Saturday, March 2, 2013

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Incentivize
NORAD is considering removing two of its 18 Air Force sites from 24-hour alert, saying it would save millions of dollars without compromising its ability to defend against 9/11-style attacks. (FOXNEWS.com, 3/1/2013)

Now we are talking. Maybe we can use this sequestration moment for greater good. This has been tried in business and there is no reason it cannot work in government: incent the various departments of government to find cost savings; reward the departments that find the greatest savings as a percentage of their annual budget. 


Correction
President Barack Obama has signed an order authorizing the government to begin cutting $85 billion from federal accounts, officially enacting across-the-board reductions that he opposed but failed to avert. (Washington Post, 3/1/2013)

Dishonest reporting from the Washington Post. More accurate would be to say:

President Barack Obama has signed an order authorizing the government to begin cutting $85 billion from federal accounts, officially enacting across-the-board reductions that he proposed, then opposed but failed to avert.

Come on Washington Post, get it right! Why someone might accuse you of media bias....


Reckoning
Instead, after Democrats spent a decade griping that the Bush tax cuts were a boon only for “the rich,” they decided that Bush had in fact been correct all along in claiming they benefited everyone.
...
The White House, for its part, plainly reckons it can come back every other month with a fresh plan to “just tax the rich” and the public will cheer.  (Matt Miller, Washington Post, 2/27/2013)

Uber-Liberal Miller rips both Democrats and Republicans over Washington's dysfunction. These are two of our favorite admissions. Good for him for at least attempting to be even-handed.


Incurable
The Fed failed to cure the former (recession), and today’s unprecedentedly anemic recovery — approximately 3 million fewer people are working than were five years ago — has failed to cure the latter: If the workforce participation rate were as high as it was when Barack Obama was first inaugurated, the unemployment rate would be 10.8 percent. (George Will, Washington Post, 2/27/2013)

Will puts some astonishing numbers to Obama's greatest domestic policy failure: the economy


Revision
The State Department issued a revised environmental impact statement for the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline on Friday that makes no recommendation about whether the project should be built but presents no conclusive environmental reason it should not be. (NYT, 3/1/2013)

Reduced dependence on foreign oil from hostile countries and union jobs versus Bill McKibben. What will Obama do? Hard to say, but we have been wrong before in underestimating the extent of Obama's Liberalism. That is why we think he picks McKibben.


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