Ryan Streeter
Follow Ryan on Twitter
We don’t want historians in 20 years writing books with titles like “Similarities between the Failures in the Soviet and American Occupations of Afghanistan.”
The real question we – and especially GOP 2012 hopefuls – should be asking after President Obama’s Afghanistan speech last night is how every decision we make in the war effort increases or decreases the likelihood of winning. Defining “winning,” of course, is challenging.
This is why the 2012 GOP presidential hopefuls reacted in different ways to President Obama’s speech last night. The difference in their reactions was as one might have expected. Foreign policy has emerged as one of the biggest points of divergence within the GOP, a topic to which Ross Douthat devoted his column this week.
Pawlenty is sounding the most hawkish these days, and Huntsman the most dovish. The others fall somewhere in between.
Pawlenty reacted this way to the speech:
Look how [Obama] phrased the outcome of this war. He said we need to end the war, quote unquote, responsibly. When America goes to war, America needs to win…I supported the surge, and I would have supported it even at a higher level as General McChrystal recommended.
Huntsman said:
Now it is time we move to a focused counter-terror effort which requires significantly fewer boots on the ground than the President discussed tonight. We need a safe but rapid withdrawal which encourages Afghans to assume responsibility.
And now is the time for candidates to get clearer about what they really mean by the statements they are making.
One early critique of the speech by Dany Pletka at the Enterprise blog contends that President Obama didn’t explain the rationale for his decision to bring 10,000 troops home this year. More specifically, he failed to explain what he meant when he said we are “achieving our goals” such that troop withdrawals are justified.
The issue of goals in Afghanistan is the most important thing anyone running in 2012 can articulate about the war. Americans don’t know why we’re over there anymore. It has been so long since a public leader has laid out with any clarity what we’re hoping to achieve that American weariness about the war is understandable. It is on this point – goals – that serious contenders in 2012 should provide clarity.
So let’s get back to the basics and ask candidates to answer two fundamental questions:
- Are Obama’s goals the right ones, and if not, what would you replace them with? Stake out your differences in clear terms. Win over the electorate. My guess is most of you would agree with the broad contours of continuing to wither al Qaeda into ineffectiveness, taking out the Taliban, and strengthening Afghanistan’s ability to protect itself – all goals that Obama cited last night. But go farther. Acknowledge that al Qaeda still enjoys safe havens where we haven’t fought yet, and say what we should be doing on that front.
- Are we meeting our goals? The answer you provide to this question is the pivotal point that defines where you stand. This is the question Obama failed to answer in any convincing way last night. Americans will respond favorably to the candidate who can explain in clear terms what it means for the Taliban to be marginalized and Afghanis to be capable of protecting themselves. If we’re not meeting these goals, it doesn’t mean we need another surge. It may mean that we need to deal differently with Afghanistan’s leaders.
The important point is this: meeting goals is the reason for bringing troops home, not war weariness.
It’s not enough to criticize Obama for signaling our intentions to our enemies, a standard talking point among Republicans who criticize troop withdrawals. Bringing troops home because we’re meeting goals is, actually, another goal of our war efforts. So let’s get serious about explaining once again why were are there, what we are trying to achieve, and why we will succeed.
I think the title of this missive is the wrong one. It should be something like: How This United States Republic Should Be Run".
Over the years a lot of the needs of people have been recognized by the Democrats so they have initiated Government programs to handle those needs.
So, I would say that the Democrats have done a good job in recognizing those needs. Problem is, they always want to correct those problems in a way that will get them the votes of the beneficiaries. Instead, they should have invited the Republicans to suggest , or to actually put forth ideas that incorporate capital, labor and insurance markets in their plans - no government re-distribution at all.
"The lack of understanding of basic economic principals displayed by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd in their push to provide home ownership to anyone and everyone is, I believe, very prevalent in the rest of the House of Representatives and the Senate; maybe not in quite as naive an example as Frank and Dodd, but pretty wide-spread just the same.
I'd like to see this as the campaign slogan of the Republican presidential nominee in 2012:
"My Government will be run with the equal interests of capital, labor and insurance as objectives. No government involvement at all except in the formulation of plan outlines. "
How To Serve The Needy At A Fraction Of The Cost
By PETER FERRARA Posted 07/14/2011 06:38 PM ET
Our nation's entitlement programs, from Social Security to Medicare to ObamaCare to dozens of welfare programs such as Medicaid, are all based on simple, late-19th century tax and redistribution ideas. Politically, we will never be able to solve the entitlement crisis by simply trying to cut people's benefits.
As I discuss in my new book, "America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb," the only politically viable solution is fundamental, structural reform that would modernize the systems to rely instead on capital, labor and insurance markets, with transformed incentives that would lead them to contribute to economic growth rather than suppress it.
Through such reforms, we can achieve all the liberal social goals of those programs far more effectively, serving seniors and the poor far better, at just a fraction of the costs of the current tax and redistribution framework. That would make the necessary reforms politically viable.
A real-world example is the 1996 reform of the old, New Deal era, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program.
The old program was based on a federal matching funding formula that paid each state more the more the state spent.
Welfare reform changed the incentives for the state bureaucrats by instead providing the federal funding through finite federal block grants that left states themselves paying for higher costs while fully enjoying any innovative savings. The incentives for the poor were transformed by requiring work from the able-bodied for the benefits.
The astounding results are well-documented.
Two-thirds left the welfare rolls of the old program, earning roughly 25% more in total income by working, which reduced poverty. And taxpayers saved more than half the costs of the old program in real dollars based on prior trends.
There are dozens of other federal/state welfare programs, numbering nearly 200, that should be reformed in exactly the same way — including Medicaid. The states could then each adopt entirely new welfare programs providing all assistance to the able-bodied only in return for guaranteed work assignments.
That would eliminate virtually all of welfare's perverse incentives for non-work and family breakup and illegitimacy, ensuring ultimately higher incomes for the poor through work and marriage.
Instead of paying the bottom 20% of income earners not to work, as today, we would be paying them to work and contribute to economic growth, primarily through real private-sector employment rather than taxpayer-financed benefits, resulting in enormous tax savings.
With all of these welfare programs together estimated to cost more than $10 trillion over the next 10 years, the savings would be in the trillions.
Real-world, 30-year-old examples from Chile, Galveston, Texas and the Federal Thrift Savings Program for federal employees show that instead of paying for all the benefits through the payroll tax as we do today, we could finance them through personal savings, investment and insurance accounts instead.
Because long-term, market investment returns are so much higher than what can be paid through the current, non-invested, tax and redistribution framework, future retirees would actually enjoy much higher benefits through such reforms. At the same time, they would be contributing mighty rivers of savings and investment to the economy that would promote booming economic growth.
The long-run result would be the greatest reduction in government spending in world history, as the benefits ultimately would be moved entirely from the public sector to market financing. Contrary to President Barack Obama's political rhetoric, all of the real-world examples of such reforms survived the financial crisis fully intact.
Just as the poor would gain far better health care through Medicaid-financed private insurance coverage, seniors would enjoy far better health care through Medicare-financed market insurance as well.
The fallacy of all the criticisms of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's Medicare reforms is to compare those reforms to Medicare before ObamaCare. That system is radically changed by Obama's law.
Seniors would be far better served by market insurance that paid doctors and hospitals market rates, enabling them to maintain the high standard of health care seniors currently enjoy, standards unreachable under the coming Medicare system.
Seniors also will need that market insurance to save them from the arbitrary rationing and denials of health care under Medicare resulting from Obama's democratically unaccountable Independent Payment Advisory Board, which he exempts from democratic control precisely because of the menace it poses to seniors.
In addition to helping today's seniors, Ryan's Medicare reforms would be even better for future seniors, transforming the Medicare payroll tax into lifetime savings from a personal account that can help finance market health insurance in retirement.
Broader health care reforms also would help by letting patient-power market incentives and competition slow health care cost inflation.
Such modernizing reforms would result in comprehensive social safety nets that pre-empt human suffering while allowing for much smaller and more effective government and contributing to the booming economic growth that is the only real way to solve the nation's long-run fiscal crisis.
Ferrara is senior fellow for entitlement and budget policy at the Heartland Institute and director of policy for the Carleson Center for Public Policy. He served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He is the author of "America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb."
Posted by: Joseph Gormley | July 18, 2011 at 09:44 AM