Culture beat: The Best Decade in History
“We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history,” notes Matt Ridley at The Spectator. Among other things, global inequality is “plunging,” child mortality has “fallen to record low levels” and famine “virtually went extinct” — while “consumption of ‘stuff’ ” is declining in advanced societies, meaning “we are getting more sustainable, not less.” But “good news is no news,” so the media rarely report these facts. Ironically, the environmental movement’s policies “would actually reverse the trend toward using less stuff,” while also “retarding progress.” If we reject the greens’ doomsday prophecies, Ridley predicts “less poverty, less child mortality, less land devoted to agriculture in the world” in coming decades, since the trends are “pretty clear — and pointing in the right direction.”
Libertarian: A Bucket of Budgetary Garbage
Congress just filled next year’s budget with tax incentives for special interests — more evidence, seethes Reason’s Eric Boehm, that its “budget-making process is broken.” As government watchdog Maya McGuineas fumed on Twitter, this “bucket of garbage” includes “more than two dozen industry-specific tax incentives.” Biodiesel producers and railroad owners will be thrilled: In addition to tax goodies from now through 2022, they’re also getting “retroactive” breaks. Worse, the spending plan overall is “a fiscal disaster,” adding “$500 billion to the national debt over the next decade.” Fact is, cutting taxes “requires spending less money,” while “spending more money requires increased taxes” — a reality Congress is “unable or unwilling” to understand.
Impeach watch: Zero Was GOP’s Lucky Number
The House voted 230 to 197 in favor of the first article of impeachment, charging President Trump with abuse of power, and 229 to 198 on the second, obstruction of Congress. For Republicans, though, “the important numbers were zero and zero,” argues the Washington Examiner’s Byron York: “Not a single Republican lawmaker voted for either article.” Before the vote, Republican Whip Steve Scalise insisted even the few Republicans “thought to be wavering” would vote against impeachment — and he proved right. The key: Scalise was “working for weeks to keep House Republicans up to speed” on the facts, organizing briefings for the many “members who weren’t in the loop” because Democratic Judiciary Chairman Adam Schiff held his hearings in secret. The leadership efforts built “a growing sense of Republican unity” and it paid off.
From the left: Why Obama Ripped Sanders
Barack Obama’s comments about the world’s problems being caused by “old men not getting out of the way” seem targeted at “one old white man in particular: Bernie Sanders,” says The Guardian’s Jessa Crispin. Sanders is “outspoken” about ending the “neoliberal experiment that privatized all services, hollowed out the middle class and removed most social-welfare safety nets” — an “experiment Obama was an enthusiastic facilitator of.” Michelle Obama says she’s friends with George W. Bush because “our values are the same”; now, Crispin observes, her husband is “against the one candidate” with different values. “Or maybe the Obamas just saw on Wikipedia that their net worth is somewhere around $70 million, and they’re trying to avoid paying Sanders’ wealth tax.”
Media watch: Not the ‘New Pentagon Papers’
The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” are not the exposé the paper pretends, explains Jonathan Schroden at War on the Rocks. Its “reporting puts sensationalist spin on information that was not classified, has already been described in publicly available reports, only covers a fraction of the 18 years of the war, and falls far short of convincingly demonstrating a campaign of deliberate lies and deceit.” In the “12 years I have been working on assessments of the Afghanistan war” Schroden has seen “shifting” and “often unclear” objectives “combined with aggressive optimism.” The Post’s main sources are simply interviews done years after the fact— and it’s “not surprising that in hindsight, many of these officials would recognize that their efforts accomplished less” than they hoped. “Does that make them liars? No.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Kelly Jane Torrance
