Gregg Easterbrook

The fight over whether to let tax cuts enacted under George W. Bush expire at the end of 2010 is being waged in terms of political sloganeering — “taxes are an outrage” versus “the rich must pay.”

Here’s the uncomfortable point few want to face: even if the rich do get hit with a federal income tax increase, the middle class must bear much of the cost of fixing America’s budget-deficit mess. Taxes should rise, not just for the rich, but for most Americans.

The current fiscal year federal deficit is running at $1.4 trillion; the outlook is for year after year of very high deficits, and this is before the Baby Boomers retire. Adjusting to today’s dollars, the United States has incurred more debt in the last decade then during the entire combined previous 211 years of the republic’s existence. Unless economic growth rises to about five percent per year and stays there for some time — which is possible, but not likely — tax increases and benefit cuts are the only ways to address record debt.

We’d all like to think that soaking the rich solves the problem, but it doesn’t. Bush’s tax cuts, due to expire on December 31, cut the federal income tax top rate to 36 percent from 40 percent. Suppose the top rate is allowed to return to 40 percent, as your columnist thinks it should. Other things being equal, that would raise federal revenues about $65 billion per annum. While we’re at it, let’s shave 10 percent off the $549 billion fiscal 2011 defense budget request, saving another $55 billion.

Now we’ve taken the only steps that are politically palatable — taxed the rich, cut the Pentagon. That reduces the deficit for fiscal 2011 by about $120 billion, of a projected $1.1 trillion deficit. The deficit would still be about a trillion dollars – just five years ago, this would have been considered an unthinkable level of debt.

Run the federal income tax rate up to 50 percent for top earners — anything more is confiscatory, considering state and local taxes must be added — and the rich will pay another $200 billion or so next year. That’s still not enough to narrow the deficit.

What happens if most George W. Bush tax cuts for the middle class are allowed to expire? The middle class pays about $150 billion more next year. All three bullets must be bitten — soak the rich, increase taxes on the middle class and cut the Pentagon — to reduce the 2011 deficit by close to half. (Unless the economy really starts to roar, in which case higher revenues come to the rescue.)

Tea Party types may shake their fists about federal taxes, and ice-cream sellers may ask Joe Biden why taxes haven’t been cut — but the reality is that federal income taxes fell dramatically during the last decade. Americans appear to believe taxes are onerously high. Actually, taxes are down, for almost everyone. Rising national debt links more closely to tax cuts than to federal spending, since spending actually has gone down slightly in recent months, as well.

Bush’s tax cuts reduced the federal income tax rates paid by the middle class by three percent, to 25 percent from 28 percent, for most middle class filers. Bush’s cuts essentially ended federal income taxes for anyone earning less than $68,000, which is roughly the median household income — people earning less than $68,000 still pay Social Security and Medicare taxes — and also made credits for dependents and childcare more generous, which helps average people more than it helps the affluent.

Americans want to believe we are being clobbered, just clobbered, by onerous taxes. Here’s the comparison to the rest of the world — U.S. taxes are relatively low. Low taxes are wonderful, and a reason the United States is strong and free. Low taxes also are a reason the national debt is at runaway levels.

The middle class must not be “sacrosanct” when it comes to deficit reduction, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said last month at a meeting of Third Way. Hoyer is the very embodiment of establishment Democratic thinking, while Third Way is rapidly emerging as Washington’s most important beyond-ideology think tank. If getting past traditional soak-the-rich rhetoric is what’s on the table at such a meeting, then the political landscape may be shifting.

As the Bush tax cuts for the well-to-do expire, somewhat higher taxes for the middle class are needed, too. Unless you’d rather reduce Social Security benefits, of course.

For points that didn’t quite make the column and matters related to the BP oil spill and subsidizing electric cars, click here.

POINTS THAT DIDN’T QUITE MAKE THE COLUMN:

1. The main column does not note that some federal taxes will rise in 2011 regardless of what happens with the Bush cuts. President Barack Obama’s health care bill raises Medicare taxes to 3.8 percent from 2.9 percent for many filers, and imposes Medicare taxes on capital gains, dividends and interest income earned by the top three percent or so of households. Thus taxes are on well-to-do are already headed up.

If, as expected, Congress increases the capital gains tax to 20 percent from 15 percent beginning in 2011, tacking on a 3.8 percent Medicare levy means the effective capital gains tax rate will rise to 23.8 percent for individuals earning $200,000 or more, or couples earning $250,000 or more. This higher taxation on the well-off is strictly to pay for new subsidized health care — none of the added revenue will offset the national debt. In effect, it’s an income transfer program, and perhaps justified to increase social equality. Will those who receive the new subsidized health coverage, paid for by others, show gratitude or merely complain that they didn’t get even more?

2. The main column uses simplified numbers for the sake of argument — anytime tax law changes, there can be unintended consequences on economic behavior.

ON SOME OTHER MATTERS:

The BP oil spill

Two months ago, at the height of oil-spill hysteria, I took considerable flak for writing that the Gulf of Mexico gusher will cause “less total damage than now expected, while recovery will happen faster than expected.” On Monday, “ABC World News with Diane Sawyer” reported that total damage was less than expected, while recovery was happening faster than expected. On Tuesday, the lead story in The New York Times began, “The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected.” Ahem, than anyone expected? It seems that VIPs flying over what they assumed would be a dying, oil-covered Gulf instead are having difficulty locating any oil to gawk at.

The BP spill was a terrible event whose negative consequences may last for years, particularly in harming the Gulf food chain and disrupting intertidal life. But the fact that the spill impact already appears exaggerated shows how little sense of history (or of ecology) is possessed by U.S. political leaders and pundits. For details, consult my May column, which seems to have appeared two months before anyone realized the alarms were overblown.

Subsidizing the electric car

Recently, yours truly noted that the Tesla electric car, being trumpeted as an instance of entrepreneurial vision, is almost entirely a creature of federal subsidies. Plus, even if it’s successful, it will result in average people being taxed to build luxury transportation for the rich. Tesla’s current model costs $110,000. A “family” car due next year will be priced at about $60,000.

Now Fisker Automotive has jumped into the game — if the government is giving away sacks of money, no surprise there is more than one taker. Fisker’s plug-in luxury sports car will sell for about $90,000. The federal government is funding Fisker with a $529 million no-collateral loan: if the car is a success then private investors keep the profit, if the car is a bust, taxpayers cover the loss.

Fisker has agreed to pay $20 million of its federal gift to Motors Liquidation, the spinoff created to close out General Motors liabilities, for an old G.M. factory in Wilmington, Delaware. Get it? Federal taxpayers rescue G.M. with tens of billions of dollars in subsidies; federal taxpayers shower subsidies onto Fisker Automotive; Fisker then hands a check to General Motors. At some point, White House officials are sure to boast that the Wilmington plant sale was a “free market” triumph, though all funds on both sides came from taxpayers.

Just like Tesla, what Fisker wants to make is an ultra-fast road-rage machine that can be afforded solely by California venture capitalists and New York investment bankers. Why isn’t there populist rage over this swindle against the taxpayer?

Meanwhile the new General Motors said on Tuesday that its Volt electric car will retail for $41,000. That’s still way too much for average people — yet average people are being taxed to subsidize the Volt, whose target market is upper-middle-class buyers.

Early iterations of technology often are affordable only to the well-off, then the price falls and everyone benefits. Surely this could happen with plug-in vehicles. For the moment, the electric car mainly seems a device for digging into taxpayer’s pockets.

TOP SECRET:

The Washington Post has done a great job with its series showing that in the wake of 9/11, hundreds of private companies and nearly 854,000 people have gone to work in classified areas. Are they doing a great job? Maybe. There hasn’t been another 9/11. Are they trampling civil liberties? Maybe.

From years of observing Washington, my worry is that the new security bureaucracies are just like other bureaucracies — featherbedded with five people for each one who’s needed, groaning under the weight of senior managers who do little but fight over the signing of memos, dedicating 75 percent of daily time and effort to the staff’s own comforts and sinecure.

But we’re not allowed to question them because everything they do is secret! Set aside that federal agencies long have stamped TOP SECRET on newspaper articles or commercial airline itineraries. Federal personnel love the word “secret,” and all its variations, because it makes them seem more important.

In the post 9/11 reality, calling offices and companies TOP SECRET exempts them from scrutiny of need or cost-effectiveness. Where there is no scrutiny, there is overspending, empire building and fraud. How much of the last few years’ run-up in the national debt may trace to waste and featherbedding in the numerous new agencies and contractors hiding behind a claim that they are tracking down terrorists?

CLIMATE CHANGE:

It was sad to hear on Monday of the death of climate researcher Stephen Schneider, 65, of Stanford University, whom I knew slightly and debated on two occasions. Schneider was a true believer in the dangers of global warming. He was a warm and broadminded man, open to the opinions of others. He exhibited none of the shrillness that colors the climate-doomsday crowd.

Schneider thought greenhouse gas regulation would not happen until a reasonable middle ground is found between the doomsday left and naysayer right. No such middle ground is in view on any current horizon — this week’s acrimonious collapse of talks in the Senate about a greenhouse gas bill is evidence. Harsh, strident ideology on both sides is a reason the Senate bill failed. If all players in the climate change debate had even half the personal grace and geniality Schneider possessed, progress would be proceeding apace.

A small sidelight of Schneider’s career was that he played himself in the 1993 CBS miniseries Fire Next Time — nothing to do with the great James Baldwin book. The show depicted a United States reduced to ruins by global warming. Plus, survivors were in constant danger of exposure to bad dialogue! Set in the year 2017, the miniseries was classic Hollywood galimatias, showing a post-apocalyptic landscape unlike anything projected even by worst-case analysis. In the miniseries, Schneider appears as an aging scientist, lamenting that nothing was done while there was time. I wish he had been given the chance to live until 2017 and see that the world will be mostly fine.

Though scientific evidence of climate change continues to accumulate, polls show public belief in global warming is softening. A minor reason is the Climate-gate nonsense — the posting, on the Web, of hacked emails showing that prominent scientists on the global warming left were using data gimmicks while trying to shout down skeptics. Perhaps, but whoever did the hacking was violating the confidentiality of the correspondence of others, and we ought to be suspicious of the motives of unethical people.

Why hasn’t there been a backlash against the Climate-gate hacker — would we applaud someone who stole letters from a neighbor’s mailbox? The University of East Anglia, the place that was hacked, also looks bad, since its much-publicized “vindication” of the researchers involved was conducted by a committee paid for by the school. Of course the hired hands “vindicated” the organization that signed their paychecks! But enough already of Climate-gate.

More important to rising disbelief in climate change is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations agency that produces global warming studies, allowed itself to be hijacked by Al Gore and a few other phonies. When the IPCC shared the Nobel Prize stage with Gore, it consented to being equated in the public mind with Gore’s relentless self-promotion. A decade ago, the IPCC was apolitical. Now it’s a marketing organization, selling the climate-doomsday brand. A new authority on climate change is needed to supplant the IPCC.

Also diluting belief in climate change is high-and-mighty behavior of some – surely not all — in the science community. Recently the environmental radio show Earthbeat ran a segment in which Susan Hassol, who’s in the instant-doomsday camp, claimed that scientists researching global warming are subject to “McCarthyism.” McCarthyism? Most climate scientists enjoy academic tenure, while being darlings of the P.C. cocktail-party circuit.

Last year the federal government awarded $7 billion in climate change research grants, making life cushy for climate scientists. I don’t recall Joe McCarthy giving billions of dollars to State Department China hands! One climate pessimist, Michael Mann of Penn State, has indeed received unfair treatment from the far right, but then again Mann is a holier-than-thou type who is quick to denounce those who disagree with him, and one reaps what one sows.

Crying McCarthyism merely because scientists who make political claims receive political criticism — what else would you expect? — is self-righteous. This is the sort of behavior Stephen Schneider would have nothing to do with, and yet another reason his loss is felt.

Tech stocks drove off the cliff in 2000. Real estate went poof in 2007. Financial stocks melted down in 2008. So what’s the next bubble to burst? Short selling.

As we look back on three major market busts in a single decade, we have begun to idolize the shorts. Michael Lewis’ book, “The Big Short,” does exactly that. The New York Times just did so as well, lauding a shorts fund manager named Hugh Hendry, who says he wishes he could “short Obama.”

Practically everyone involved in capital markets now admires David Einhorn, who, in early 2008, warned that Lehman Brothers was dangerously leveraged. He was excoriated for saying so, and got the last laugh when his short-sales of the firm became lucrative.

Because shorts of the recent past look smart – and some became wealthy — it’s suddenly trendy to bet on decline. Investors now jumping into short selling — gambling that worrisome trends will continue — are making a move they should have made several years ago. This is exactly how bubbles form! Lots of people, recall, jumped into high-tech Internet stocks a couple years later than they should have, gambling on the notion that positive NASDAQ trends would continue.

According to figures compiled for this column by Lipper senior analyst Tom Roseen, from June to September of 2008, as the Dow and S&P were spiraling downward, a net of $10.7 billion flowed out of dedicated short bias funds. With a big fall in progress on Wall Street, that was the time to take profits on short positions. Since then, Roseen finds, a net of $26.9 billion has flowed into short funds.

True, $26.9 billion isn’t Lehman money – that company took $600 billion to Davey Jones’s locker when it hit the iceberg. But when billions of dollars flow into a specialized, very risky asset class, we have the makings of a bubble.

Shorts are assuming more bad news to come. What if economic news enters a cycle of steady improvement instead? (That’s what my book, Sonic Boom, supposes and there is considerable data to back the notion.) If we’re headed for years of steady, unspectacular economic improvement – shorting will be another bubble.

Which, of course, everyone will claim in retrospect to have known all along.

*****

Here are two other bubbles to watch for:

1. Gold Prices:
   In adjusted dollars, gold prices have nearly trebled through the last decade. Gold prices collapsed in the early 1980s, and buyers lost their shirts. That can’t possibly happen twice, can it?
2. Cupcake Prices:
   Also, cupcake prices are in for a major correction. Even in New York City and San Francisco, people seem unlikely to continue paying $5 for a cupcake that’s mainly icing, which, in turn, is mainly sugar. I’d unload Georgetown Cupcake now. Someday the cupcake bubble will be a standard b-school cautionary case study.

President Barack Obama is being praised for proposing new air quality regulations to reduce smog and acid rain. Obama’s proposal is a good idea — and strikingly similar to air quality regulations that were proposed in 2002 by George W. Bush, then fought with white fury by Democrats and environmentalists.

The reforms Obama suggests today could have begun eight years ago, were it not for intense opposition from the very people now backing the idea. And therein lies a tale of Washington dysfunction.

In 2002, Bush offered legislation to amend the Clean Air Act of 1970 to reduce smog and acid rain emissions by about two-thirds, while regulating airborne mercury emissions for the first time. You’d think this would have drawn applause from Democrats and environmental lobbies: instead their reaction was angry condemnation. Supposedly the bill was not strict enough because new standards would not go into force for several years, with the final, strongest rules not taking over until 2018. Way too long to wait!

What was really happening was that Democrats wanted to deny the Republican Party a pro-environment accomplishment, while environmentalists wanted, for fundraising purposes, to maintain their treasured illusion that corporations are conspiring to destroy the air. So determined were Democrats to prevent passage of Bush’s air quality bill that in the Senate they blocked it from leaving committee to ensure there would never be an up-or-down floor vote. Sounds a lot like what Republicans are now trying to do to Obama, doesn’t it?

Unable to advance legislation, in 2005, Bush tried to strengthen anti-pollution standards using the administrative authority of the Clean Air Act. The drawback to the Clean Air Act administrative rules is that, for reasons we can skip, they are easy to file lawsuits against. (Bush’s proposed 2002 legislation would have avoided this problem). Sure enough, some groups filed litigation claiming the 2005 clean air rules were too strict while others filed briefs claiming the rules were too lax.

Federal courts spent the next few years bouncing the rules like a basketball — as nothing went into effect. Meanwhile airborne mercury from power plants was being said to represent a super-ultra emergency. Year after year no mercury restrictions went into force, as lawyers and judges argued over commas.

For environmental fundraisers the outcome was ideal: because no action was taken, they could continue to make doomsday claims. For business groups the outcome was also ideal: they could avoid new pollution control costs. For politicians the outcome was ideal, too: each party could blame the other. For the rest of Americans? Screw them!

Bush left town with this mess unresolved. Gridlock happens in Washington not because of a systemic breakdown, but because insiders and lobbyists of all stripes benefit from dilatory tactics. When Washington is gridlocked, political posturing and special-interest fundraising are more effective.

Taking office, Obama’s initial hope was to write broad legislation that reduced air pollution and greenhouse gases at the same time. A year and a half later, greenhouse gas restriction, though justified, is stalled in the Senate. So Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency decided to issue air-pollution reduction rules under existing administrative authority of the Clean Air Act — exactly what Bush tried in 2005.

Obama’s proposed rules are winning praise from some of the same editorial pages that stridently denounced Bush’s extremely similar proposals. Oh well, you know how that game is played.

But Obama’s clean-air rules, however wise, won’t be final until 2012 at the earliest, because administration actions under the Clean Air Act engage in an elaborate public comment process. Because they are administrative rules rather than legislation, they are subject to lawsuits, just as Bush’s were. Typically, Clean Air Act rules in are litigation nearly a decade before becoming final.

This means we will be lucky if any of the new pollution reducing standards actually go into force by the middle of this decade, once described as way, way too late. If it weren’t for Washington dysfunction, the rules would have taken force years ago!

But, take note of these two, important facts:

–Don’t worry about the air. All forms of air pollution, other than greenhouse gases, have declined steadily for a generation, owing to improvements in technology and to reforms even most policy wonks don’t know about, such as regulation of emissions from locomotives and removal of sulfur from diesel fuel. Los Angeles smog has gone down dramatically. Obama’s proposal is still justified, as it would accelerate positive trends. But too few people know that clean-air trends are positive already.

–In 2002, Bush proposed to reduce mercury from power plants beginning in 2005, with a maximum cut of 70 percent by 2018. This was denounced as too little, too late. Owing to gridlock, no mercury rules have been enacted — nothing has happened. Obama himself hasn’t even proposed anti-mercury regulations: when he does, years will pass before anything takes force. Had Bush’s 2002 legislation not been fought, regulation of mercury from power plants would have begun five years ago. Today, we’ll be lucky if it begins five years from now.

For points that didn’t quite make the column, click here.

POINTS THAT DIDN’T QUITE MAKE THE COLUMN:

* In 2001, the FDA warned pregnant women not to eat Great Lakes fish because airborne mercury settles on the Great Lakes. Since then, according to daytime talk shows and to some environmentalists, airborne mercury from U.S. power plants has been an incredible menace. Mercury emissions from power plants should be regulated. But perspective is missing from the debate.

United States power plants account for around 3 percent of new mercury being emitted to the environment. In 2002, and again in 2005, George W. Bush proposed to reduce U.S. power plant emissions of mercury by 70 percent — which would have reduced the U.S. power plant share of environmental mercury to around 2 percent. Environmentalists and editorialists said the proposed Bush cut was far too little, that a 90 percent cut was needed. But because American power plants are such a small slice of the problem to begin with, reducing their mercury emissions 90 percent would have cut the U.S. power plant share of environmental mercury to around 1.5 percent — barely different from what Bush proposed.

So because of a fight about whether a problem should be reduced to 2 percent or 1.5 percent, nothing at all was done. Environmentalists didn’t discuss how small the power-plant contribution is to mercury exposure, because that would undercut scare-tactics fundraising.

* The New York Times often bungles environmental reporting: its coverage of mercury and arsenic has been scandalously bad. Throughout the eight Bush years, the Times front page and editorial page consistently suggested that White House policies would allow smog and acid rain to rise, and basically skipped the politically inconvenient complication that under Bush, smog and acid rain were declining.

For instance, this 2004 New York Times Magazine cover story announced “the undoing of 30 years of clean air policy” and declared George W. Bush engaging in a sinister “radical transformation of the nation’s environmental laws.” The 8,000-word article was a model of dishonesty. It simply did not mention that all forms of air pollution — other than greenhouse gases, which Congress has never voted to regulate — were declining under Bush, as they also declined under Bill Clinton. A year later when statistics showed a drop in smog in the very part of the country where the Times magazine article said smog would increase — what happened to that “undoing” of clean air policy? — the paper buried the story on page A10.

This isn’t just a journalism history lesson. Polls show Americans believe air pollution is getting worse, when for a generation, air pollution has been in decline. One reason for the public perception dichotomy is that major news organizations such as the Times downplay or simply don’t report environmental progress.

The best argument for greenhouse gas regulations is that smog and acid-rain regulations worked — so greenhouse gas regulations will work, too! People won’t come around to that point of view until the press corps stops pretending, for ideological reasons, that all environmental news is negative.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, United States forces are trying to fight a shadowy enemy that does not wear uniforms, while being told to protect corrupt governments. But here is the really disturbing parallel between the current conflicts and Vietnam: Washington is drawing out the troop presence in Afghanistan and Iraq long after any justification has expired, in order to postpone that moment when it must be admitted we did not succeed.

America won’t fail in Afghanistan or Iraq — but won’t succeed, either. Lives are being sacrificed so that American leaders can continue pretending otherwise.

A terrible price

Lack of success is different from failure. The United States military wins nearly every battle, and in Afghanistan and Iraq, most U.S. soldiers and aircrew have behaved in exemplary fashion. But the United States has not known success — we have not stopped Afghanistan and Iraq from being horrible places. Inconclusive outcomes, neither success nor failure, seem likely now. American leaders seem incapable of facing the prospect that a vast expense of blood and treasure has been directed toward an inconclusive outcome.

This is why we keep having public flare-ups on the Afghan and Iraq situations. In the most recent, former Afghanistan commander Stanley McChrystal was called to the White House and fired for speaking to a rock-and-roll magazine, while Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele is in a storm about dopey remarks he made on Afghanistan under a picnic tent. If anyone could imagine what a realistic successful conclusion of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars might be, American energies would be focused on seeking that. Instead the energy is diverted to name-calling and finger-pointing.

Allowing our soldiers to die

It is shameful to allow more of our soldiers to die so that our leaders can avoid admitting mistakes. To postpone the moment when the United States admits it did not succeed in Afghanistan and Iraq, the country’s leaders, Democrat and Republican alike, keep opting to drag out U.S. presence in these conflicts. Exactly as during the final years of Vietnam, the young are dying so that the old can postpone admitting mistakes.

Shameful, too, is the lack of concern for civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. In most cases, the killing of civilians by U.S. forces in these nations has been by error, not by intent. But to the dead it’s all the same. U.S.-caused civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are barely mentioned in American political debate . The civilians being killed by Western forces in these nations are anonymous members of strange societies that America doesn’t like, so America doesn’t care about them. Small wonder, especially in Afghanistan, that no matter how many bad guys our side kills, the following day there are more.

The invasion justifications have long since expired

In 2001, the United States was attacked by forces based in Afghanistan. America had a clear self-defense right to strike back, and nearly all the world’s nations indicated support for America’s counterattack on Afghanistan. But that was nine years ago!

Last month, CIA Director Leon Panetta said the number of al Qaeda still in Afghanistan is “relatively small — at most, we’re looking at 50 to 100, maybe less.” Tens of thousands of combat soldiers, and frequent airstrikes, cannot be justified by a search for 100 people. In order to postpone the moment when U.S. forces leave Afghanistan, Washington has redefined the mission, which is now to hunt the Taliban. The Taliban are awful people – but they are awful people who have nothing to do with the national security of the United States.

As for Iraq, it can be argued that in 2003, to depose the dictator Saddam Hussein, and destroy any Iraqi atomic weapons program, constituted legitimate grounds for the United States invasion. In a year, Saddam was captured and inspectors had learned there was no Iraqi atomic weapons program. By spring 2004, the United States had done what it set out to do in Iraq — why didn’t we just leave? Simply leaving would have been the honorable course. Six years later, we are still there.

Why are we still in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Officially the continuing U.S. presence is to stabilize the country – the real reason we stay is to postpone the sectarian bloodbath that may occur when the United States withdraws. Yet U.S. departure has always been inevitable. Whatever is going to happen in Iraq when the United States leaves, will happen when the United States leaves. Postponing that moment only raises the death toll.

In Afghanistan, U.S. forces are now staging a “counter-insurgency” campaign. What are the insurgents doing? Resisting our occupation. It’s circular: we are there to fight the people who are fighting us because we are there. The Afghanistan government may be the most corrupt on Earth; that U.S. soldiers are dying to defend a corrupt government is a horror. If we left Afghanistan, would the Taliban take over? Perhaps, and that would be a dark day.

Do we owe it to the fallen to continue?

Would leaving Afghanistan or Iraq now mean earlier sacrifices were in vain? More than 5,500 United States armed service members have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, all with the idealistic hope that these places would be improved by their sacrifice. Senator John McCain recently said the United States should commit to staying in Afghanistan indefinitely — decades if necessary — because that “would make the war more winnable and hasten the day when our troops can come home with honor.”

Senator McCain, a Vietnam veteran, knows his generation of warriors was denied its victory parade through Times Square, and other forms of recognition — there was never a moment when the Vietnam War was won, and the tickertape fell. But United States forces could have fought in Vietnam for many years more and that war never would have been “won.” That was not the fault of those who served in Vietnam, it was just the reality. What was happening in Vietnam was fundamentally political, and military organizations cannot solve political problems.

Today, regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no scenario that leads to a declaration of victory and fireworks around the Statue of Liberty. That is not the fault of the United States military. Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan already have covered themselves with honor. They have bested Saddam and routed al Qaeda, creating a chance for Iraq and Afghanistan to someday evolve into better places. Would the fallen want more U.S. soldiers to die, just so admission of the lack of a victory-celebration outcome can be postponed for another election cycle?

The choice not made

The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts is between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending on factors such as long-term benefits to disabled veterans. If the United States had spent half that amount building schools and hospitals in these nations, instead of trying to identify people to shoot at, would Iraqis and Afghans today love Americans? Perhaps. At this point, the chance has been lost.

When the next time comes, let’s remember that just because the United States has the world’s greatest military — and that use of that military is manly and dramatic for presidents — does not mean sending in our armed forces is necessarily the smart move.

What the past tells us

On the day he died, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was polishing a speech he planned to deliver that week. The speech contained this remarkable line: “More than an end to war, we want… an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method” of settling differences.

The key word in Roosevelt’s speech is impractical. Bombs and artillery were the only solution to the Nazi menace. But mainly, war is impractical — usually it doesn’t work. War is not working now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why must we continue to postpone, at the cost of soldiers’ and civilians’ lives, the day on which this is admitted?

OTHER TIMELY POINTS FROM THE LOGIC COP:

Russian Spies

It’s not clear in what sense the “Russian spies” were spies, since they are not charged with espionage and, according to this Washington Post report, were specifically instructed by their government to avoid classified material. They’re been charged with failing to declare employment by a foreign power, which essentially means they were unregistered lobbyists.

What were the “spies” up to? According to the Post, their task was to ingratiate themselves with wealthy or influential Americans, then find out what these people were talking about. Going to such trouble to discover the kind of information printed on websites that can be read for free from any laptop in the world suggests Moscow actually believes that secret councils of the wealthy in New York City and Washington are pulling the strings on U.S. life. As for the “spies,” it has long been the case that most of the information reported home in breathless cables by intelligence operatives simply comes from local newspapers. Those who live in luxury abroad as “agents” have long hoped their home governments won’t catch on.

Tesla Motors

Tesla Motors, the first American automaker IPO since Ford Motors, 54 years ago. Tesla, which makes high-performance battery-powered cars, is being celebrated as some kind of testament to the entrepreneurial spirit. What a crock. This company is heavily subsidized, and builds a plaything for the rich.

Tesla is capitalized mainly via a $465 million no-collateral federal loan — if Tesla goes out of business, the taxpayer takes the loss, while if Tesla becomes a hit, private investors keep all the profit. The firm’s electric cars entitle buyers to a $7,500 tax credit, plus sales tax exemption in many states, meaning Tesla marketing receives significant subsidies.

The company is purchasing a factory in Fremont, California, where Toyota and General Motors once had a joint venture. The Department of Labor just announced $19 million in special payments to workers there, essentially subsidizing the Tesla labor force. A month ago, Tesla sold federal emissions credits to Honda for $12 million: the company hopes to qualify for more credits, which it will sell.

What’s the product? A $109,000 luxury sports car that accelerates from zero to 60 in 3.9 seconds, the speed of the hottest Porches and Corvettes.  Such speed has no relevance to everyday driving, rather, it is useful solely for road-rage behavior: running lights and cutting others off. Your taxes now fund a rich-person’s road-rage toy! Tesla says its next product will be a “family sedan” – expected price, $57,000. Perhaps the White House and congressional officials who approve Tesla’s subsidies think $57,000 is what typical families spend on sedans.

Yes, federal investments sometimes help kick-start what eventually become beneficial industries. But Tesla isn’t even attempting to build a product useful to the typical person. Its output is focused exclusively on the rich – while average people are taxed to cover the company’s bills. If only the Russian spies could have explained how powerful insiders are working this swindle.

Click here to see why Breakingviews journalist Antony Currie says not just anything can ride the markets like Tesla.

Please don’t tell me the government is also subsidizing the Terrafugia flying car, which just won exemption from a federal airworthiness safety standard.  The entire market niche for flying cars is maybe 10 vehicles, and two of them are sure to collide.

Martin Feldman’s oil stocks

Lefties are going nuts over the fact that Martin Feldman, the federal judge who overturned the temporary offshore drilling ban, owned oil-companies stocks. Keith Olbermann has hyperventilated about this to the point that I worried his cheeks would explode. Feldman’s ruling might make oil stocks more valuable – that’s the supposed scandal. But Feldman sold off his oil stocks before issuing the ruling! If he’d purchased oil stocks and then issued a pro-oil ruling, that would be an outrage. But what happened is he sold his stocks in order to avoid benefitting from his decision. Journalism needs a new specialty: Logic Cop.

Even people who don’t like guns ought to be happy about this week’s Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment – the “keep and bear arms” clause of the Constitution – binds state and local governments, in addition to the federal government. Way too much time and energy has been wasted arguing about the Second Amendment: it’s obvious the Framers expected private ownership of guns.

While the decision makes clear there exists an individual right to possess firearms, the decision also makes clear that firearm ownership may be regulated. That is every bit as important as settling the argument regarding the breadth of the Second Amendment. In fact, this week’s Supreme Court decision could be the best thing that ever happened to gun regulation – and I say that as someone who’s owned guns.

Thanks, Supreme Court, for making clear that gun ownership can be regulated. There is now no doubt an individual right of firearm possession exists, and also no doubt government may regulate that right.  So let’s fix the regulation of guns — by focusing regulation on dangerous firearms.

There is a little-understood legal distinction between guns and dangerous guns. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion, most of which is by Justice Samuel Alito, spells out that dangerous guns are subject to regulation by all levels of government; a dissent by Justice Stephen Breyer adds emphasis on that issue. Lobbying and commentary about firearms has for too long been divided into camps of gun-lovers and gun-haters. We ought instead to focus on regulation of dangerous guns, which the Supreme Court ruling just reiterated is entirely Constitutional.

Aren’t all guns dangerous? In legal terms, a “dangerous” gun is one that creates risks beyond the normal risks associated with hunting and marksmanship; or that is used mainly for crime. In 1934, Congress banned private ownership of machine guns, fully automatic guns, sawed-off shotguns, silencers and flash suppressors. These weapons and attachments, Congress said, had no legitimate purposes, such as hunting or self-defense. In 1939, the Supreme Court upheld this 1934 act, and Monday, the Supreme Court affirmed its primary reasoning. Other laws restricting cheap throwaway weapons, which are plainly intended for crime, have been upheld. The Supreme Court’s new decision reiterates that gun rights may be regulated to prevent the spread of dangerous firearms, while allowing possession of guns intended for use in lawful ways.

Handguns are dangerous in the Constitutional sense, long guns are not. Nearly all firearm crimes are committed using handguns, because they can be concealed. Most gun suicides involve handguns, and most accidental firearm deaths are by handgun. Rifles and shotguns, by contrast, are seldom used in crimes or suicides, and only occasionally cause accidental deaths. Because of this, rifles and shotguns are not dangerous in the legal sense. The pump-action shotgun is even known as a “safe weapon” because it cannot be hidden, is hard to point and requires three separate motions to fire, thus almost never going off by accident.

Last summer on a clay-shooting range, a firearms instructor without hesitation handed a pump-action shotgun to my 14-year-old, a novice. He would never have dreamed of handing over a pistol: all handguns are easy to point, and many are easy to fire by mistake.

Strict regulation of handguns, coupled to broad freedom to own long guns, would make sense to the Framers – and would fit the language of the new Supreme Court ruling.

Long guns meet nearly all individual needs for firearms. Hunting and marksmanship are rifle activities; shotguns may be used for hunting, and are the best weapon for home defense. Shotguns are the best self-defense weapon because they are visually the most intimidating non-military gun. 

The gun that doesn’t go off is the most effective gun. The ideal self-defense outcome is to show a weapon but not fire it. For this, long guns are better than handguns, because they are menacing in appearance and deadly if they must be used. Twice in our lives, my wife or I have shown a 12-gauge shotgun and ended a confrontation, in both cases without the weapon being fired.

Yet shotguns and rifles are close to worthless for crime, because they cannot be concealed. Studies showing that bringing a gun into the home increases the risk of gun violence within the home only take into account guns that are fired. But weapons that are shown without being fired are important deterrents to crime.  MAN WAVES RIFLE,  BURGLAR FLEES is a headline you’ll never see, because nothing happens. But in this instance, a long guns offers the best self-defense.

Why do individuals need handguns? Mainly, handguns are used for homicides, thefts and drug-dealing. Law enforcement officers need pistols, and military personnel carry them as sidearms. Under what lawful circumstances does the typical person need to carry a handgun, or benefit from possessing one? There are possibilities:  for example, a woman threatened by an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend might have a lawful reason to carry a handgun. Most people who carry handguns do not have lawful activity in mind. By the reasoning of this week’s Supreme Court case, handgun ownership could be very tightly regulated using licensing laws, while long gun ownership would be only lightly regulated.

What about the militia reference in the Second Amendment? When the Bill of Rights was enacted, the United States had no standing army: if the country were invaded, people would need firearms in their homes. Today this situation doesn’t apply – if it did, we would want homes to contain antitank rockets. The Framers had in mind a dual purpose for gun ownership: militia formation, and personal use such as self defense and hunting. The new Supreme Court decision makes clear that the militia rational is antiquated, but the second rational remains.

Don’t we need guns to ensure our liberty? The Framers would have sympathy with that argument. But if the United States government, with its tanks and ground-assault aircraft, becomes a dictatorship, pistols won’t be the answer.

In urban circumstances, the primary use of handguns is for crime. State and local governments should employ the reasoning of this week’s Supreme Court decision to regulate handguns very strictly.

Click here to read what the logic cop has to say on Russian spies, Tesla Motors, and Martin Feldman’s oil stocks.