Thursday, May 31, 2006 at 9:30 pm
Troubling Treasury tree-huggers

Like Paul O'Neill, Bush's renegade first Treasury secretary, nominee Henry Paulson, the chairman of Goldman Sachs, declares himself an advocate of curbing greenhouse emissions.

The trouble with appointing corporate titans like Paulson and O'Neill to government posts is they often see the U.S. economy as business-driven. In fact, it is consumer-driven.

In addition to his investment banker duties, Paulson has polished his corporate PC credentials as chairman of the board of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a liberal activist group. Here’s an excerpt from TNC on global warming: “Without enacting our own emission limits, U.S. companies will lose ground to their competitors in Europe, Canada, Japan, and other countries participating in the Protocol who are developing clean technologies.”

But it's not the U.S. government’s responsibility to create markets for business. Its role is to ensure open markets where business can best serve consumer needs.

An example: “Clean” ethanol fuel has failed in the U.S. marketplace because consumers find a gallon of gasoline goes farther, cheaper. But now Archer Daniels Midland is trying to force American consumers to buy ethanol by declaring it “clean” and lobbying Congress to give it huge tax breaks. If ADM succeeds, Paulson’s “business” interests will win – but consumers will lose.

A multi-millionaire like Paulson can surely afford the extra-cost of an ethanol-powered car, but most Americans cannot.

As Treasury Secertary, Paulson is unlikely to influence U.S. environmental policy. But if he tries to push his brand of anti-consumer Kyoto policy, the Bush Administration should show him the door – just as it did self-styled Greenie Paul O’Neill before him.

By making the serious question of immigration reform about Hispanics, the GOP threatens to repeat its mistake of forty years ago when it alienated a generation of black voters by winding up on the wrong side of the civil rights debate.

Then as now, Republicans did not see the political forest for the trees.

In 1964, it was Republicans – not Democrats - who voted overwhelmingly for a national law banning racial separation. With the South controlled by segregationist Dixiecrats, the Democratic Party was deeply split over a civil rights bill, and it was only the GOP’s support – led by conservative Sen. Everett Dirksen - that got the act passed. Dirksen fundamentally understood that America represents equality under the law.

"I am involved in mankind, and whatever the skin, we are all included in mankind," he said upon passage of the act.

But, the Republican role was overshadowed by the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, a civil rights advocate from Arizona who nevertheless argued that such rights were an issue for statehouses and not the federal government. On this principle did Goldwater fight the ’64 election and forever tar his party.

Fast forward forty years to 2004, and Republicans once again declare adherence to "principle” (border enforcement) at the expense of an American ideal (“huddled masses yearning to breath free”).



This time, ironically, it is presidential party leadership that stands in the way of a headlong dash over the cliff. George W. Bush, unlike Goldwater before him, understands that the principle at stake is America’s vision of itself.

With his leadership, Republicans can craft broad immigration reform that recognizes border security – but also the hopes and dreams of a fastest-growing segment of the American electorate: Hispanic-Americans.

First came Democrats – with an eye on their militant union base – fear-mongering over the operation of some U.S. ports by a Dubai firm this February. Left largely unmentioned was that foreign-owned companies from Singapore to England own most American ports.

Now come desperate Republicans pandering to their nativist base with a campaign against Mexicans crossing our borders. These illegals, it is said, are a threat to our national security and a drain on our social infrastructure.

Both claims, upon closer examination, are empty.

The security claim is ridiculous on it face. As New York Times columnist John Tierney put it Wednesday: "Mohamed Atta did not have to hire a coyote or swim across the Rio Grande. He and the other hijackers entered the country legally.”

But don’t illegals take more from the U.S. than they give? Shikha Dalmia, an immigration expert for the Reason foundation, methodically shreds this straw man in a May 1 column:

“Immigrants aren't flocking to the United States to mooch off the government. . . . (A) vital thing happened in 1996: the IRS began issuing identification numbers to enable illegal immigrants who don't have Social Security numbers to file taxes.
“Close to 8 million of the 12 million or so illegal aliens in the country today file personal income taxes using these numbers, contributing billions to federal coffers. . . . What's more, aliens who are not self-employed have Social Security and Medicare taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks. Since undocumented workers have only fake numbers, they'll never be able to collect the benefits these taxes are meant to pay for. Last year, the revenues from these fake numbers . . . . added up to 10 percent of the Social Security surplus.
“Beyond federal taxes, all illegals automatically pay state sales taxes that contribute toward the upkeep of public facilities such as roads that they use, and property taxes through their rent that contribute toward the schooling of their children. The non-partisan National Research Council found that when the taxes paid by the children of low-skilled immigrant families — most of whom are illegal — are factored in, they contribute on average $80,000 more to federal coffers than they consume.”

Case closed. These facts won’t stop the hysterical anti-foreigner rhetoric, but they make a more convincing argument.

No they’re not. Americans are for laws that make sense.

Take the national 55 mph speed limit, a bad law that the American public universally ignored until the feds finally repealed it in the late 1990s. Like our impractical Mexican immigration laws, the feds threw massive amounts of money out our speeding “problem” in order to enforce it. But no amount of money could overrule the laws of physics. Interstates are designed for 75 mph, and that’s how fast we drove.

Our Mexican border is a similar case study. O’Bierne says we have “been unwilling to try to control it.” Not true. We have thrown billions at the problem, doubled the number of law enforcement personnel, and still the illegal immigrants come . . . because no amount of money can repeal the laws of labor markets.

Sure, Americans believe the border law should be enforced, just as polls showed we wanted 55 mph enforced. But it’s a support that’s shallow. At the end of the day, Americans want convenience: the convenience of quick transportation on their interstates, and cheap labor on their roofs.

Lurking in the heart of many liberal pundits, it seems, is a closet despot.

Newsweek's prized columnist Fareed Zakaria, for example, frowns on America’s love affair with “guzzling” SUVs. His proposed solution? “SUVs would be banned,” he writes in this week’s magazine. Zakaria’s diktat is an echo of liberal, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Thomas Friedman, who in an April 21 column calls for “banning gas-guzzling G.M. Hummers.”

Standing in the way of these leftist jihads, however, is American consumer democracy.

Over fifty percent of new-car buyers today choose SUVs. And where would the ban stop? The best-selling vehicle in America is the Ford F-150 pickup, which gets SUV-like fuel mileage. Ban it? Or how about 3,000-square foot homes? Energy-guzzlers compared to 2,000-square foot homes. Ban them? And so on.

Of course, voters are unlikely to be any more thrilled about Zakaria-Friedman’s other brainstorm: taxing gas to $7 a gallon a la “prices in Japan and Europe.”

“That's not just good economics, it's good politics,” Zakaria assures us.

Of course, any pol who thinks goosing gas prices is the key to political fortune might look at President Bush’s poll ratings after a month of $3 a gallon gas. Twenty-nine percent approval ratings don’t look like good politics.

Then again, Zakaria-Friedman might have the answer to voters who disapprove of their schemes: Just ban elections.

Beware fear by anecdote. A May 5 Washington Post report declares that global warming "is fueling the spread of epidemics in areas unprepared for the diseases. Mosquitoes, ticks, mice and other carriers are surviving warmer winters and expanding their range, bringing health threats with them.”

But the problem with anecdotal evidence is that it can cut both ways, depending on what horror you want to promote.

For example: The winter of 1994 in the northeast United States set records for low temperatures. The frigid weather caused rolling power blackouts down the Eastern seaboard. The “trend” seemed to continue in February of 1996 when northern U.S. temperatures set all-time record lows. Then, in 2002, Lansing, Mich. experienced temps of 18 below zero, shattering a 133-year old record.

Someone might use such anecdotal evidence to predict global cooling Armageddon – which is exactly what Greens did back in the 1970s.

In its April 28, 1975 issue, Newsweek reported that “meteorologists are almost unanimous” that recent cooling trends “may portend a drastic decline in food production.” Evidence from “satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.”

What to do about this cooling?

Said Newsweek: “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change. . . . They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve.”

If only our brave leaders had acted on the “unanimous” scientific evidence and melted the ice caps with soot!

What to make of climate hysteria that swings from the poles (so to speak) of cooling to warming from decade to decade? The only common thread is that either scenario is an excuse for more government control of our cars, our consumer habits, our lives.

A Senate Republican proposal for a $100 gasoline rebate to millions of American has died under withering criticism from voters and talk radio hosts.

So how would they feel about a $500 gas rebate?

That was the original Senate proposal suggested by our own Michigan Senator Stabenow – backed by our pandering Governor Jennifer Granholm – to combat high gasoline prices.

Wow. Leave it to “Dangerously Incompetent” Debbie to come up with a proposal even more absurd than a GOP measure widely derided as the low point in the current Washington gas orgy. Republicans deserve their licks for having tried to co-opt a proposal from Stabenow, who is fast becoming one of the Senate’s laughingstocks.

The Senate idea died in part because of intra-party Republican ridicule. "Over the weekend I heard back from my constituents. They thought it was stupid," said John Boehner, an Ohio Republican.

What must Stabenow’s constituents be thinking?

The current Rolling Stone features a cover story direct from the megalib Princeton historian Sean Wilentz pondering whether George W. Bush is “The Worst President in History?”

C’mon, guys.

I thought The Left had already settled this: Ronald Reagan was the Worst President in History.

Remember him? The cowboy with the reckless foreign policy? The guy who took us into that illegal war in Nicaragua and was nearly impeached for his secretive Iran-contra dealings? All because he thought democracy could actually take root in South America and defeat the global communist menace? What a load of naïve poppycock that was. I mean, he unnecessarily made the U.S. a world pariah when any foreign policy realist could have told him the Cold War was unwinnable.

And take a look at his tax cuts! Good lord, they wrecked the U.S. economy, giving us the highest deficits in history and the Decade of Greed. As a result, the stock market crashed in 1987 and hasn’t risen above 2,000 since. And those interest rates! Thanks to Reagan’s record deficits, we had to suffer through years of double-digit interest rates that continue today under Reagan’s protégé, Dubya.

Like Reagan, history will judge Bush unkindly. Growth through tax cuts? Foreign policy by the sword? As the Reagan Era proved, such policies will never get you elected to a second term.

After a month of $3 a gallon gas, some media outlets waited eagerly for Tuesday’s auto sales figures to ring the death knell for America’s SUV gluttony. Panted Time magazine reporter Nancy Gibbs: “If this (gas price) goes on long enough, U.S. automakers are sure to build less wasteful vehicles because that's what people will be buying, and if we switch to hybrids the air will clear, our dependence on nasty countries for their oil will diminish, and Jimmy Carter's dreams will come true, 30 years later.” Preach it, sister!

And initial reports seemed to confirm the hunch. “Rising gasoline prices have dragged on U.S. automakers' SUV sales as consumers have sought more fuel-efficient vehicles,” claimed CNN as it jumped on news that Ford Explorer sales had tumbled 42 percent from a year ago, while sales of its Ford Escape and Mercury Mariner models soared 68 percent.

Meanwhile, Toyota’s Prius hybrid saw its sales slump by 27 percent - marking its third straight monthly decline - and GM’s big Tahoe and Yukon SUVs boasted sales jumps of 30 percent.

Come again? It seems this auto market stuff is a little more complicated than we thought.

The fact is, Americans buy automobiles for a lot of reasons - not just the moral, “save the planet” rational journalists favor. Coincidentally, Ford chose April to jumpstart tepid Escape and Mariner hybrid sales with deep discounts – so there were purse issues in play other than pump prices. Gas at $3 a gallon is surely an attention-grabber, and it has undoubtedly effected huge SUVs like the GM Suburban and Ford Expedition.

But the SUV market is here to stay because drivers find them practical.

“SUV SALES AT TURNING POINT,” screamed the Free Press headline Monday. “Experts say customers who stick with their SUVs now probably are die-hard SUV lovers.” Nice try, but despite stalled sales numbers, SUVs still make up over 50 percent of vehicle sales – hardly a “die-hard” collection of deadenders.

And then there’s this: Hummer (the brand that makes Greens see red) sales rose by 218 percent over last April.

Why? Because GM launched a THIRD Hummer model, the H3, for customers hungry to buy the brand as status symbol. Just as Prius customers like to flaunt their steed as a symbol of their social responsibly. For that reason, neither the Prius nor the Hummer will ever be more than niche vehicles, coveted by a limited, affluent demographic.

For the rest of America, the ol' SUV or large sedan will do just fine.