Loved this commentary

By Victor Davis Hanson, one of my favorite writers.

From the national debt to Libya, the political class is asleep at the wheel.

Barack Obama just gave a belated but stern warning about escalating debt — a few weeks after he presented a 2011 budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit, the largest shortfall in American history. Congressional Republicans are now crowing about reducing Obama’s red ink by forcing some $38 billion in cuts. Such supposed slashing means America would borrow just $1,562 billion this year rather than the scheduled full $1,600 billion.

The administration expects that someone will have enough money to float us $4 billion to $5 billion a day in loans — either foreigners such as the Chinese, whom we are accustomed to lecturing about their illiberal habits, or our own wealthy, whom President Obama so often chides and threatens with higher taxes. Meanwhile, shrill critics of Congress’s modest cuts claim that the elderly, poor, sick, and helpless will be cast adrift if their government dares to trim its massive borrowing by less than 3 percent — or just about 1 percent of this year’s projected $3.7 trillion budget.

Obama borrowed more in the month of February alone ($223 billion) than did the spendthrift George W. Bush during the entire 2007 budgetary year ($163 billion). Obama recently asserted that not authorizing a lofty new national-debt ceiling would be partisan recklessness. He should know. In 2006, then-senator Barack Obama voted not to raise the debt ceiling and railed against out-of-control government spending under the Bush administration. But then, the annual deficit was one-fifth of what it is today. Apparently President Obama lives in an alternative universe from the one Senator Obama used to inhabit.

Gas is heading toward $4 a gallon nationwide — and might reach $5 by Labor Day. The world price for a barrel of oil is well over $100 — and climbing. In response, Obama praised Brazil for developing a vast new offshore oilfield and promised that the United States would readily buy the oil it produces.

The Obama administration has made it clear, however, that such messy drilling is for others. So, much of Alaska, the American West, and our coastal waters will remain off limits. The logic is that Americans can borrow to buy oil from foreign nations that are willing to drill in their fragile tundra, offshore seas, and natural preserves. Apparently the White House has not much concern about where we are going to get the cash, or how other nations are going to recover oil offshore more cleanly than we would.

Instead of a detailed plan for developing more sources of natural gas, oil, and coal, including tar sands and oil shale, we still hear infantile chants about “wind, solar, and millions of new green jobs.” But solar panels and windmills will not be up to fueling the nation’s 250 million passenger cars and trucks any time soon.

The president announced that he would support the Libyan rebels. He pointed to United Nations and Arab League authorizations to establish a no-fly zone and stop Qaddafi from killing his opponents. Helping the rebels win means using force to remove Qaddafi. Yet regime change is a mission that we insist is not our goal and would not be authorized by the international bodies to which we subordinate ourselves.

In truth, the Obama administration intervened without knowing who or what the Libyan rebels were, apparently on the theory that they were close to winning and seemed a far better option than Qaddafi. The first premise proved wrong; the second could be true but is still subject to debate. So we took a breather and quit military operations, hoping the Libyan mess would just go away, in the same way that dictators voluntarily stepped down in Egypt and Tunisia.

The U.S. government is no longer supposed to use hurtful vocabulary like “War on Terror,” “Islamic terrorism,” or “jihadist.” But some unnamed groups are still apparently trying to kill us. Otherwise, why would the White House keep the demonized Guantanamo Bay facility open? And for what purpose, and against whom, are we still employing the once-hated military tribunals, renditions, and preventive detention?

Fantasy apparently seems preferable to reality. In our new dream world, borrowed money need not be paid back. Cars may run on nasty gas, but only if it is produced in faraway places. Mean dictators should flee when told to leave. And radical Muslims are not really trying to kill us.

Like children, we turn on any spoilsport parent who nags us to stop borrowing, cut entitlements and government spending, start drilling and building power plants, get real about dictators in the Middle East, and keep vigilant against radical Islamic terrorists.

So we will keep dreaming until creditors, oil exporters, enemies, or terrorists wake us up.

Interesting...

The following is an editorial from the Wall Street Journal.

The debate over Paul Ryan's Medicare reform ideas has largely been healthy, even amid the liberal distortions. But why has there been so little scrutiny of President Obama's new Medicare proposal? Anyone worrying about more individual choice and responsibility in health care might be interested to learn that the alternative is turning every one of these decisions over to a 15-member central committee.

It sounds absurd, but there the President was last week, gravely conceding Mr. Ryan's analysis of Medicare's balance sheet and then claiming that the solution is to give a lot more political power to an unelected board to control health costs. Democrats believe this board will play doctor and actuary and allocate health resources better than markets, so allow us to fill in some of the details of this government-planned future.

The Independent Payment Advisory Board was created in the ObamaCare statute, and the President will appoint its experts in 2012 to six-year terms. From then on, look out. Democrats cut $468 billion in Medicare spending by screwing down its price controls and gutting the private insurance options of Medicare Advantage, while also boosting taxes by about $89 billion. This money could have strung along the status quo for a few more years, but Democrats diverted it instead to their new middle-class entitlement, which is like eating all the food left in the life raft.

Starting in 2014, the board is charged with holding Medicare spending to certain limits, which at first is a measure of inflation. After 2018, the threshold is the nominal per capita growth of the economy plus one percentage point. Last week Mr. Obama said he wants to lower that to GDP plus half a percentage point.

Mr. Ryan has been lambasted for linking his "premium support" Medicare subsidies to inflation, not the rate of health cost growth. But if that's as unrealistic as the liberal wise men claim, then Mr. Obama's goals are even more so. Medicare grew 2.1 percentage points faster between 1985 and 2009 than Mr. Obama's new GDP target. At least Mr. Ryan is proposing a workable model for bringing costs down over time by changing incentives.

Mr. Obama, by contrast, is relying on the so far unidentified technocratic reforms of 15 so far unidentified geniuses who are supposed to give up medical practice or academic research for the privilege of a government salary. Since the board is not allowed by law to restrict treatments, ask seniors to pay more, or raise taxes or the retirement age, it can mean only one thing: arbitrarily paying less for the services seniors receive, via fiat pricing.

Post-ObamaCare, Medicare's administered fee schedule is set eventually to dip below Medicaid payments in many states, which are themselves already far lower than the rates of private insurers that reflect the true costs of health care. Medicare itself says these cuts will cause 15% of U.S. hospitals to become unprofitable in the next decade. Mr. Obama wants Americans to believe that his planners will wring out even more spending through the power of positive technocratic thinking.

Under last year's law, the board submits its recommendations to Congress on an up-or-down vote and they go into effect automatically unless Congress adopts an equivalent plan. Its decisions aren't subject to judicial or administrative review. Now Mr. Obama wants to give the board the additional power of automatic sequester to enforce its dictates, meaning that it would have the legal authority to prevent Congress from appropriating tax dollars. In other words, Congress would be stripped of any real legislative role in favor of an unaccountable body of experts.

The honest-to-Peter Orszag liberal theory here is that, among ObamaCare's well-meaning if speculative pilot programs, someone will find a way to deliver better health care at a lower cost. Then the board will decide "what works" and apply it through regulation to all of American medicine. But small-scale initiatives usually succeed because of local health-care conditions and rarely succeed when mass-scaled. Anyhow, decades of government faith in omniscient miracle workers has left Medicare in its present shambles.

As a practical matter, the more likely outcome is the political rationing of care for the elderly, as now occurs in Britain, or else the board will drive prices so low that many doctors and hospitals drop out of Medicare. Either alternative would create the kind of two-tier system dividing the poor and affluent that Democrats claim is Mr. Ryan's mortal sin.

Messrs. Ryan and Obama agree that Medicare spending must decline, and significantly. The difference is that Mr. Ryan would let seniors decide which private Medicare-financed insurance policies to buy based on their own needs, while Mr. Obama wants Americans to accept the commands of 15 political appointees who will never stand for election.