably fail in both the House and the Senate for the next few years.

It just goes to show that both liberals and conservatives can delude themselves.

The Boston bombing

What is surprising about the Boston bombing isn't that it happened, but rather that it didn't happen before. I was pretty sure after 9/11 we would get more of these bombings in the next few years, not only from Muslim fanatics but also from home-grown fanatics and copycats. Other nations got them - think of the 2005 London bombings and the 2004 Madrid train bombings.  Of course we did get the 1996 bombing at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atalanta, which turned out to be from a home-grown anti-abortion fanatic. And the 1995 Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing, which also came from a group of home-grown militia fanatics.

But considering how open and free our nation is, how porous our borders are, and how long the middle-Eastern wars have dragged on, one really has to credit our domestic anti-terrorism forces with preventing the sort of frequent bombings that have plagued Iraq and Afghanistan for years now.

I suspect this will turn out once again to be the product of a home-grown fanatic of some sort. I do notice that American power has apparently gained some respect in the middle East,  The Pakistani branch of Al Qaeda wasted no time in assuring everyone who would listen that it had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING do do with the Boston bombing. I guess that they noticed after 9/11 that when they took down two US buildings, we retaliated by taking down two whole countries.  There is an Asian  saying (actually used in one of Tom Clancy's novels): "Who pulls the tiger's tail needs to watch out for his teeth".

Recommended: The Pension Rate-of-Return Fantasy

In the Wall Street Post today Andy Kessler has an interesting piece, The Pension Rate-of-Return Fantasy.  As he points out, all sorts of local and state governments, and not a few big corporations,  have based their pension calculations on wildly over-optimistic estimates of the rate of return of their pension investments in the coming years.  So even pension systems that look, on paper, to be healthy may well be simply illusions.

In general, governments and corporations have predicted returns on their pension investments in the range of 7-9% per year. The actual rate of return in recent years has been more like 2-3%.  For my own retirement accounts spreadsheet, I have been assuming real returns, conservatively, at about 1%  per year after allowing for 4% annual inflation.  While inflation thus far hasn't actually been that high (about 2.4% per year on average over the past 10 years), the fact that the Fed continues to print money by the billions makes me wonder if my 4% average inflation estimate isn't itself overly-optimistic over the long term.

Of course the stock market has in the past month or so seen new highs, but one can't help but wonder if this isn't really just another short-term bubble fueled by the Fed's rock-bottom interest rates. Yes, the economy is improving, but at a very, very sluggish pace, hardly fast enough to justify the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market in recent days.

In any case, this is yet another sign that, below the surface, we have serious fiscal problems in this nation which the political system, and the public, are largely ignoring, perhaps hoping they will just somehow magically go away. We would no doubt be in far worse shape if Europe weren't in such bad shape that Treasury bonds still look like the best and safest investment around, despite our national debt load and federal deficits.  But then, European politicians have been so amazingly inept at handling their fiscal problems over the past few years that perhaps this fortunate (for us) condition will prevail for many more years.