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Apart from color, demeanor, and facility with the English language, the substantive differences between our current President and his immediate predecessor seem fairly insubstantial.
An Associated Press article in today’s newspapers reports that General David Petraeus, appearing this morning on NBC’s Meet the Press program, described Afghanistan as a “tough and enduring fight that would require its ‘character and its size being scaled down over the years.’” That sounds as if we can expect our troops to remain in Afghanistan in strength well beyond the end-2011 deadline announced earlier by President Obama. General Petraeus also said that if the U.S. loses, there would “likely be a bloody civil war followed by a takeover by extremists. If the U.S. succeeds and Afghanistan stabilizes, the country could become the region’s new “Silk Road” with the potential to extract trillions of dollars worth of minerals.”
The General does not speak for the President, but Petraeus, as savvy a political operator as ever wore an Army uniform, is not about to repeat Stanley McChrystal’s mistake which, minus the frat boy banter, consisted of publicly disagreeing with the President. If he said this on a network TV broadcast, it is likely that the President agrees with his assessment, and may even have approved his remarks as a sort of trial balloon for the bad news he (the President) will ultimately have to break to the American people. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Afghanistan,
Bush,
deficit,
government spending,
Obama,
Petraeus
Even the most rabid opponents of Obamacare recognize that something is wrong with the current health care financing system we have in the U.S., and even its most ardent supporters are willing to admit that, projections of deficit neutrality notwithstanding, the new health care system will do nothing to contain costs and will almost certainly drive them up.
What if there were a partial solution (at this point it would take divine intervention to devise a complete solution) that most people could agree on? [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
health care finance,
health costs,
HMO,
market force,
Obamacare
I present here a few paragraphs on wages and benefits, an excerpt from Human Action, a work by the famed Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who is the intellectual godfather of F.A. von Hayek, among other notables. I find it especially relevant because I have been working in Haiti for the past couple of weeks, my firm having won a contract to conduct a pre-feasibility study for an industrial park in the northern part of the country, which will accommodate garment manufacturers. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
benefits,
garment,
Haiti,
Hayek,
informal sector,
remuneration,
sweatshop,
textile,
von Mises,
wages
General Motors’ return to profitability had to jostle for attention with other big stories in last week’s newspapers, notably the burning of Bangkok, the resurgence of Iceland’s volcano, and the Greek crisis and bailout, but it stood out nonetheless. Here was a bankrupt company, delisted from the New York Stock Exchange and deprived of its 83-year place in the Dow Industrial Average, now owned by an unholy trinity of the U.S. and Canadian governments and the United Autoworkers, showing a respectable first quarter profit almost exactly a year after it filed for bankruptcy protection. Although axing various brands like Hummer, Saturn, and Pontiac, closing plants, and laying off thousands of workers played a big part, no less significant was a nearly 50% increase in GM sales, from $22 billion in the first quarter of 2009 to over $31 billion in the first three months of this year. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
auto industry,
bailout,
Chrysler,
General Motors,
GM,
TARP
Attentive and loyal readers of this blog will recall that I wrote, almost exactly a year ago, about China’s proposal to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency with the special drawing right (SDR), a unit of account used by the IMF, which is based on a weighted basket of currencies that includes the dollar, the euro, the yen, and the pound. I wrote then that this proposal had virtually no chance of being adopted, one reason being that the Europeans would be loath to abandon their new currency, which already accounted for a growing share of world reserves, in favor of a faceless accounting unit. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Angela Merkel,
bailout,
Britain,
Bulgaria,
dollar,
Dominique Strauss-Kahn,
euro,
European Union,
Greece,
Greek,
IMF,
Ireland,
Portugal,
reserve currency,
Romania,
SDR,
Spain
