Gregg Easterbrook

Pundits, columnists and editorialists are good at saying who and what they don’t like. But what is it that they do like? All opinion-makers should be required to pen regular accounts of who and what they admire. As my two-year stint as a Reuters weekly columnist concludes – you’re not out of the woods, I may pop up occasionally – let me offer an incomplete accounting of ideas, organizations and people I view as worthy of praise:

World Vision: Many Christians conveniently ignore Jesus’s teachings about the poor. Many Americans don’t care about the billion people globally who are impoverished. World Vision, an evangelical organization, combats both problems by working to end poverty in developing nations. World Vision has done more to help the global poor than most governments, is pragmatic regarding economics, and its staffers don’t proselytize. There are few organizations one can admire without reservation: World Vision is one.

Barack Obama: His “next year we will get serious about the national debt” act is wearing thin. But in the main, Obama has been a good president – and Americans are turning post-racial so quickly that already we seem to shrug about the incredible historic significance of an African-American in the Oval Office.

Obama took command of the country at a low point: a deep recession, a costly quagmire in Iraq. If he’d come onto the national stage under the conditions encountered by the previous two chief executives – Bill Clinton took the White House at the start of an economic boom, George W. Bush took the White House just before 9-11, which ensured him a five-year honeymoon as the nation rallied – Obama might already be viewed as a great president. And he might still cross that threshold. ObamaCare was a major legislative achievement, and though it has bureaucratic-nightmare potential, bear in mind that few of its advantages have yet taken effect.

Doctors Without Borders: In the parts of the developing world where there are medical emergencies, workers of Medecins Sans Frontieres are viewed as saints walking among men. That’s the way I feel, too.

Cass Sunstein: Obama’s regulatory czar wants regulations to be necessary and cost-effective, which offends both ideological extremes. He’s doing a fine job.

Third Way: The Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute continue to do good work. But Third Way is the future of think tanks, focused on pragmatic solutions, not panel discussions.

International Justice Mission: Founded just 14 years ago, IJM already has achieved results in pressuring the legal systems of African, Asian and South American countries to recognize human rights and to take concrete action against human trafficking, government corruption and police brutality.

Red Cross/Red Crescent/Red Star of David: The structure of the Red Cross, Red Crescent and Red Star of David societies can be confusing. But in a world of situation ethics and I’ve-got-mine-Jack, the brave personnel of these organizations represent the embodiment of selfless virtue.

Stephen Carter: Author of important nonfiction books, of bestselling novels and a chaired law professor at Yale University, for my money Carter is the nation’s leading public intellectual. A political and religious moderate – not many Ivy League professors have written a column for Christianity Today, which is traditionalist on spiritual issues and liberal on social questions – Carter is a fine candidate for a Supreme Court opening. Yes, he writes novels that contain conspiracies, including an evil Supreme Court justice. They’re novels! Surely even the Senate Judiciary Committee can understand the difference between scholarship and entertainment. Carter would bring to the highest court intellectual heft, equability and humility, all of which the Supremes need.

The deficit commission report: It’s the map for the only clear path out of America’s primary domestic problem.

Berea College: Founded to aid the poor of Appalachia, Berea College is a private institution that does not charge tuition. “Financial need” is a requirement for admission. As top colleges and universities increasingly become preserves of the well-off, Berea College tirelessly works to end college-based class distinctions.

Mitt Romney: So he flip-flops. If this is the worst thing about him, he’s a welcome addition to national politics. Romney has been a success as a business and a government executive. He behaves honorably and treats others with respect. At a time when American discourse grows bitter and divisive, an Obama-Romney presidential race could set an example for high-minded public behavior.

The Pew Charitable Trusts: The Pew Trusts is the nation’s leading progressive philanthropy, campaigning for reform in health care, the environment, energy policy and other subjects. Its divisions concerned with state government and public opinion do great jobs. The founding impulse of Pew was a left-wing Christian – a flavor missing in national discourse. Its president, Rebecca Rimel, is a self-made woman who began her career as a nurse.

Reuters readers: I thank all readers who followed this column. You’re number one on my list of What I Like.

PHOTO: People stand together as they create the biggest human smiley in the world on the Zagreb main square May 6, 2011.

By Gregg Easterbrook
The opinions expressed are his own.

Conventional wisdom says the Republican presidential nomination will go to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich. This could change – don’t be surprised if it changes more than once. But suppose conventional wisdom proves correct. If you were Barack Obama, which would you rather run against?

A follower of polls might say, “Of course Obama wants to run against Gingrich.” An Obama-Gingrich race could end with a walkover for the incumbent, as happened in LBJ-Goldwater of 1964 and Nixon-McGovern of 1972.

Gingrich, some thinking goes, has a borderline personality. His past is full of strange diatribes on a weird range of subjects. As Ronald Reagan sometimes confused movies with reality, Gingrich confuses science fiction novels with reality. He threw a temper tantrum about his seat on Air Force One. Hardly anyone likes him personally. He was a transparent opportunist with Fannie and Freddie, organizations that voters hate. Gingrich is proficient at bloviating, and the one time in his life he held actual responsibility as Speaker of the House he did a terrible job. Would you trust the nation’s budget to a man who ran a $1 million tab at Tiffany?

Gingrich hectors others about their personal lives, while presenting himself as a champion of traditional values. Yet he admits betraying not one but two wives. Some kind of new low in politics was achieved when Gingrich formally pledged to stop committing adultery. Gingrich wears the letter H — for hypocrite — around his neck as Hester Prynne wore an A around hers in The Scarlet Letter.

These are sound reasons why Obama might prefer to face Newt. They are reasons the Republican National Committee is said to be feeling panicky about a Gingrich candidacy. Newt has the potential to lose by a spectacular margin, dragging Republican Senate and House candidates down with him. The Republican establishment has not forgotten how much damage he did to the GOP during his administration of the House. Run against a guy even your opponents despise? Sounds promising.

But, as you’ve probably guessed by now, there is a but.

Gingrich is a wild card. He probably would end up a flaming wreckage in electoral terms, but there’s a chance he could become seen as the man unafraid to bring sweeping change to an ossified Washington, D.C. There’s perhaps a 90 percent likelihood Obama would wipe the floor with Gingrich, versus a 10 percent likelihood Gingrich would stage an historic upset. In game theory terms, this invokes the minimax problem – should Obama maximize his chance of a huge victory or minimize his chance of a stinging defeat?

We must take into consideration that Gingrich can be vicious. He viciously denounced Bill Clinton and demanded his impeachment for having an affair, all the while, as we now know, Newt was busy cheating on his own wife. This shows Gingrich will say anything in order to serve himself. Of all GOP contenders, Gingrich seems the only one who might stoop to appealing to the very worst aspects of the American character — if he thought he would personally benefit.

Now consider Mitt Romney. He is perceived as being more appealing to independents than Gingrich. Romney possesses an air of maturity and reasonableness, qualities Gingrich sorely lacks. Also unlike Gingrich, Romney has been a success as an executive — running private businesses, the Olympics and the state of Massachusetts. There seems little chance Romney will stage a campaign that melts down and simply hands a reelection to Obama, which Gingrich might do. Because he is perceived as admirable, Mitt could help Republicans pick up House and Senate seats, even if they miss the White House.

Overall, in most respects, Romney is a significantly more formidable opponent than Gingrich. Yet there are reasons the president might prefer to run against Mitt.

His Latter-Day Saints faith could be a negative — one Obama need not even mention. Evangelicals normally turn out for Republican candidates, but they may be put off by the longstanding question of whether Mormons are Christians. As a churchgoer myself, I think Mormons have the same claim to be followers of Christ as anyone else does. But then I belong to an eccentric joint Christian-Jewish congregation that takes a broad view of spirituality. Many traditional Christians, however, are suspicious of the Mormon denomination. This could knock a couple of points off a Romney vote without the president having to do or say anything.

Romney’s other powerful negative is his background in private equity. Right now “Wall Street” is an expletive, and Romney is Wall Street up one side and down the other. His years running Bain Capital will be described in campaign advertising as vulture capitalism – corporate raiding, followed by layoffs and outsourcing with huge profits for wealthy insiders and average people out of work.

That may not be a fair charge, but it is a powerful one, with which Obama could pillory Romney. There is a clear political playbook to use against Romney.

This especially matters to the youth-vote/youth-volunteer equation. The young voters who enthusiastically supported Obama in 2008 now seem more turned off by him. But if 2012 pits Obama versus Mr. One Percent, young voters might get excited again. Obama would be offering them a chance to defeat Wall Street, at least symbolically.

Whatever other failings he may have, Romney has always comported himself with dignity. An Obama-Romney contest would be the kind of decorous, high-minded campaign at which the president excels. In an Obama-Gingrich race, practically anything could happen.

So forget the polls. If I am Barack Obama, I want to run against Mitt Romney.

Photo: Republican presidential candidate former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) looks on as fellow candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (L) makes a point during the Republican Party presidential candidates debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, December 10, 2011. REUTERS/Jeff Haynes

If you’re thinking the jumbled Republican presidential field does not matter because whomever gets the nomination can’t win – think again. A Republican could well take the White House in 2012.

At this point in the 1992 election cycle, the elder George Bush held an 89 a 66 percent approval rating (update: on October 13, 1991, according to Gallup data on the Roper Center website). Back then, Democratic figures including Mario Cuomo did not enter the 1992 race because they thought the elder Bush was “unbeatable” – just as today many Republicans are not entering the race, thinking Obama is unbeatable.

But Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton, who, a year before his victory, was a low-name-recognition outsider with personal baggage.

Clinton beat a popular incumbent with a fantastic approval rating. For the 2012 election, Barack Obama is just as vulnerable as the elder Bush, if not even more so. Obama currently has an approval rating of 23 percent. 40 percent (update: as of October 13-15, 2011, according to Gallup).

Upsets aren’t unusual. At this point in the 2008 election cycle, Hillary Clinton was viewed as having an insurmountable lead for the Democratic nomination. At this stage in 2004, John Kerry was thought to be running a vanity candidacy. By Election Day, a small swing in the Ohio count would have put Kerry into the White House. As for Ronald Reagan, at this point in the 1980 election cycle, he was the favorite to win the Republican nomination, but incumbent Jimmy Carter was expected to retain his post in the general election. Reagan ended up taking 44 states.

Carter had a rocky presidency, but the power of incumbency was thought to be too great for Reagan to overcome. Obama, despite having a rocky presidency, is expected by many to be reelected on the basis of incumbency. Yet two of the last five incumbents to stand for reelection were defeated. Obama could make it three of the last six.

Of the Republican field, those who have the best chance to unseat Obama are Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman, for a simple reason – governorship.

Four of the last six presidents were governors before ascending to the White House: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. (The elder George Bush had been vice-president, while Obama had been a senator.)

Of the most recent six presidents, party doesn’t tell much, since three were Democrats and three Republicans. Other major distinctions don’t tell much either. Two were former members of Congress (Obama and the elder Bush). Two were former active-duty military (Carter and the elder Bush). One had held high federal government posts (the elder Bush had been CIA director and United Nations ambassador). Two had run a small business (Carter and the elder Bush). One had run a large business (the younger Bush). There’s no other factor among the most recent six presidents that leaps out like governor status.

Right now Romney seems to be the frontrunner, which, of course, is a mixed blessing. His aura of experience and reasonableness could prove quite appealing to voters.

Perry continues to have the potential to light a populist fire. But don’t sell Huntsman short because he is low in the polls – Obama had been at that point, too. But Obama took the White House in part on the strength of being Not Just Another Politician. Of all the 2012 candidates, Huntsman is the one who is Not Just Another Politician.

So why are governors so appealing as presidential contenders? Running a statehouse is the closest thing to running the White House. It’s a real job with executive authority, unlike being in Congress, where windbag behavior dominates. Americans seem to think more fondly of state governments than of the federal government, rightly or wrongly viewing states as better-run. Governors benefit from state finances containing a hefty share of bookkeeping illusion, while the fiscal recklessness of the Washington establishment cannot be disguised. And many widely admired former presidents – Reagan, FDR, Woodrow Wilson – were governors first.

Ideally, a presidential candidate is a former, not current, governor. That conveys the prestige of governorship, while leaving the candidate not responsible for whatever’s going wrong in his state right now. Romney and Huntsman can argue that they left Massachusetts and Utah in fine shape. Perry, still in office, must shoulder some blame for current defects of Texas public schools and health care.

So don’t assume Obama is a shoe-in for reelection. And of the Republican field, keep your eyes on Romney and Huntsman. They are the former governors who seek the White House, and a former governor is a fine thing to be.

Photo: Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney greets people in the crowd as he arrives for the third debate between US Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) and US Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ) at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, October 15, 2008. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton; Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman during a break in a debate with other Republican presidential hopefuls at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, October 11, 2011. REUTERS/Scott Eells/POOL

“If we don’t take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could …  jeopardize our recovery.”

–President Barack Obama, January 2010.

“Next year [I will] start presenting some very difficult choices to the country” on debt reduction.

–Obama, June 2010

Bartender, giveaways for everyone!

–Essentially what Obama said, in so many words, December 2010.

Barack Obama pledged to reduce the national debt during his presidential campaign, but instead has added $2.7 trillion to that debt so far – more than the entire national debt in the year 1975. Throughout 2010, he repeatedly promised there will be no more treating the Treasury as a cookie jar. Now, suddenly, there will be $900 billion in new giveaways, financed entirely by borrowing.

Just a week ago the deficit reduction commission proposed wrenching cuts and tax increases that, best-case, would cut several hundred billion dollars from the deficit over the next few years. The deficit commission recommendations had only been out a week before the White House, most Republicans and some Democrats endorsed a giveaway of significantly more money than the wrenching cuts would save!

But don’t we need more giveaways to stimulate the economy?

First, there is little reason to believe this will work. Second and more important, constant additions to the national debt — coupled with the sense that Washington is out of control — may be the reason the economy keeps sputtering. The latest giveaway may cause more economic malaise, rather than cure it.

Won’t tax cuts save the economy?
The argument that extending the 2003 tax cuts is needed to boost the economy simply ignores that the economy declined with these cuts in place. Federal income taxes (for the working class and the middle class as well as the rich) were reduced in 2001 and again in 2003. Right after that, the economy began to sputter.

Maybe this would have happened anyway. But it’s incontestable that low taxes on the middle class and especially on the rich did not pull the country out of the recession of 2007-2009, or out of the slow growth of 2010. Reckless fiscal policy didn’t work. Now we’re supposed to believe that the same tax cuts that didn’t work before magically will work in 2011 and 2012.

Stimulus spending didn’t work either. George W. Bush supported $200 billion in stimulus spending in 2008. Obama added another nearly $800 billion in 2009, and about $300 billion rationalized as stimulus in 2010. All was backed by debt. Now we’re told $900 billion in additional debt will boost the economy — magically, though it didn’t before.

Of course everyone wants lower taxes. But federal income and corporate taxes are already at historical lows, while national debt keeps breaking records. The White House deal is transparently a package of giveaways. In the very worst of Washington traditions, a spending-spree mentality took hold — I’ll prove that I can give away more than you can! — with the negotiators emerging having agreed to hand out substantially more than the worst-case estimate when the talks began.

Will the latest giveaways harm the economy rather than help it?
If the White House plan goes through, national debt will have increased to nearly $6 trillion during the first term of the Obama presidency. Republicans are as much to blame as Democrats — no one has been more irresponsible with national finances in the last decade as Republicans. Regardless, you should be shocked by this number — almost as much debt taken on in four years as in the entire previous history of the Republic! And no plan to do anything about it.

Each time Washington increases the debt, it makes the United States less valuable — in the same way that each time you borrow against your house, you make your house less valuable. To you, at least. (The country, in this analogy, is becoming steadily less valuable to Americans, though more valuable to Chinese and Arab sovereign wealth funds.)

Since 2006, Congress and the White House, under leadership and presidents of both parties, have steadily made the United States less valuable via reckless fiscal policy.

This is a core reason the economy continues to sputter. Corporations are sitting on big piles of cash they won’t invest. Why invest in a country that keeps becoming less valuable?

Why innovate in hopes of future profit when systemic fiscal irresponsibility by both parties means either the United States will become a stagnant mega-Japan, or steep tax increases will be the only way out when panic sets in?

Corporations aren’t investing to spark new growth and create more jobs because they think Washington’s Democrats and Republicans alike are running the country into the ground. The new $900 billion giveaway provides evidence this view is correct. No one in the White House or in Congress is willing to act like a responsible adult. They’ve all got hands in the cookie jar, and future generations will suffer.

Bear in mind, when the early 1990s recession afflicted the country, President Bill Clinton did not back any form of giveaways. Instead he reigned in federal spending in order to reduce the deficit and create confidence the United States was becoming more valuable, not less.  This worked! The deficit declined and the decade that followed was the best-ever economically for the nation.

Maybe this week’s deal tells us Barack Obama is simply becoming yet another political phony — a depressing thought at many levels. Last January during the State of the Union Address, when Obama declared there would be strict fiscal disciple but not “till next year,” the transcript recorded that there was laughter. Suddenly it’s not funny.

But the worst fear is that the deal tells us the president and congressional leaders have no backbone: whenever an interest group squeals, it will receive a handout, regardless of harm to the country.

Cutting the debt, by taxes and by spending reductions, could pull the economy of out the quicksand. Increasing the national debt will likely make matters worse.

If you are a Barack Obama supporter — as I am — you should be glad the House of Representatives is changing to Republican. For this is likely to make Obama a better president.

Bill Clinton was ineffective in the first two years of his presidency, with Capitol Hill debacles on health care and the forgotten BTU tax. Then Clinton’s party lost the House in 1994: and his performance as president began to improve.

Sure, there was some kind of fuss between the White House and the House regarding somebody named Monica. But all of Clinton’s signature achievements — welfare reform, the Good Friday Agreement, conversion of federal deficits into surpluses, the Camp David summit — came after the Democrats lost the House.

Once the Democrats no longer had full control of Congress, Clinton no longer could spend his time mediating disputes among the party’s interest groups – disputes regarding the various handouts and special deals various factions were demanding. Clinton needed to broaden his appeal and leadership style, plus acquire genuine concern for his opponents’ positions. He went from being president of the Democrats to president of the nation.

Losing the House was essential to the maturation of Clinton’s presidency. The same can happen for Barack Obama.

So far, President Obama has devoted most of his time and energy to trying to be leader of the always-complaining, always-hands-outstretched internal factions of the Democratic Party. For Democrats to hold the White House, Senate and House, plus have two fresh appointments to the Supreme Court, arguably has made Obama less effective than he otherwise might have been.

Open squabbling over giveaways — the $800 billion stimulus bill might have been called Interest Groups Spoils of Victory Act of 2009 — has made the Democrats look foolish. Possessing near-total control of Washington, Obama’s party nonetheless has made wacky claims of conspiracies against it. Nancy Pelosi’s assertion that “secret money” beholden to mysterious foreign powers is really running the U.S. government is the daffiest thing anyone’s said in years, but hardly the only contention along these lines. Losing the House of Representatives should cause the White House, and at least some Democrats, to get their feet back on the ground.

Obama needs to become the leader of all Americans. As happened with Clinton, this will require broadening his leadership style and finding genuine concern for his opponents’ views and positions.

In a democracy, steamrolling the opposition may work once in a while, but cannot be a basis of governing. Consensus must be sought. Losing the lower chamber of Congress means the White House can’t steamroll any more – and this will be good for the Obama presidency.

Millions of Americans agree with and like President Obama — but millions also don’t. Obama needs to come to terms with that, and show that he cares just as much about his opponents as about his party’s interest groups.

Barack Obama is the most gifted natural leader since Ronald Reagan — who also stumbled and struggled in his first two years as president, and who also took a shellacking, in terms of losing House seats, in his first national election while president, which in Reagan’s case was in 1982.

Clinton in 1994, and Reagan in 1982, woke up and realized they needed to become president of everyone. Both grew in empathy, and improved as leaders, as a result. The same can happen for Obama.

Election postscript 1:
There was obvious voter anger about the cost and bureaucratic-nightmare aspects of ObamaCare. Since most of the reform has not yet taken effect, consensus-seeking amendments to the legislation could improve health care reform — as long as Republicans are sincere in saying they want to improve the reform, rather than just use the issue as a political battering ram.

But bear in mind –– hardly any of the benefits of ObamaCare have been felt. Voters are very aware of the costs and red tape — they haven’t yet experienced the benefits. Once they do, even most Republicans may conclude that Obama mainly was right about health care. Fixing the “preexisting conditions” fault of health insurance, for instance, is a tremendous reform that will spread benefits across all social and income classes.

Election postscript 2:
Have Republican leaders even read the health care reform bill they denounce? The party’s pre-election Pledge to America says of the Republican agenda,  “We will make it illegal for an insurance company to deny coverage to someone with prior coverage on the basis of a pre-existing condition, eliminate annual and lifetime spending caps, and prevent insurers from dropping your coverage just because you get sick.” All these points are already covered by Obama’s legislation!

Election postscript 3:
The big question about incoming Tea Party types is, what exactly will they cut? It is hard to imagine tackling the deficit without cuts in Social Security and Pentagon spending. So far no Tea Party senator- or representative-elect has offered anything even remotely specific about how the deficit might be pared. It’s a lot easier to denounce than to govern.

Republican Jim DeMint, a Tea Party favorite just re-elected to his second term in the Senate, said on Meet the Press on Sunday that reductions in Social Security and Pentagon spending won’t be required because “we can cut hundreds of billions of dollars a year at the federal level” by eliminating “administrative waste.”  If DeMint knows of “hundreds of billions of dollars a year” — this is about the same as Medicare spending — in “administrative waste,” how come he never moved to do anything about it during his first six years in the Senate?

Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Pundits are restless, an election looms – so this week, President Barack Obama is proposing yet another round of special favors, aimed at improving the economy. Prominent columnist Paul Krugman wants the plans to be “bold” and to involve huge amounts of money. Here’s a contrasting view: government should stop declaring recovery plans, bold or otherwise.

Maybe the constant announcing of new plans – especially plans backed by borrowing or tax cuts – is, itself, an impediment to economic growth.

Two years ago this month saw the beginning of the financial-sector meltdown that is the primary feature of the current high-unemployment, slow-growth mess. Since then, Republican and Democratic presidents and Treasury Secretaries alike have announced bold plan after bold plan after bold plan. Often the plans change week-to-week. Many of the plans are just political talking points, with no follow-through. Many are mutually contradictory, like advocating tax cuts and tax increases simultaneously.

Here’s what the endless succession of plans has in common – they haven’t worked. If something hasn’t worked, why does this cause us to think more of the same is required? The White House, Treasury Department and Congress should stop contemplating new plans.

Endless emphasis at high political levels on the need to “do something,” if only to appease the press, communicates the message that U.S. leadership is either panicky or has no idea what’s going on or both. When leaders act perpetually panicked, voters and business managers become nervous. Voters want new leaders and business managers put off decisions until they have a better idea what may happen next. The result, for the economy, is slower growth than the mainly good world situation — no resource shortages, low international tensions, rising education levels, liberalizing trade – would seem to suggest.

Maybe plan after plan after plan is a cause of the sluggish U.S. economy.

Maybe presidents George W. Bush and Obama, and Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner, by constantly vacillating in public about their plans, are creating the impression government privately knows things are worse than they seem. This, in turn, slows economic growth –- why invest or hire if government privately knows things are worse than they seem?

My guess is things are better than they seem: but regular announcements of new special giveaways creates the opposite impression. So President Obama and both parties, stop announcing new plans! Leave the situation alone and let a sense of normalcy resume.

Dramatic government plans were a leading cause of economic contraction in September 2008. As detailed by University of Chicago economists John Cochrane and Luigi Zingales, the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy that month did not deflate markets. The Wall Street plummet and credit-markets malfunction began two weeks later, when Paulson nervously announced a mega-bailout — then began months of leaking mutually contradictory plans, many composed, Cochrane and Zingales point out, during preposterous middle-of-the-night conference calls. The plans were bold! But I don’t think clearly at 2 A.M., and neither did Paulson. The fact that there was a new plan with every phase of the moon diminished confidence, which is essential to a vibrant economy.

Obama’s infrastructure spending plan is obviously an election-year handout to interest groups. The president proposes an addition $50 billion per year in federal spending for roads, bridges and subways. This kind of spending should be justified on the merits: if road repairs are needed, then spend regardless of political considerations. To propose new spending just to quiet critics or reward voting blocs creates an impression that the White House is lurching from day to day without a larger vision. In that kind of environment, why invest or hire?

To justify more handouts, the president is talking down the economy. New initiatives are needed, Obama said last week, “to break the back of this recession.” The recession ended nine months ago, when growth resumed. Growth isn’t as strong as anyone would like, and unemployment remains the number-one domestic issue. But Obama, other Washington political leaders and pundits constantly use the word “recession” to describe a situation that is not a recession. This scares voters and business managers into believing things are worse than they are. But – scare tactics are historically a way to rationalize special-interest giveaways.

New infrastructure spending will make the deficit worse. In the category of it-would-be-funny-if-it-wasn’t-true, President Barack Obama says the new spending will not increase borrowing because it will be paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes. Yet he gives no specifics. Demanding more spending now while vowing discipline later is a roasted chestnut of Washington doubletalk.

In his January State of the Union address, Obama said he would make dramatic spending cuts that would begin around now. Instead, now he proposes more spending – while vowing dramatic cuts in future.

And closing corporate loopholes — yours truly is all for that. Politicians love to say they will close loopholes. When has it happened? In June, the White House backed off from a House of Representatives move to close the “carried interest” loophole exploited by some private-equity and venture-capital funds, a loophole that is strictly a cookie jar for wealthy campaign donors. The administration was too timid to close this loophole – even the Wall Street Journal calls carried interest a “loophole” — though doing so would raise about $2 billion per year. But we’ll make an unspecified $50 billion a year cut in loopholes in the future!

Immediately after saying he will crack down on corporate taxes, Obama also proposes corporate tax cuts. Is this public policy or a Saturday Night Live sketch? Tomorrow, the president is expected to propose $200 billion in tax giveaways to business. This will make the national debt worse. Will it help the economy? Corporate profitability isn’t a problem! Corporate profits and cash positions are quite good. What’s needed is rising demand, which this giveaway does not address.

Nearly three decades ago, your columnist showed in detail that corporate taxes are at most a secondary factor in business decision-making – demand, innovation and expectations for the future are far more important. Giving business yet another tax handout – the fourth or fifth in the last decade alone – could actively backfire if the debt incurred reduces economic confidence.

Don’t we need a bold plan for the housing sector? Many Americans have serious problems making their mortgages payments – but many also talked their way into homes using liar-loans or no-down-payment deals that were essentially renting with an option to buy. More important, the real estate market has always fluctuated, and this has never been a cause of panic or debt-based bailouts before.

Even with the 2008-2009 decline, according to the Case Shiller Index, the typical American home today is worth 40 percent more than a decade ago. This is a national emergency?

And don’t tell me the emergency is the “underwater” problem of people owing more than their home are worth. If you need to sell your house right now, being underwater is terrible. If you don’t need or don’t want to sell your house, being underwater is irrelevant! Unless you’re selling, appraised value is just a number. If you plan to stay in your home, your situation vis-à-vis your monthly payment is exactly what it would be regardless whether you’re underwater or on the surface.

Yet at a time when Federal Reserve policy is lending unprecedented support to today’s homeowners – at the expense of tomorrow’s – there is pressure on Obama to announce yet another round of mortgage-subsidy “bold” plans. Right now nobody’s buying because buyers want to wait and see if there will be another handout, like the $8,000 bonus that just expired. The real estate market will not return to normal until the “bold” plans stop.

Doesn’t a second stimulus sound good? Free candy always sounds good – till it’s time to visit the dentist. Any additional debt-based initiatives would be a third stimulus – Congress dispensed $200 billion in stimulus funds in 2008, then $800 billion in 2009. Backers of more debt-based spending, such as economist Laura Tyson, are saying what they want is a “second stimulus” because this sounds less nutty than asking for a “third stimulus.” If a nation could borrow its way out of economic languor, then all nations would envy Greece.

Both parties are demanding more of policies they claim don’t work. Republicans say the 2003 tax cuts for the rich must not expire, because they are needed for economic growth. But those tax cuts have been in place for seven years and economic growth has slowed. If something doesn’t work, why is more of it the solution?

Democrats say more debt-based stimulus spending is needed for economic growth. But $1 trillion in formally designated stimulus funds have already been spent and economic growth remains slow. If something doesn’t work, why is more of it the solution?

Core problem – we are making the American future less valuable. Left-wing plans to incur more debt and spend, and right-wing plans to keep taxes very low, share this in common – both borrow from the future. When you borrow from the future, you make the future less valuable.

This is a core reason constant Washington “bold” economic plans don’t inspire the economy – the plans deplete the country’s future. If you believe the future will be worth less than the present then why hire, why build, why feel optimism? Investment spending can make a future more valuable. But neither party proposes merits-based investing – both just propose panicky new handouts to their constituencies and donors. Do these possible additional plans make you feel confidence — or dismay?

The best and smartest action Washington could take about the economy would be to stop declaring new plans. There are plenty of programs in place. Letting the situation stabilize is what the economy most needs – and a surer path to job growth.

Gregg Easterbrook is a Reuters columnist. Any views expressed are his own.

Space policy is a small fraction of the U.S. federal budget – around one percent, when NASA and Air Force spending are combined – and much less important than topics such as health care, defense or debt. But if government can’t get minor policy right, how can it be trusted with major issues? That is the underlying question of President Barack Obama’s appearance at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida today. Cable-news commentary may focus on the political fight: who gets the biggest handouts. More important is whether Obama can change NASA from an example of what’s wrong with government (wasteful projects that serve only political favorites) to an example of what can be right (an agency that provides tangible benefits to taxpayers).

Yes, the Apollo moon landings were significant and memorable, but the last one occurred 38 years ago. In recent decades, NASA’s record has been spotty. The agency’s space science program – probes of the outer planets, telescopes that scan the far heavens – is successful and cost-effective. But for decades manned space flight, which receives the bulk of NASA funds, has accomplished: um, what? More money than was spent for the Apollo moon missions has been invested in the International Space Station, whose primary function is to give the space shuttle a destination. The shuttle, in turn, exists mainly to fly to the space station. The space station has no notable scientific achievements: it is such a white elephant that already NASA is studying the best way to “deorbit” the whole 380-ton structure, meaning allow it to burn in the upper atmosphere. This may happen as soon as 2016.

While spending freely on the space station and the shuttle, NASA has avoided research into new launch strategies that might cut the cost of access to orbit. Lower cost isn’t wanted – the whole point is to make the manned program expensive! And NASA has done just shy of nothing to plan for protecting the Earth from an asteroid strike: more on that in a moment.

Looking ahead to the inevitable demise of the space station, in 2004, NASA and the George W. Bush White House cooked up a plan to return astronauts to the Moon. That didn’t make much sense – because the Apollo landings found nothing of pressing scientific interest, NASA had gone 25 years without so much as launching an automated probe to the Moon. But sustaining spending, not finding a valid objective, was the goal.

To make a return-to-the-Moon seem like something more than a warmed-over reenactment, Bush declared that a Moon base would be a steppingstone to Mars. Physicists and engineers winced. There is no possibility a Mars mission would stop at the Moon; all proposed Mars missions involve departure directly from low-Earth orbit to the Red Planet. Landing first at the Moon, then blasting off again, would use up nearly all the mission’s fuel to accomplish, um, what?

LUNAR PORK-BARREL

Obama’s proposed fiscal 2011 budget cancels the Moon-return program, which is oddly called  Project Constellation, though it has nothing to do with the study of constellations. (And not called Project Artemis: she was Apollo’s sister, NASA can’t even come up with good names anymore.) There will be a nasty fight on Capitol Hill over canceling the Moon return, a presidential decision Congress must approve, because politically favored contractors and congressional districts would lose pork-barrel spending. It is essential that Obama’s rejection of Project Constellation is made to stick. If the president cannot impose fiscal rationality on an issue as minor as space spending, how will he ever wrestle the national debt to the ground?

A sure sign of the pork-barrel essence of the Moon-return idea is that proponents are going directly to the lamest possible arguments in its defense: jobs and China. You’ll hear a lot today, and in weeks to come, about how canceling the Moon return will cost jobs. NASA currently has $108 billion scheduled for spending on Constellation, with 6,000 jobs directly tied to the project. That’s $18 million per job created, an absurd amount. Washington could create more jobs by spending that $108 billion on something else, or better by not spending the money, returning capital to the free market.

Going deeper into silliness, Rep. Pete Olson of Texas, whose district includes the Johnson Space Center, which would control a second Moon mission, recently said the president “seems willing to hand off American dominance in human spaceflight to nations like Russia and China.” Russia does a number of things well in space, including affordable launching, but does not challenge the United States in any way: decades after the Moon race, cosmonauts still have never left low-Earth orbit. FKA, Russia’s answer to NASA, today is essentially a NASA subcontractor; “The USA May Order a Remote-Sensing Satellite in Russia” is the current lead headline on the FKA website.

China? The Chinese space program is about where the United States was in 1965; China’s best manned-space hardware is equivalent to NASA’s obsolete Gemini rocket-capsule stack. If China lands a man on the lunar regolith half a century after the United States reached “been there, done that” status for this objective, it is hard to see how that threatens America – let China be the country to waste a huge chunk of national treasure looking for ice on the Moon! Old-timers from NASA, and pork-barrel proponents such as Rep. Olson, want to depict China’s 1960s-vintage space effort as a national threat, because then money will flow without any need to prove the case. If a return-to-the-Moon made sense on its own, proponents would argue on the merits.

Obama’s NASA plan involves canceling the Moon return, and canceling two new rockets, Ares and Ares V, both under development; starting a new development program for a very powerful rocket that could be used to reach asteroids; keeping the manned space program in business at a lower budget; postponing the burn-up of the space station till 2020; temporarily paying FKA $56 million per seat to fly U.S. astronauts to the space station (space-shuttle launches cost about $150 million per seat); directing more funds to satellites designed to study Earth and the Sun; and encouraging a commercial-space industry that would develop private launchers to replace the FKA flights. Obama does not propose any commitment to Mars travel – surely this will happen someday, but for now the technical obstacles appear insurmountable, unless truly vast sums of money were spent.

FREE-ENTERPRISE ROCKETRY

There is good and bad in the White House plan. More study of the Earth and Sun has long been needed, since this could discover information of tangible benefit to taxpayers. More study of Venus is needed, too – that planet has a runaway greenhouse atmosphere, and Earth governments are contemplating greenhouse regulation. Canceling Ares V development is a puzzling step, since that rocket would be very powerful – exactly what another part of Obama’s plan seeks to develop. (This part of the plan would make sense if there is a propulsion breakthrough; Ares V uses existing engine technology. Flight to Mars would become less impractical if higher rocket speeds were achieved.) Keeping the space station in orbit is politically expedient, since this postpones the incredibly embarrassing day when Obama, or some president, has to explain why the single most expensive object ever constructed is being deliberately burned up above our heads.

Obama’s plan to encourage free-enterprise rocketry sounds great, but is extremely unrealistic. Only one company, Sea Launch, has ever succeeded in placing a large, privately funded rocket into orbit, and right now Sea Launch is in Chapter 11. The capital requirement for reaching space is very high, the customer base modest. (Here are details about Sea Launch and private rocketry.)

The White House would provide $6 billion over five years to encourage development of private rockets, but this is a drop in the bucket. The new Boeing 787 and its engines cost about $13 billion to develop, and the 787, while beautiful, is just an airplane. A new “human-rated” — multiple redundant systems — rocket capable of carrying significant payloads to orbit could easily require $25 billion or more for development. No private company will be able to raise such a sum without a long-term guaranteed NASA contract, at which point you might as well just have NASA develop the next rocket. (Private flight to orbit will happen someday, but absent a major breakthrough, perhaps not for decades. The winged “spaceship” being developed by Richard Branson is not a spaceship; it will fly higher than conventional aircraft, but not reach orbit.)

Overall, the Obama NASA plan is the first serious attempt to reorient the space agency away from pork barrel and toward rational spending priorities. Will Obama succeed, or will oink-oink rule on the Hill? Let’s root for the president and rationality, even if Obama’s plan needs improvement. Washington is under the thumb of countless agencies and programs whose justification is slim, but whose funding continues year after year for pork reasons. Obama must show he can break the psychology of permanent spending before he can face larger budget challenges ahead. NASA is a good place to start.

And asteroids? Just because an asteroid strike was the premise of a ridiculous Bruce Willis movie is no reason to think this can’t happen. As recently as a few decades ago, researchers believed asteroid strikes were extremely unlikely, or had been confided to the mists of the far past. Recent research shows that near-Earth asteroids are far more common than thought, while major strikes have occurred much too recently for comfort: including a probable asteroid strike in the year 536 that might have caused mass extinctions, if the rock had hit land instead of the ocean. Here is detail on asteroid-threat research. And here is the running count of asteroids that might threaten Earth – 280 as of Wednesday, and nearly all of them discovered in the last 10 years.

Yet NASA has no program to counter an asteroid threat – not one piece of equipment in development. This 2008 Air Force “war game” concluded that it would be possible to deflect an asteroid away from Earth, but that five to 10 years of preparation would be needed. So why are we gambling the existence of humanity by doing nothing? True, an asteroid-deflection rocket might never be used. But we built ICBMs in the hopes they would never be used. And an asteroid-deflecting project should cost substantially less than the amount NASA is eager to waste on the Moon.

One can appreciate that neither the space agency, nor the White House, wants to announce a program that sounds like a Bruce Willis movie. But the threat is genuine, and if we wait until a large asteroid is observed approaching, it will be too late. Unlike a Moon base, asteroid protection could return tangible benefits to the taxpayer. Stopping an asteroid from striking the Earth could be, well, the greatest achievement in human history. Didn’t somebody say NASA needs an inspirational mission?

Today, Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev meet in Prague to sign an agreement that will eliminate more than 1,000 large nuclear bombs from the Earth. Ho-hum! Commentators are carping that this development is not splashy or dramatic enough. Quite the contrary: it is magnificent news for our world.

When historians look back on the present generation, they will say that there were three trends of historic import – and none involve the effluvial trivia that dominate most contemporary discourse.

One trend of historic import is the spread of democracy, a sanguine development which seemed impossible as recently as the 1980s. The second is the rapid decline of global poverty – an improvement barely remarked upon in the West, because it isn’t happening there, and violates the chic-pessimism script preferred by tastemakers. China has moved 220 million people, nearly the population of the United States, out of poverty in a single generation. This production-and-output achievement is every bit the equal of America’s production-and-output achievement to win World War II. Poverty is declining in many though of course not all other developing nations.

The third great development of the present generation is steady decline in the world’s inventory of Armageddon weapons. According to estimates from the Federation of American Scientists, at the peak, in the mid-1980s, the United States and old Soviet Union possessed 80,000 nuclear warheads – sufficient to end human life, if not life on Earth.

Following a quarter-century succession of agreements backed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike in the United States, and reformers and zealots alike in Russia, the total is down to about 15,500 nuclear warheads. That is still too high. But when else exactly in history has fourth-fifths of any category of military power voluntarily been given up, to say nothing of within a single generation?

Today’s agreement binds the United States and Russia to a further reduction of about 1,600 thermonuclear devices, and the ones to be eliminated are the worst kind – “strategic” warheads up to 125 times as powerful as the atomic explosive dropped on Hiroshima. In the 1980s, each side possessed about 10,000 strategic bombs of extreme destructive force. Under the terms of today’s agreement, each side will be limited to 1,550, representing an 85 percent reduction in the worst category of nuclear threat.

The Prague agreement further sets the stage for a renewed push for nonproliferation — unfortunately, not likely to succeed in the short term — and for U.S.-Russian negotiations toward a sharp reduction in short-range, Hiroshima-class “tactical” nuclear weapons. There may be no realistic means to get Iran or North Korea to abandon nuclear-weapon efforts. But it is quite realistic to hope the United States and Russia will agree to more cuts in tactical nuclear arms: Moscow has already signaled its desire for this. Tactical nuclear munitions don’t engage public or political attention, because a single one cannot incinerate a city. But because tactical nuclear bombs are so numerous, reducing them is important, too.

Once today’s agreement takes force, the United States and Russia combined will have about 3,000 strategic nuclear devices and about 11,000 tactical bombs – far less than the two sides possessed at the height of the Cold War. Future historians may express amazement that so little heed has been paid to such reduction: though nuclear arms are by a huge margin the worst threat to human life.

Nor is much attention paid to related treaties by which Washington and Moscow have agreed to keep most nuclear warheads in storage – most of today’s bombs could not be fired by accident because it would take days or weeks to re-initialize them; agreed drastically to reduce the number of ICBMs, the missiles that carry the worst kinds of nuclear warheads; agreed to halt development of new ICBMs; and agreed it make it harder, though not impossible, to target ICBMs against cities.

Grousing that today’s Prague agreement somehow isn’t impressive enough, because it represents only one phase in reducing the nuclear-war threat, betrays a lack of any sense of history. Today’s agreement is magnificent: showing the leaders of the United States and Russian Federation share a positive vision of walking the world back from the brink of midnight.

As president, Jimmy Carter supposed that nuclear warheads could be reduced until each side possessed only 100: he felt that would be ample to insure against attack. Last year, Obama said he sought a “world without nuclear weapons.” Neither of these idealistic goals may come to pass. It’s not even clear a world without nuclear weapons would be desirable. For 65 years, nuclear deterrence has prevented great-powers war: the maintenance of small nuclear inventories sustains that deterrence.

But it is undeniable that shrinking the doomsday arsenal is a global good, and today’s agreement is another step. For two decades, nuclear-warhead facilities in the United States and Russia have run in reverse, disassembling bombs rather than making them. Today’s agreement gives the bomb-disassembly facilities a few years’ more business. If only every day brought such welcome news.