I recently wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal counseling patience in allowing the troop surge in Baghdad to show its impact. This is an e-mail that I received in response from Lieutenant Colonel Steven Miska, commander of a small base that I recently visited in northwest Baghdad, called Forward Operating Base Justice. He agreed to let me share it with COMMENTARY readers:
Max,
Great article. Keep beating this drum. Most of the leaders on the ground simply ignore the political discourse, as it is not helpful to our mission. Nobody wants to be in the middle of a civil war, low-grade or not, but we have found ourselves here. The only solution military leaders on the ground have is to work with the good allies we have made in Iraq.
We have some true patriots that are sacrificing everything and betting on the U.S. to be there for them. How could we look them in the eye if given the order to pull out? The vast majority of the people on the street want what every American wants—hope for tomorrow, good schools and opportunity for their children, a safe neighborhood, employment. Almost nobody trusts the politicians, but they might if they see the coalition forces standing side by side with Iraqi Security Forces for long enough. As the public begins to develop confidence in the Iraqi formations, that trust could rub off into government legitimacy. Our only other option would be to replace the government, which nobody in the U.S. seems to have the political stomach for at this juncture.
Given that reality, we need to stand by the Iraqis. How long, you ask? I am on my second tour following a year in Tikrit from 2004-2005. A realistic goal is to have stabilized this region by the time my eleven-year-old son is old enough to serve in the military. Not that he is preordained to serve, but my hope is he will not have to deal with the complexity and tragedies that I have witnessed in Baghdad over the last eight months. My only other goal is to be able to look myself in the mirror every day, knowing that I stuck to my principles and did as much as possible to win in this very dangerous environment.
If our government decides to prematurely pull out, I would fail to reach both goals, and my son and his generation may find themselves embroiled in something far worse than what we experience now—all because my generation couldn’t get the job done.
Thanks for your continued intelligent contributions to the current debate. I will try to ignore it all and stay focused on the reality of real people trying to find hope for tomorrow on the streets of the most lethal city in the world.
Sincerely,
Steve Miska
LTC, Infantry
Task Force Justice Commander
I think a Ford F-150 compares to a Toyota Tundra. But when you have a $2K to $3K (which is the cost of the more outrageous union benefits that Japanese and Korean manufacturers, even here do not have to pay) surcharge on vehicles, something has to give.
“If Republicans are looking to play a constructive role and join forces with Democrats to help revive the economy, they might suggest a serious bipartisan effort to examine how the bailout money has been spent and what it’s given us”
they should just oppose it. obama got elected president because he was smart enough to oppose the iraq war. buchanan, ron paul, kennedy, virtually everyone who did has reaped benfits from it.
republicans who are brave enoguh to stand up against socialism will be rewarded soon enough
There is another kind of anti-recession activity which has worked quite well in the past. It’s called tax cuts. But Obama is only proposing rather limited ones. Why? Because Democrats spent the past eight years inveighing against Bush’s taxcutsfortherich. They can’t very well change their tune and engage in substantial tax-cutting now. Over the past eight years we got to see Republicans refuse to change course on certain issues because of a philosophical commitment (like the Rumsfeldian obsession with winning wars with a “light footprint” that led to deep setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan). Now Democrats are making the mistake of getting hoist by their ideologically-planted petards.
The bailout was a canard by Paulson to save his former company Goldman Sacbs. All that was needed was for FDIC to increase its deposit guarantees, which it did and for the Treasury and Federal Reserve to backstop the money markets, which they did. Other than that, banks that were choking on trouble assets should have been allowed to fail in an orderly way, much as Wachovia bank was ushered out of existence with the help of FDIC, without the government taking ownership stakes. Now we have billions on the hook in badly run companies and the government in a position to tell those badly run companies how to do business. I agree with Ted, you would think this would be the perfect time to boost incentives for businesses to take risk and increase investment, but the Democrats will keep the uncertainty of higher tax rates, higher labor cost (card check) and more regulations in the air for at least the next 4 years. On top of that, they plan on blowing the roof off with trillions of dollars in new spending from God knows where, since we already have a budget deficit projected for 2009 at $1 trillion.
The corporate bailouts won’t work;neither will tax cuts or other minor surgery. Only Debt relief will free up the economy;this will prove to be the biggest bail out of them all(direct to the individual debtor),a debt write down(forgiveness)=s $trillions of write downs for creditors. Because 70%of our GDP is consumer spending,the debt bail-out is the only option. Otherwise,it’s Herbert Hoover time for the forseeable.
Being beset by government regulations, taxes, and the threat of lawsuits does not make a business incompetent or an industry a failure.
Americans are ignorant fools about this whole bailout issue, and until we wise up, it will only get worse. Government isn’t bailing out business, or even labor. Government is bailing out GOVERNMENT.
Remove all the obstacles put up by government to profitability — generically, and without any clever ideas about government deciding which businesses and industries ought to prosper — and THEN, and only then, will we know which businesses are being managed incompetently, and which industries are destined to fail.
You pay for 70+ years’ worth of welfare state regulation, taxes, and fees, with every single consumer purchase you make. Employer-provided health care? You’re paying for it. Worker comp insurance? You’re paying for it. Environmental regulatory compliance? You’re paying for it. Union bargaining power in non-Right-to-Work states? You’re paying for it. Special road use fees for transport trucking? You’re paying for it.
And when you stop paying, because it just costs too much and you can’t keep borrowing, or paying for a new car AND the electric bill — businesses and industries start to fail.
All of you, get over the erroneous idea that our businesses or industries are operating in a cost-neutral government environment, and that any failures to profit are the fault of private management, or unguided demographic trends. We have been heaping increasing government costs on businesses for decades. Part of what we are finding out right now is that that government-mandated overhead cost burden is unsustainable, outside of constantly increasing consumption.
Here is the right way to look at it. Government would rather borrow against your financial future to try to shore up the existing situation, than change any of its policies, and lighten the government-mandated cost load on private industry. We don’t KNOW which businesses are managed incompetently, or which industries destined to fail, or be transformed. We would only know that if all the government policy intervention were removed.
#6 “We would only know that if all the government policy intervention were removed”
This will happen right after the states withers away.
WaPo railing about “moral hazard”? I guess we’re all neo-cons now.
J.E. Dyer at this stage what would move this nation towards the conclusions you have come to about the great cost the government places on enterprises? It seems just as Reagan says that the closest thing to eternal life is all the government mandates, programs, and regulations you say are keeping us from really knowing who is managing their businesses incompetently! I don’t agree with that characterization, because we have seen businesses across all sectors, including in the financial industry succeed in this environment (think Bank of America and Wells Fargo). However I am sympathetic to your view that government policies have done much harm and in many ways a lot of these crises needing government intervention were caused by government intervention! So what will possibly move us away from this need for government beyond its constitutional role?
#9,”However I am sympathetic to your view that government policies have done much harm and in many ways a lot of these crises needing government intervention were caused by government intervention!”
I agree,as recently as 1980,we were still the #1exporter & manufacturer in the world. And despite the many problems,mostly government mandated, our economy had then,who wouldn’t wish it back,compared to what we have now. Another point,What technology is avaliable to do for us what computerization did for us from 1980-2001??? Please, don’t try to sell bio-tech,that won’t cut it.
Steven, I share the note of despair in your post. This is so very hard to oppose because 1) it is always for a “good” cause, like safety, transparency, conservation, or the real kicker, promoting growth. Then, 2) the people who are benefited (or think they are) by the regulations know who they are, while the people who lose (almost everyone else) haven’t been following the issue, not having an immediate personal interest in it. The answer is determined, almost boneheaded opposition on the part of conservative politicians, but I admit it’s pretty difficult to consign a politician to always being in opposition. I’ve been supporting candidates through the Club for Growth; there are other PACs and organizations working on this. And the case needs to be made again and again that poorer people, those who must spend a higher percentage of their income on immediate purchases, are the people who pay most for regulations that aren’t very narrowly targeted to preventing fraud and direct safety hazards.
Well RCAR we won’t know until they are created. Whether in biotech, energy, or computers, we don’t and certainly the government doesn’t know. We didn’t know in the 80s and even the 90s how all the things we have today would materialize. But that’s immaterial because in a free market economy you will always have innovation because of the profit motive and thus new products and services. My concern and I think that of J.E Dyer is whether the government is unduly interfering in this process of innovation, by placing too much burdens on innovators, entrepreneurs, and businesses to the detriment of our future prosperity. Prosperity that can only come about as you say from new technologies that come from those sources.
13,”My concern and I think that of J.E Dyer is whether the government is unduly interfering in this process of innovation, by placing too much burdens on innovators, entrepreneurs, and businesses to the detriment of our future prosperity.”
Right now,your concern should be,that due to government policy,our GDP is now 70% consumer purchasing rather than Business to Business transactions. Which means that without disposible income,our consumers aren’t buying. Tell me how in the short term,the Market is going to fix that?
Steven — the only thing I can prescribe is knowledge. People simply don’t know what a burden regulation, taxes, and the fear of litigation are on private business today. They also don’t understand that WE, as consumers, are paying the freight.
In many industries, for example, the cost of employing a worker is twice what he actually sees in his paycheck, when you add up the employer contributions to Social Security and Medicare, and to state medical insurance programs, along with the worker compensation insurance, the per worker contribution required of employers to state unemployment funds, the employer-paid private health insurance premiums, and the employer retirement account contributions offered to full-time employees to attract the best ones possible. Of all these employer costs, over and above salary and bonuses, only the last one is at least nominally optional. And this list doesn’t include the retainer paid to a law firm in anticipation of employment-related lawsuits, which also amounts to some premium per worker.
The worst aspect of the comparatively high cost of American labor is that, by and large, the actual worker is not overpaid, when his direct compensation is considered relative to his productivity (which is very high). It’s the extra ton of flesh cut out by government for every worker, from his employer, that makes the worker so expensive. Our government is the one pricing American workers out of the world market. A lot of American companies could and would pay workers more, in direct compensation, and still save money on total employment costs, if they weren’t funneling so much into government-mandated programs.
An employer may happily pay an American worker $40K a year and get more productivity than a from Bangladeshi whom he would only have to pay $20K a year. He might even do so if the US labor market priced the American worker at $50K a year in direct compensation. But if the US and state governments are making the employer spend $80K a year to employ the American worker, he may just decide it’s better to employ two Bangladeshis to yield the same production, and pay additional inconvenience costs. He is likely to still save on overall employment outlays.
Don’t mistake me for an apologist for big business. Big business has a tendency to cooperate with government interventionism in the belief that government mandates price smaller competitors out of the market — which they often do. I carry no brief for big businesses, although some are tight-run ships, and others are targeted unfairly. Big businesses can too often turn to government, and mistake themselves for necessary elements of the social or political landscape, and that’s unhealthy.
But I can refrain from contributing to big business by not buying its products. I don’t have that option when it comes to government economic intervention, whether regulation, which costs me in what I pay for goods and services, or bailouts, which also cost me. We have hit the wall, as of 2008: we can no longer pretend that regulating and taxing every human transaction doesn’t cost anything. It does. Every benefit you vote for “the workers” becomes a government mandate that raises the prices you pay, makes American workers less competitive, and has its biggest, most immediate impact on the real engine of the American economy: small business.
The same is true of all regulations, from occupational safety to environmental, and it is true of all taxes and fees. It is most especially true of government-mandated entitlements. Intelligent Californians immediately recognized, when Sacramento began confessing that the 2-year deficit total for 2009-10 was likely to be “somewhere between $28 billion and $42 billion,” that this enormous discrepancy could only come from the uncertainty of projecting outlays on entitlements. In specific terms, that means expenditures on state-provided welfare and medical care. California politicians have been warned for years that these entitlements cost money; and the cost is coming home to roost. Californians are losing their jobs (unemployment higher than the national average) and their homes, businesses are going under and fleeing the state, and now Sacramento wants to tax us even more heavily, in our dwindling aggregate incomes and wealth, to pay for entitlement spending — instead of cutting back or eliminating the spending.
Make no mistake: by “bailing out” the auto companies and GMAC, the federal government is doing exactly the same thing. It is borrowing against YOUR financial future, to avoid having to adjust its policies today. The remedy we need is an adjustment of government policies, away from mandating outcomes that we can’t pay for.
Is there any chance of Jennifer Rubin pipping down? MUST she make every other post on contentions? really? I’ve had enough.
J.E., I guess what I was getting at is whether we are at the point of no return with all of this government activism in the economy. The rooster indeed has come home to roost in California and that’s an isolated case, but at this stage with a $1 trillion deficit and a $10 trillion debt, I feel that nationally our financial condition will have material affect on the federal government constitutional responsibility to protect our freedoms. This is the only role of government to protect our freedoms, not to solve all our problems. Protecting our freedoms enables the very opportunities that make this country the greatest in history. If we are too busy mandating outcomes that are unaffordable, instead of really getting down to the basics and ensuring an environment where able bodied, able mind people reach their fullest potential, we are in trouble. I’ve always felt that in a free society, with free markets, where there’s a problem there is a profitable opportunity. We have gotten away from allowing the innovation of our people to solve our problems. Instead we rather rely on a small number of people, well let me just call them what they are, politicians to try to solve every little problem in our society. They try to call them “social problems” as if to distinguish them from other types of problems, but what happens is that these social problems are encroaching more and more into every facet of our lives, costing us a bundle. We need to get back to government protecting freedom and if we have to help individuals, then it has to be those who really cannot help themselves. Businesses should not get anything from government, period. They must earn their keep. But J.E. I am pessimistic about whether we are going to ever be able to shake off this mentally that government must solve all of our problems. I am hoping and praying but I don’t see it.
To RCAR, I will simply say that your concern should be jobs and jobs are create from investment by enterprises. Boost the incentives to encourage such investment domestically and to attract foriegn direct investment and your disposable income will be plentiful.
To Shira, what does it matter if Jennifer is the primary poster on Commentary? So long as what she post is interesting and worthy of comment, I care less how often she posts. Shoot, it gives me something to look forward to.
I echo Steven’s response to “shira.” Bring on the JRub commentary. She’s a superb blogger. More, please!