Monday Morning Quarterbacks

Published: December 1, 2008

There might be a financial dimension to the terror attack in Mumbai, writes Thomas Lifson at americanthinker.com. Mumbai is a major financial center for India and serves as the connecting node between India and the world financial system, Lifson writes. "India’s spectacular economic success in recent years is an implicit affront to the far less dynamic economy of its Muslim neighbor Pakistan, not to mention Bangladesh,” he writes. "The horrific terror attacks in Mumbai so far are known to involve nonfinancial targets, like hotels, a restaurant, a railway station, and a gathering place for Jews. One must wonder if financial institutions may be targets of a later attack, in the vain hope of toppling the world financial system, already straining under a financial crisis.”

While some Democrats have dreams of a New Deal-like wave of legislation by the incoming administration. Pejman Yousefzadeh at chequer-board.net recalls that Franklin Roosevelt’s agricultural subsidies and imposition of industry cartels were an economic disaster back in the 1930s. "One certainly hopes that taxes will not be raised and that the Bush tax cuts will still have a lot of life left in them during the Obama administration,” Yousefzadeh writes. "If the President-elect wants to encourage some serious economic stimulus, he would do well to take a page from Milton Friedman, recognize that individuals need to sense a long-term increase in their take-home pay, and pledge to make the tax cuts permanent.” Team Obama should remember to be humble "concerning the limit of government’s power to do good, even as government will now seek to increase even further its power to meddle.”

Barack Obama’s hometown paper didn’t pass up the chance to comment on the Obama family decision to put the daughters in an exclusive private school. The president-elect’s daughters have been attending a private school in Chicago, so the decision was hardly surprising. The Chicago Tribune noted the disappointment of Washington, D.C., school officials who would’ve loved to have the girls in public schools. "Fat chance,” the newspaper wrote in an editorial. Proponents of school choice won’t let this opportunity pass them up. And as the Tribune editorial showed, it will draw even more attention to D.C.’s school reform efforts, not the least of which is a high-profile effort to scale back teacher tenure.

It didn’t go unnoticed in this time of tight budgets and tuition increases at many colleges and universities nationwide that some university presidents are raking in some serious cash. A recent report from The Chronicle of Higher Education showed the median salary for public university presidents topped $427,000 last fiscal year. The Dallas Morning News figured one university president grasped the "image problem” when he asked university officials not to increase his $500,000-plus salary. They did it anyway. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette chimed in, too: "When the taxpayers are asked to give more of their tax dollars to support state-affiliated schools and when parents and students are told to dig deeper when writing checks for tuition, room and board, public university presidents must lead by example and draw a tighter line at their rich rewards. You might even call it school spirit.”

Michael Barone at usnews.com sizes up Tuesday’s U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia between incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin. Polls show Chambliss leads by about the same margin he finished ahead of Martin on Election Day, when Chambliss narrowly missed winning the election outright. "Democrats hope for a disproportionately large turnout of young and black voters, but Barack Obama, busy building an administration with an eye to bipartisan acceptability, seems so far unwilling to deploy the one political asset — personal campaigning by the president-elect — that seems most likely to spark such turnout,” Barone writes. In 1992, Bill Clinton suffered some lost prestige when his campaigning in Georgia’s Senate runoff failed to drag incumbent Democrat Wyche Fowler over the finish line. "I’m guessing that Obama wants to avoid a repeat of this outcome,” Barone writes.

Jennifer Rubin at commentarymagazine.com writes about President-elect Barack Obama’s early selections for his administration. Although some on the political right roll their eyes at Obama for saying his job as president is to provide vision for his team, Rubin believes Obama is correct. "Ultimately it will be up to the president to make all the tough calls (the easy ones get decided before they hit his desk), and he alone will bear the responsibility if things go poorly, if the economic vision is flawed, if his decision making process gets bogged down and if underlings err or misbehave,” Rubin writes. Obama’s selections suggest he favors experience over ideology and big spending over tax increases. But "it is simply too early to tell how he plans to govern and what balances he will strike,” she writes. "Along the way we’ll find out more. But Obama is right about one thing: in the end it is all about him.”

Despite the pretense of being a free trade nation, the U.S. has significant barriers to trade that come in the form of tariffs, quotas and steep regulatory barriers. Our restrictions are just not as onerous as many other countries but there’s a push to make them so. It’s simple politics.”

Walter Williams
Syndicated columnist

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