Planning to Fail
Three Crises Bigger than the Oil Spill—and Why Obama's Ignoring Them, Too
by Robert Tracinski
We warned them, but I guess it took the public until now, with the Gulf oil spill, to see through Barack Obama. They had to learn about Obama, not from some event in his past (which is subject to interpretation and distortion), nor from some big, abstract issue or something projected to happen in the future (like the health-care crisis we're going to face once ObamaCare fully goes into effect), but from a concrete crisis that we can all see unfolding before us in real time.
So I guess Mark Steyn is right: it takes a spillage to see that Obama is an empty suit. Steyn sums it all up in this passage:
[H]e could have demonstrated, as he and his energy secretary (whoops, Nobel Prize-winning energy secretary) have so signally failed to do, an understanding of what is actually happening 5,000 feet underwater and why it's hard to stop. Instead, lazy and incurious, this is what the technocratic mastermind offered: "Just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge—a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation's secretary of energy. Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice. As a result of these efforts, we've directed BP to mobilize additional equipment and technology."
Excellent. The president directed his Nobel Prize-winning head of meetings to assemble a meeting to tackle the challenge of mobilizing the assembling of the tackling of the challenge of mobilization, at the end of which they directed BP to order up some new tackle and connect it to the thingummy next to the whachamacallit. Thank you, Mr. President. That and $4.95 will get you a venti at Starbucks.
Mark Steyn is the writer I hate to love. He consistently offers sharp observations, and he's very funny—but most of the time, he's too funny, focusing more on cracking jokes than making his point. But here is a case where Steyn's style of mockery is the only proper response.
So while Louisiana's Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, is the only one who is actually kicking posteriors—intervening to stop the Coast Guard from blocking oil-skimming barges—Obama is doing nothing. The only sympathy I've expressed toward the administration is the fact that industrial accident clean-up is not the federal government's responsibility, and that Obama is not (and should not be expected to be) some kind of engineering super-genius who is going to come up with a better technological solution that BP hasn't thought of. But the one thing a politician can do is what Jindal is doing: remove the bureaucratic barriers that prevent BP and others from implementing solutions to the problem. And that's precisely what Obama failed to do. Instead, he's making the regulatory muddle worse, exploiting the crisis to push through cap-and-trade energy rationing, and issuing an arbitrary six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling, which will flatten what is left of the Gulf Coast economy.
The oil spill is the area where the failure of Obama's leadership is most obvious—but it is not the area where it is most important. There are three crises that are much bigger than the Gulf oil spill—and the bad news is that Obama is ignoring them, too.
The best estimates for the volume of the oil spill is that it will pump about 100 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico—a body of water that contains 643 quadrillion gallons of water. So the oil spilled by BP would, evenly diluted, be measurable only as parts per billion—a virtually undetectable trace amount. Of course, that oil won't be evenly diluted. It will hit in damaging concentrations in some areas of the coastline and in some Gulf fishing grounds. But the history of previous spills on this scale indicates that the Gulf will recover with surprising quickness. So as serious as this is for those on the Gulf Coast, it is a crisis that is temporary and regional.
Not so with the three other big crises the president is ignoring.
The first crisis: Social Security is going into the red.
Last week, a blogger released an analysis of Social Security cash flow from the first half of this year, and it reveals that the program paid out about one billion dollars more than it took in from Social Security payroll taxes. This wasn't supposed to happen for another five years, but the recession has moved the program's insolvency forward because reduced employment causes a reduction in payroll tax receipts.
To understand why this is such a disaster, you have to understand the scale of the financial fraud it is about to unmask. The fraud, which dwarfs anything ever dreamed up by Bernie Madoff, is the Social Security Trust Fund. For decades, Social Security has taken in more money than it has paid out. The surplus supposedly went into a "trust fund" to be saved against—well, against today. But that's not what happened. And we wouldn't want it to happen. Imagine the damage the federal government could do by investing a trillion-dollar trust fund into the stock market, or by socking it away someplace safe, such as buying mortgages from Fannie Mae. So instead what Congress did was to spend the Social Security surpluses on other government programs, then issue IOUs to the Social Security Trust Fund.
The IOUs are now coming due, and the result will be a shattering fiscal crisis. Social Security used to provide a net positive cash flow into the federal treasury, which could be diverted into other programs. From here on out, it will be a net negative cash flow, which will begin taking money from the rest of the budget. As the Baby Boomers retire, it will take more and more money—hundreds of billions of dollars more. So this is the point, right now, when the biggest of the middle-class entitlements begins to yawn wide open and swallow the federal budget. It puts the government of the United States on a path to insolvency, a path to a Greek-style meltdown.
Yet Obama is making it worse. He began his administration by adding another trillion dollars to the deficit with the non-stimulating "stimulus," and his biggest accomplishment to date has been to add a couple of hundred billion dollars a year (or more) to the budget with a new middle-class entitlement, health care. And then there's the fact that Obama wants another round of "stimulus," largely to bail out left-dominated state governments, such as California, which have already gone down the road to insolvency.
When the economy recovers, can't we grow our way out of all of this debt? But the economy isn't going to recover, unless someone does something about the second big crisis: a looming, self-induced energy crisis.
A good measure of the economic downturn is electricity sales, which were down about 1% in 2008 and another 4% in 2009. As Jack Wakeland put it to me, "The patient's industrial respiration has declined and the doctors in Washington aren't interested in COPD treatments. Instead, the EPA is putting together a plastic bag to put over our heads."
That about sums it up. Since carbon dioxide emissions are an unavoidable byproduct of the use of our cheapest, most abundant fuels—the ones burned by the overwhelming majority of our power plants—we should expect an increase in these emissions as the economy recovers. Yet the Obama administration has already mandated a decrease in emissions for "large-source" generators, meaning factories and power plants. And we know, from the past two years, the only realistic way to achieve such a reduction: a decrease in economic activity and industrial production.
Again, instead of helping, Obama is actively working to make this crisis work. It's not just that he is exploiting the Gulf oil spill to try to push cap-and-trade legislation through Congress. That's a distraction, because Obama's EPA has already declared its intention to impose restrictions on emissions of carbon dioxide, without waiting for Congress to pass an actual law—and Congress has failed to block this usurpation of its power. The short-term target is a reduction of our carbon dioxide emissions by 15% in the next decade—a continuation of the recession would help us reach that goal easily—and a reduction by a cataclysmic 83% in the thirty years after that.
To borrow one of President Obama's favorite phrases, let me be clear: the unilateral imposition of carbon dioxide restrictions by the EPA is not just a crisis for representative government. It is an economic crisis, a self-imposed energy shortage that mandates a permanent recession.
And it gets worse. To accommodate economic growth into the next decade, we would have to be building new power plants. But the construction of coal-fired power plants has been stalled, not just by current EPA regulations, but by the virtual certainty of more restrictive rules to come. Nuclear power plants face the same political risks—the threat of being caught up for years in red tape by environmentalists—and they take a very long lead time to build in the best of circumstances. The supposed replacements for these power plants, wind and solar power, are both fabulously expensive and unreliable. (Coal and uranium can be burned day and night, but the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine.) But to build a new power plant now carries the same political risks as—well, as setting up an offshore oil drilling rig, something that no one is going to be eager to do anytime soon, either.
So we have no idea where the energy is going to come from to support a recovery or continued economic growth.
On top of these economic crises, we are now facing a full-blown foreign policy crisis. I'm not just talking about the howling international mob out for the destruction of Israel, nor am I talking about the ineffectual sanctions that are allowing Iran's theocrats to keep their grip on power and build an atomic bomb. The part of Obama's foreign policy that has become an immediate crisis is obviously the collapse of his strategy in Afghanistan.
Over the weekend, when I originally planned to write about this, I thought I would be warning my readers about something that was not making the headlines. Then there came a profile in Rolling Stone on our top general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, in which he and his aides voiced their frustration with and contempt for the civilian officials in the administration, up to and including the president and vice-president. A confident president would have taken the event in stride, not let his anger be publicly declared, and accepted an apology from McChrystal in a very low-key, private manner. But that's not our president. Instead, he called McChrystal back to Washington in a fit of pique—which I believe is only his third face-to-face meeting with the general—and fired him. The good news is that he replaced McChrystal with his superior, General David Petraeus, the man who won the war in Iraq for us, and who won't need to do much to get up to speed on the mission in Afghanistan.
But this does nothing to address the real, underlying crisis in Afghanistan. The real crisis was caused last year when the President declared a surge of US troops to implement a counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, combined with a hard-and-fast deadline for the beginning of a US withdrawal. In 2007, George Bush's decision to order the "surge" convinced wavering Sunni tribes that he was serious and wasn't going to withdraw from Iraq, encouraging them to flip to our side. But Obama's mixed message to the Afghans—we're coming, but we're going—had the opposite effect. It convinced the Afghans that we weren't serious and could not be relied upon, something that Afghan leader Hamid Karzai has been openly stating.
Yes, this is exacerbated by rules of engagement that our troops regard as overly restrictive, which is also documented in the Rolling Stone article. Attempts to avoid civilian casualties are a legitimate and necessary part of counter-insurgency warfare, but so is demonstrating one's tenacious, irresistible ability to systematically decimate the enemy. The motto of counter-insurgency is "no better friend, no worse enemy," and we have to demonstrate both sides of that motto. But the tactical complaints against McChrystal are secondary to America's big, strategic error. Counter-insurgency war is a war of commitment, of persistence. It is won by the side that convinces the population that we will still be around and able to dole out rewards and punishments in the future. And that is precisely what Obama undermined in Afghanistan from the beginning of his surge.
Everywhere you look, wherever there is a crisis, Obama is not simply doing nothing. He's making things worse. America is about to plunge into unsustainable deficit spending? Obama got us started early with the stimulus package and the health care bill. Big states are being bankrupted by public employee unions? Obama wants to increase the unions' power. Not enough power plants? Obama wants to restrict them further. Iran is seeking nukes? Obama gave them a reprieve against a popular uprising. Karzai doubts America's resolve in Afghanistan? Obama wavers on our strategy and declares our intention to bug out, no matter how much disarray there is in our strategy and command.
There's an old saying: When you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But the pattern of the Obama administration has me wondering if we're seeing the inverse: when you plan to fail, you fail to plan. That is, if American contraction and retreat is your goal, why would you make any plans to revive the economy or win wars?
I think what we're seeing here is something worse than just a failure of leadership by a disengaged president. We have to ask ourselves why he is disengaged. Why, when multiple alarm bells are ringing, is he spending more time on his hobbies than the rest of us? Or more to the point, when existing policies lead to failure, why does he double down and make things worse?
From the beginning, we've been warning that Barack Obama is an anti-American president, that he believes in American decline on principle—that he thinks we're too wealthy, too powerful, and too free and need to be taken down a peg. His policies are achieving that goal.
Americans are learning that Obama is an ineffectual leader by the standard of achieving America's success, prosperity, and security. What they need to learn next is the terrifying truth that these are not his standards. |
