Nov 1, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From the lead editorial in Friday's New York Sun:The 7.2% growth rate that the Commerce Department has measured for the American economy in the third quarter of 2003 is stronger than anything ever achieved under President Clinton's boom...The tax reductions on capital gains and dividends, along with the accelerated reductions in personal income tax rates, were signed by President Bush on May 28, 2003. These were pushed through by President Bush and the Republican Congress over the objection of Democrats like Senator Schumer and Senator Clinton, who voted against them. Every major Democratic presidential candidate wants to roll back these tax cuts. [NYSun]
Jerry Bowyer comments:
...some of President Bush's most prominent bashers were claiming that we were in "the worst economy since Herbert Hoover." That's a little difficult, even for them, to say with a straight face when we've just finished our best quarter since the fourth year of President Reagan....Some have suggested that this growth rate is somehow related to the president's "record high deficits." Aside from the fact that they're not record-high when you account for inflation and the size of the economy, this latest growth number owes nothing to the deficit, because it owes nothing to government spending. Government spending for the third quarter went up only 1.3%. Nor is this a war boom; defense spending was flat.... Some may also say that this is driven by inventory.... This does happen, but not today: inventories actually fell during the third quarter, as they have been falling during all of 2003. Yet sales remain strong.
...it's the application of new technology to inventory management to the effect that companies no longer have to pile up a lot of inventory in times of recovery...To some degree, it's an increase in retail consumption, up 6.6%. But to a much larger degree, this recovery is being driven by increases in investment, both business, up sharply at 14%, and residential, up double sharply at 20.4%. Now the reason this has happened is that Mr. Bush cut taxes. And when that didn't work, he cut taxes again.... [NySun]
And as if that weren't bad enough for the Democrats, they're also getting killed by their own campaign finance legislation:
[F]inding people who will fork over, say, $25, $50, or $100 has became critical with the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, or McCain-Feingold, as it is more commonly known.... And even Democrats admit that Republicans have had a decades-long head start in getting small donors to write checks....[A]ccording to the FEC, the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have collected a total of $133,861,490 in small hard-money contributions so far in the 2004 election cycle, while the corresponding Democratic committees have collected a total of $45,662,730. [NYSun]
Oct 30, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Hillel Halkin writes in the NY Sun:If [such as Mahathir] are Islam's moderates, then Islamic moderation needs to be feared every bit as much as Islamic militancy. Or are the two simply different tactical expressions of the same mind-set? It has been a near-universal shibboleth, especially since the September 11 terrorist attacks, that Western democracies are not at war with Islam but only with violent Islamic fundamentalism....
Islam is not a particularly "peaceful religion." In fact, historically, it is the world's only major religion that has been spread mainly by the sword....
The only significant parts of the world that can be said to have been Islamized peacefully are Indonesia and areas of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
...not only has war been a legitimate way of spreading Islam; for them, military victory has been the ultimate proof of the truth and validity of Islam....
Until modern times, nearly always the winner in its encounters with other cultures and religions, Islam never has learned the art of losing, which is why military and political defeat is so humiliating to it. And of all its modern defeats, none has been as shaming as its defeat by Israel and the Jews, who are seen as a small and contemptible people that Islam had always subjugated.
Oct 30, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Now It's the Teachers Who Cheat:High-stakes standardized testing has led to high-level cheating -- by teachers trying to gain an advantage for their students...Teachers have read off answers during a test, sent students back to correct wrong answers, photocopied secure tests for use in class, inflated scores, and peeked at questions then drilled those topics in class before the test, according to records obtained by The Associated Press. [Yahoo News]
Oct 30, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From Ann Coulter:Liberals are hysterical about Justice Brown principally because she is black. Nothing enrages them so much as a minority who does not spend her days saying hosannas to liberals.
Related reading:
A Lynch Mob Gathers Around Justice Janice Rogers Brown: Part 3 by Thomas Sowell (October 23, 2003)
A Lynch Mob Gathers Around Justice Janice Rogers Brown: Part 2 by Thomas Sowell (October 22, 2003)
A Lynch Mob Gathers Around Justice Janice Rogers Brown: Part 1 by Thomas Sowell (October 21, 2003)
Oct 30, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Writes Edwin A. Locke from the Ayn Rand Institute:President Bush recently announced that he would supply $157 million to help Indonesia's school system. The Indonesians will apparently accept the donation but have made it very clear that they would have total control over how the money would be spent and that they would not teach American values.
Given that Indonesia is a hotbed of Muslim terrorism, it is obvious that this money will be spent, in part or in whole, to teach hatred of America and everything she stands for: reason, freedom, individual rights, capitalism, technology, and progress.
In short, this money will be used to subsidize the teaching of ideas aimed at bringing about our own destruction. Karl Marx said that capitalists would sell communists the rope with which the Marxists would hang them. But what President Bush is doing is much worse. Rope is simply a material object, but Bush's subsidy will help spread the ideas that encourage others to kill us--with rope or any other weapon at their disposal.
Giving this subsidy to Indonesia is simply suicidal; it would be like giving educational subsidies to the Nazis or Communists. It would be the most shameful act of President Bush's career. Let us hope that more rational members of the administration will change the President's mind.
Oct 29, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
The DailySun on Education in the New Century:Under the guise of reforming public education, [New York City schools'] Chancellor Joel Klein has been sending down directives covering everything from the arrangement of chairs in the classroom to the number of minutes teachers can spend on extracurricular activities. One controversial order insists that teachers sit in rocking chairs while reading aloud to the class. Just to punctuate the point, a middleschool math teacher told the story of being reprimanded in front of the class by her new math "coach" for giving too much praise to her students for doing their homework right. [DailySun]
