Mark Steyn's Blog, page 52

Re: The Euro Disaster

Rich, your pal writes in support of the euro:

Turkey should adopt the euro tomorrow and take off in growth.

He adds:

Your article concludes with a call for the drachhma for Greeks, which is a horrible and unnecessary fate.

Just for the record, economic growth in Turkey, 2010:

8.2 per cent

I shall spare the United States' blushes and pass over our own economic growth - if, indeed, we still have any - but, for the purposes of comparison, economic growth in Greece, 2010:

Minus 4.5 per cent

Turkey would not have 8.2 per cent economic growth if it adopted the euro.

Re: When Politicians Are More Savvy Than Pundits

David is right about the ten-to-one ratio between spending cuts and taxes. And Kevin's "Chalk one up for the crazies" line is unworthy of him. But, in his discussion of "extreme hypotheticals," it's important to remember that almost all the spending "cuts" and even the formulae on which they're calculated are extremely hypothetical to the point that they will never happen, while the taxes are real. I would take a ten-to-one cuts/taxes ratio for FY 2012. When that's your plan, get back to me.

PS If you're in the general vicinity of Manchester, New Hampshire, tomorrow night at 6pm I'll be talking about debt, decay, doom -- the good ol' S&P triple-D rating -- live at St. Anselm's College, latterly the scene of the presidential candidates' debate. If CNN's John King is still lurking and has one of his "Boxers or briefs?" quickie questions left over from his lame-o format, I'm happy to answer that. But there'll be plenty of red meat, too. If you're in Maine, northern Massachusetts, eastern Vermont, Lac St-Jean, Quebec, or the Labrador interior, it's a convenient 20-minute drive.

Re: Another Cabinet Department to Abolish

Mark, re the President's brilliant idea to create a "Department of Jobs" to stimulate the economy, perhaps with "Job Security Administration" agents who could grope around in your underwear when you line up to apply for an opening at Burger King in case the unemployment rate drops so low it suddenly falls into your gusset:

As usual (as Paul Krugman will tell you) Obama isn't going far enough. The nation is crying out for a Department of Departments to coordinate coordination between departments.

Obviously, this would not include Agencies and Bureaux, which would require a separate Bureau Czar and Agency Tsar that would maintain Jamie Gorelick's "wall of separation" between them and the Secretary of Departmental Departments.

Voice of the Mainstream

I am on book promotion duty at the moment and, as a sensitive soul and insecure little author, it is naturally distressing when one hears circuitously from respectable TV bookers that one is considered a bit too "fringe" and "out of the mainstream" for their tastes. So I'm always interested to discover what these shows consider "mainstream."

Yesterday the "Fareed Zakaria GPS" show hosted Paul Krugman of the New York Times. Professor Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, has spent the last couple of years arguing that World War Two is proof that Keynesian stimulus works. But, in our present economic crisis, he's now decided that massive global conflagration between conventional nation states leading to tens of millions of deaths is nickel'n'diming it and we need to think big:

KRUGMAN: It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal.

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better –

ROGOFF: And we need Orson Welles, is what you’re saying.

KRUGMAN: No, there was a “Twilight Zone” episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don’t need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

And, even when the lid gets blown off, the demand for "The Invasion From Planet Zongo Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers will stimulate a second economic boom!

Re: Gregory Grills Bachmann

So I was watching Michele Bachmann on Meet the Press and was pleasantly surprised to find her quoting my book (about nine minutes in). This was in response to the umpteenth drearily parochial question from David Gregory, and, not having read my book or indeed heard of it, he didn't respond to the point but went on to some other drearily parochial obsession.

I don't watch the Sunday morning shows terribly often so I have no idea whether this was a typical performance from Mr. Gregory but his Beltwaycentric questions about the debt ceiling, the payroll tax, extending unemployment benefits from two years to five years to twelve years or whatever he thinks will be sufficient to "stimulate" us back into good times cumulatively reminded me of the beginning of the Godzilla movie when all the experts are standing around in the strange indentation in the ground arguing about what it is, and then the camera pans back out and up into the sky and you realize they're all standing in a giant footprint.

David Gregory is stuck in the small toe. I'm glad Congresswoman Bachmann can at least see the footprint. 

The World They Made

My weekend column is on London ablaze and a society summed up by the relevant chapter title in my new book ("The New Britannia: The Depraved City"). The scenes we've witnessed this last week ought to prompt some serious soul-searching by liberal elites. I nearly said "paternalist", but, as Tocqueville noted, the word paternalism implies that your object is to raise your charges to adulthood, whereas the children of dependency are maintained by government in a state of permanent and increasingly feral adolescence.

Are we likely to get that soul-searching? Charles Crawford, sometime NR cruiser and formerly Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador in various parts of Mitteleuropa, thinks not:

The only worse thing than having a problem is not knowing you have a problem.

And even worse than not knowing you have a problem is knowing you have a problem, but being unwilling to accept responsibility for doing anything about it.

And that's the problem of our political elites, from all parties.

They dimly sense that things have gone badly awry, with Sprawling State (UK and EU combined) no longer the answer. But they just don't have the strength or insight or idealism to do anything meaningful about it.

Peter Hitchens is inclined to agree:

As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.

No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake. I have heard them in the past few days clinging to their old excuses of non-existent ‘poverty’ and ‘exclusion’.

I think they will have difficulty "saving themselves". I have many in-laws and friends in delightful corners of village England, where as the sun rises on ancient hedgerows and thatched cottages it is easy to believe the paralytic chavs and incendiary imams and all the rest are somewhere far away and always will be. As leftie columnists in their Hampstead redoubts began (privately) to calculate as the rioters moved in from the less fashionable arrondissements, on a small island the mob doesn't stay beyond the horizon for long.

Re: Bachmann: 'Now, We Start Onto All 50 States'

I was interested to read Katrina Trinko's report of Michele Bachmann's victory in Iowa. But I like to think Katrina's Tweet from Indianola yesterday got to the real reason for the Bachmann win.

The New Britannia

The trick in this business is not to be right too early. A week ago I released my new book -- the usual doom’n’gloom stuff -- and, just as the sensible prudent moderate chaps were about to dismiss it as hysterical and alarmist, Standard & Poor’s went and downgraded the United States from its AAA rating for the first time in history. Obligingly enough they downgraded it to AA+, which happens to be the initials of my book: After America. Okay, there’s not a lot of “+” in that, but you can’t have everything.

But the news cycle moves on, and a day or two later, the news shows were filled with scenes of London ablaze, as gangs of feral youths trashed and looted their own neighborhoods. Several readers wrote to taunt me for not having anything to say on the London riots. As it happens, Chapter Five of my book is called “The New Britannia: The Depraved City.” You have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat me to Western civilization’s descent into barbarism. Anyone who’s read it will fully understand what’s happening on the streets of London. The downgrade and the riots are part of the same story: Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too.

#ad# As part of my promotional efforts, I chanced to find myself on a TV show the other day with an affable liberal who argued that what Obama needed to do was pass another trillion-dollar -- or, better yet, multi-trillion -- stimulus. I think not. The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government: They have been marinated in “stimulus” their entire lives. There is literally nothing you can’t get Her Majesty’s Government to pay for. From page 205 of my book:

“A man of 21 with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers’ money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute.”

Hey, why not? “He’s planning to do more than just have his end away,” explained his social worker. “Refusing to offer him this service would be a violation of his human rights.”

Why do they need a Dutch hooker? Just another hardworking foreigner doing the jobs Britons won’t do? Given the reputation of English womanhood, you’d have thought this would be the one gig that wouldn’t have to be outsourced overseas.

While the British Treasury is busy writing checks to Amsterdam prostitutes, one-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works -- in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing, and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One tenth of the adult population has done not a day’s work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997.

If you were born into such a household, you’ve been comprehensively “stimulated” into the dead-eyed zombies staggering about the streets this last week: pathetic inarticulate sub-humans unable even to grunt the minimal monosyllables to BBC interviewers desperate to appease their pathologies. C’mon, we’re not asking much: just a word or two about how it’s all the fault of government “cuts” like the leftie columnists argue. And yet even that is beyond these baying beasts. The great-grandparents of these brutes stood alone against a Fascist Europe in that dark year after the fall of France in 1940. Their grandparents were raised in one of the most peaceful and crime-free nations on the planet. Were those Englishmen of the mid-20th century to be magically transplanted to London today, they’d assume they were in some fantastical remote galaxy. If Charlton Heston was horrified to discover the Planet of the Apes was his own, Britons are beginning to realize that the remote desert island of Lord of the Flies is, in fact, located just off the coast of Europe in the north-east Atlantic. Within two generations of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, a significant proportion of the once-free British people entrusted themselves to social rewiring by liberal compassionate Big Government and thereby rendered themselves paralytic and unemployable save for non-speaking parts in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. And even that would likely be too much like hard work.

Here’s another line from my book:

“In Britain, everything is policed except crime.”

#page#

Her Majesty’s cowed and craven politically correct constabulary stand around with their riot shields and Robocop gear as young rioters lob concrete through store windows to steal the electronic toys that provide their only non-narcotic or alcoholic amusement. I chanced to be in Piccadilly for the springtime riots when the police failed to stop the mob from smashing the windows of the Ritz and other upscale emporia, so it goes without saying that they wouldn’t lift a finger to protect less prestigious private property from thugs. Some of whom are as young as nine years old. And girls.

#ad# Yet a police force all but entirely useless when it comes to preventing crime or maintaining public order has time to police everything else. When Sam Brown observed en passant to a mounted policeman on Cornmarket Street in Oxford, “Do you know your horse is gay?”, he was surrounded within minutes by six officers and a fleet of patrol cars, handcuffed, tossed in the slammer overnight, and fined 80 pounds. Mr. Brown’s “homophobic comments,” explained a spokesmoron for Thames Valley Police, were “not only offensive to the policeman and his horse, but any members of the general public in the area.” The zealous crackdown on Sam Brown’s hippohomophobia has not been replicated in the present disturbances. Anyone who has so much as glanced at British policing policy over the last two decades would be hard pressed to argue which party on the streets of London, the thugs or the cops, is more irredeemably stupid.

This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want” to be accomplished by “co-operation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life’s vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. From page 204:

“For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population”.  

I believe it is regarded as a sign of insanity to start quoting oneself, but at the risk of trying your patience I’ll try one more, because it’s the link between America’s downgraded debt and Britain’s downgraded citizenry:

“The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people.”

Big Government means small citizens: It corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. When you’re imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.

There are lessons for all of us there.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn

That Sinking Feeling

A commenter from Djibouti at a Somali community forum muses on the London riots:

That awkward moment when your cousin in Mogadishu sends you a FB message and asks you if you are safe.

Indeed. I have a section in my (ahem) new book on civic disintegration in Britain called "The Depraved City." But I didn't expect my publicist to light up half of London as a promotional tie-in.

(via Kate McMillan) 

Mad Debt

On Thursday, in honor of Barack Obama’s 50th birthday, the Dow dropped ten points for every year he has walked among us. It was the ninth largest drop in history. We should be relieved he wasn’t turning eighty.

The markets are apparently concerned that the entire global economy may be “stalling.” You don’t say? Observant fellows, these market chappies.

#ad#And yet, in a certain sense, these are still the good times. At the end of the week, U.S. Treasury yields plunged to Eisenhower-era rates. America, explained Ethan Harris of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, “still gets the safe haven money.” That’s to say, as crazy as Washington is, Europe is perceived to be crazier. In confirmation of the point, over in Italy, which is (believe it or not) a G7 economy, police raided Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s over allegations that all the meanie things that the rating agencies have been saying about the Italian economy were having an impact on Italian stock prices. Apparently that’s a crime in Italy. They’re not yet shooting the messenger. But they are dragging him through the streets in chains pour encourager les autres. Good luck with that.

But I wonder if “the safe haven money” is quite as safe as its investors assume. Under the “historic” “resolution” of the debt crisis (and don’t those very words “debt crisis” already feel so last week?), America will be cutting federal spending by $900 billion over ten years. “Cutting federal spending by $900 billion over ten years” is Washington-speak for increasing federal spending by $7 trillion over ten years. And, as they’d originally planned to increase it by eight trillion, that counts as a cut. If they’d planned to increase it by $20 trillion and then settled for merely $15 trillion, they could have saved five trillion. See how easy this is?

As part of this historic “cut,” we’ve now raised the “debt ceiling” -- or, more accurately, lowered the debt abyss. Do you ever discuss the debt with your neighbor? Do you think he has any serious intention to repay the 15 trillion racked up in his and your name? Does your congressman? Does your senator? Look into their eyes. You can see the answer. And, if none of these parties seem inclined to pay down the debt now, what are the chances they’ll feel like doing so by 2020 when, under these historic “cuts,” it’s up to 23-25 trillion?

Like America’s political class, I have also been thinking about America circa 2020. Indeed, I’ve written a book on the subject. My prognosis is not as rosy as the Boehner-Obama deal, as attentive readers might just be able to deduce from the subtle clues in the title: After America: Get Ready For Armageddon. Oh, don’t worry, I’m not one of these “declinists.” I’m way beyond that, and in the express lane to total societal collapse. The fecklessness of Washington is an existential threat not only to the solvency of the republic but to the entire global order. If Ireland goes under, it’s lights out on Galway Bay. When America goes under, it drags the rest of the developed world down with it. When I go around the country saying stuff like this, a lot of folks agree. Somewhere or other, they’ve a vague memory of having seen a newspaper story accompanied by a Congressional Budget Office graph with the line disappearing off the top of the page and running up the wall and into the rafters circa mid-century. So they usually say, “Well, fortunately I won’t live to see it.” And I always reply that, unless you’re a centenarian with priority boarding for the ObamaCare death panel, you will live to see it. Forget about mid-century. We’ve got until mid-decade to turn this thing around.

Otherwise, by 2020 just the interest payments on the debt will be larger than the U.S. military budget. That’s not paying down the debt, but merely staying current on the servicing -- like when you get your MasterCard statement and you can’t afford to pay off any of what you borrowed but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge. Except in this case the interest charge for U.S. taxpayers will be greater than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel combined.

When interest payments consume about 20 percent of federal revenues, that means a fifth of your taxes are entirely wasted. Pious celebrities often simper that they’d be willing to pay more in taxes for better government services. But a fifth of what you pay won’t be going to government services at all, unless by “government services” you mean the People’s Liberation Army of China, which will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers by about 2015. When the Visigoths laid siege to Rome in 408, the imperial Senate hastily bought off the barbarian king Alaric with 5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 pounds of silver. But they didn’t budget for Roman taxpayers picking up the tab for the entire Visigoth military as a permanent feature of life.

And even those numbers pre-suppose interest rates will remain at their present historic low. Last week, the firm of Macroeconomic Advisors, one of the Obama administration’s favorite economic analysts, predicted that interest rates on ten-year U.S. Treasury notes would be just shy of nine percent by 2021. If that number is right, there are two possibilities: The Chinese will be able to quintuple the size of their armed forces and stick us with the tab. Or we’ll be living in a Mad Max theme park. I’d bet on the latter myself.

Did you know there’s a U.S. Bureau of the Public Debt? Hey, why not? There’s a bureaucracy for everything else. I’m sure somewhere or other there’s a CBO graph showing that by 2050 all federal revenues will be going either to the Chinese Politburo or to the lavish pension plans of retired officials of the Bureau of the Public Debt. At any rate, the BPD is headquartered in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and it’s easy to find because it’s the only building in the state other than the Klan lodge not named after Robert C. Byrd. The Bureau uses as its motto the words of Alexander Hamilton: “The United States debt, foreign and domestic, was the price of liberty.”

But in the early 21st century foreign and domestic debt is a threat to liberty. As the Brokest Nation in History drowns in its profligacy, its commissars will grow ever more rapacious and desperate. If you think Obama’s dreary attempt to blame America’s woes on corporate-jet owners is unbecoming to the chief of state, wait till he’s reduced to complaining about two-car families. By the way, if you’re reading this out on the runway at O’Hare, what’s the difference between a corporate jet landing and Obama flying in? With Air Force One, even when they switch the engines off, all you can hear is the whining.

No author writes a dystopian apocalyptic doomsday book because he wants it to happen: Apart from anything else, the collapse of the banking system makes it hard to cash the royalty check. You write a doomsday book in hopes you can stop it happening. But time is running short. If you think we’ve got until 2050 or 2025, you’re part of the problem.