Blogs > Linked! > Author > Nathaniel Ward
To understand how subjective poverty in America is, one need only recognize the fact that most rich people from a century ago would be considered poor by today?s standards, and today?s poor would be considered rich by the standards of 1900. In 1900, 2 percent of homes had electricity, and 1 out of 10 homes had flush toilets. Today, pretty much all of them do. In other words, the tangible goods that defined wealth have been democratized. Absurdly, according to the official measurements used by the federal government, fewer people lived in poverty in 1973 than today. But in 1973, most poor people didn?t have a car. Today, almost 75 percent of those officially in poverty have a motor vehicle. Today?s poor households, according to statistician Nicholas Eberstadt, are more likely to have telephones and televisions than non-poor families were in 1970. In the 1970s, undernourishment still factored into poverty. Today, obesity is a far bigger problem.
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Pressed by the demands of fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has been unable to maintain proficiency in the kind of high-intensity mechanized warfare that toppled Saddam Hussein and would be needed again if the Army were called on to fight in Korea or in other future crises, senior officers acknowledge... The Army's senior leaders say there is scant time to train troops in high-intensity skills and to practice large-scale mechanized maneuvers when combat brigades return home. With barely 12 months between deployments, there is hardly enough time to fix damaged gear and train new soldiers in counterinsurgency operations. Some units have the time to train but find their tanks are either still in Iraq or in repair depots.
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Bush?s belief in the desire for freedom has influenced the policy of his administration in crucial ways. One reason that the administration hadn?t more seriously considered worst-case scenarios prior to the fall of Baghdad was that its thinking was soaked in the notion that once Saddam Hussein?s dictatorship was removed, the true nature of the Iraqi people would be revealed as freedom-loving democrats. Don Rumsfeld infamously justified the post-liberation looting as the natural exuberance of a newly freed people. In this, they had forgotten conservative wisdom about the importance of institutions and culture. Even if people desire to be free, it does them no good unless their desire can be channeled through appropriate governmental institutions, which are excruciatingly hard to build up once they have been torn down. We are still working on the Iraqi police, and will probably be doing so for years.
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It's a mistake to read The Wealth of Nations as a justification of amoral greed. Wealth was Smith's further attempt to make life better. In Moral Sentiments he wrote, "To love our neighbor as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity." But note the simile that Christ used and Smith cited. The Theory of Moral Sentiments was about the neighbor. The Wealth of Nations was about the other half of the equation: us.
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The liberal take on American history and the Founding Fathers.
The real American question of our times is how our country in a little over 200 years sank from the great hope to the most backward democracy in the West. The U.S. offers the worst healthcare program, one of the worst public school systems and the worst benefits for workers. The margin between rich and poor has been growing precipitously while it has been decreasing in Europe. Among the great democracies, we use military might less cautiously, show less respect for international law and are the stumbling block in international environmental cooperation. Few informed people look to the United States anymore for progressive ideas. We ought to do something. Instead, we keep worrying about the vision of a bunch of sexist, slave-owning 18th century white men in wigs and breeches. Even in the 18th century, the founding fathers were not the most enlightened thinkers available.... To be honest, the U.S. was never as good as it was supposed to be.
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The last thing the U.S. should do is reward North Korea's missile provocation with direct talks. Yet before yesterday's missile tests, that is exactly what Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar advised. Former Clinton officials Ashton Carter and William Perry have accused President Bush of ignoring diplomatic options with Pyongyang, even as they also propose a pre-emptive military strike. But what are the six-party talks with the North if not multilateral diplomacy? The real story may be, as Nicholas Eberstadt argues in The Wall Street Journal today, that Kim Jong Il has concluded from recent U.S. actions toward Iran and North Korea that Mr. Bush is now as diplomatically pliable as Mr. Clinton.
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Nationwide, the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all, according to an analysis of government records by The Washington Post. Some of them collect hundreds of thousands of dollars without planting a seed. Mary Anna Hudson, 87, from the River Oaks neighborhood in Houston, has received $191,000 over the past decade. For Houston surgeon Jimmy Frank Howell, the total was $490,709." I don't agree with the government's policy," said Matthews, who wanted to give the money back but was told it would just go to other landowners. "They give all of this money to landowners who don't even farm, while real farmers can't afford to get started. It's wrong." The checks to Matthews and other landowners were intended 10 years ago as a first step toward eventually eliminating costly, decades-old farm subsidies. Instead, the payments have grown into an even larger subsidy that benefits millionaire landowners, foreign speculators and absentee landlords, as well as farmers. Most of the money goes to real farmers who grow crops on their land, but they are under no obligation to grow the crop being subsidized. They can switch to a different crop or raise cattle or even grow a stand of timber -- and still get the government payments. The cash comes with so few restrictions that subdivision developers who buy farmland advertise that homeowners can collect farm subsidies on their new back yards. The payments now account for nearly half of the nation's expanding agricultural subsidy system, a complex web that has little basis in fairness or efficiency. What began in the 1930s as a limited safety net for working farmers has swollen into a far-flung infrastructure of entitlements that has cost $172 billion over the past decade. In 2005 alone, when pretax farm profits were at a near-record $72 billion, the federal government handed out more than $25 billion in aid, almost 50 percent more than the amount it pays to families receiving welfare.
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Cities and towns ? and school districts and transit authorities and utility agencies ? across the country are increasingly reaching for that same toolbox, putting lobbyists on retainer to leverage their local tax dollars into federal tax dollars. Since 1998, the number of public entities hiring private firms to represent them in Washington has nearly doubled to 1,421 from 763, as places like Treasure Island, population 7,514, have jumped onboard with behemoths like Miami that have long had lobbyists. Most of these new clients had never sought earmarks ? some had never even heard of them ? before someone knocked on their door, essentially offering big pots for a pittance. Others had read in the newspaper about neighbors with lobbyists building bridges or beach walks and felt pressure to keep up with the municipal Joneses.
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Once considered the green dream of the environmentally sensitive, ethanol has become the province of agricultural giants that have long pressed for its use as fuel, as well as newcomers seeking to cash in on a bonanza. ... The modern-day gold rush is driven by a number of factors: generous government subsidies, surging demand for ethanol as a gasoline supplement, a potent blend of farm-state politics and the prospect of generating more than a 100 percent profit in less than two years. The rush is taking place despite concerns that large-scale diversion of agricultural resources to fuel could result in price increases for food for people and livestock, as well as the transformation of vast preserved areas into farmland.... Despite continuing doubts about whether the fuel provides a genuine energy saving, at least 39 new ethanol plants are expected to be completed over the next 9 to 12 months, projects that will push the United States past Brazil as the world's largest ethanol producer.
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Eamonn Butler rebuts Chancellor Gordon Brown's casting of Adam Smith as a defender of the modern European welfare state.
And yet the effort to rebrand Smith as an early Scottish socialist rests not so much on a misinterpretation of Smith as on a misinterpretation of capitalism, self-interest and the other supposed vices that are alleged to have annexed Smith’s reputation to themselves today. One argument is that Smith was certainly no defender of merchants and manufacturers, and in fact distrusted them. Which is, of course, quite true.
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Outrageous as it seemed, the government would be able to prosecute them for publicly expressing themselves about a matter of public policy.
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Jonathan Rauch calls for realism in foreign policy.
Realists can be criticized for not proffering a specific agenda of their own, and that, too, is a fair rap. Realism does not define, and should not limit, America's aims in the world. It is, however, an indispensable ingredient of a grown-up foreign policy. If realism had the advocacy it deserves, it would be enjoying a renaissance it has earned.
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The Washington Post's editors make the case for holding firm in Iraq.
To do all this, the Iraqi government desperately needs continued U.S. military and economic support. That's why it was a little unnerving, in the middle of yesterday's celebrations, to hear President Bush speak of plans to hold high-profile consultations early next week on "how to best deploy America's resources in Iraq." U.S. commanders have been eager to reduce American troops from the current level of about 135,000 to 100,000 by this fall; the Pentagon may seize on the good news to justify the reduction. Both Americans and Iraqis would love to see U.S. troops come home -- and a redeployment might help Mr. Maliki politically, not to mention U.S. Republicans facing this fall's elections. Yet officials from both countries were unanimous in predicting yesterday that the challenge from the insurgency will continue to be severe. Perhaps U.S. troops can be drawn down without worsening that threat; but it would be tragic if, after so much suffering, Iraq's first democratic government were denied the means to succeed.
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President Bush announced in his State of the Union address in January that he backed funding for research into producing ethanol from corn and other farm products, with the goal of making a viable fuel alternative to gasoline for automobiles. Since then, Congress has wrangled over how to implement the idea. Critics, meanwhile, have blasted the viability of ethanol. A central argument is that corn-based ethanol, the most-common form today, is literally a waste of energy. Detractors say that it takes more fuel to make ethanol -- growing the corn, bringing it to a processing plant and converting it to fuel -- than would be saved by using it.
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But things in Sweden are not as good as the advocates would like to believe. Long the paragon of social democracy, the Swedish model is rotting from within. Ironically, the unique social and economic foundation that first allowed Sweden to construct its political edifice--and which makes it such a difficult model for other countries to emulate--has been critically weakened by the system it helped create. Far from a being a solution for the new sick men of Europe, Sweden must face serious and fundamental challenges at the heart of its social model.
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