When can we declare the liberals' economic experiment finished?

The Democrats have had the past year and a half to do their best to fix the economy. They've tried their stimulus. They've bailed out companies. They've saved union jobs. They've saved public sector jobs. They've passed ObamaCare. They've done what they thought was best to help our faltering economy. And it has failed.

Unemployment continues at higher levels than when they started. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost hope and stopped looking for jobs. The private sector is too uncertain as to what government will do next to invest in growing the economy and hiring more people. It's time to end the liberal experiment and try something else. They have failed.

As the WSJ writes today, it is time to try a different approach.

So far the Obama team has thrown the entire Keynesian playbook at the economy. We have paid people to buy cars, purchase homes, pay off their mortgages, weatherize their homes and put solar paneling on their roofs. And of course there was the original stimulus package of $862 billion, though some of that remains unspent. None of it has put America back to work.

The policy lesson is that you can't have a jobs recovery without private confidence and investment. The Obama crowd bet that you could force-feed private investment with government spending and politically directed credit, but the result has been to traumatize business instead. Why would a small business owner hire anyone new if he knows that taxes are going up, health-care costs are sure to rise, and the cost of each new employee is uncertain? Nor can you inspire business confidence if you demonize bankers and business.

The economy is now 2.5 million jobs short of where it would need to be to get back under the 8% unemployment rate we were promised. With the federal government running a $1.4 trillion deficit, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling the House back into session to pass a $26 billion "stimulus" bill to give cash to states, cities and teachers unions.

As the evidence mounts that government spending doesn't create net new jobs, the White House insists we need to double down on spending and monetary stimulus. We've now had three years of this policy, and it isn't working. Time to try a different economic model, the one that worked in the 1980s after another severe recession.

We've tried the liberal experiment. Its failure is clear. Let's not double down on their bad bet.

Eric Holder's slush fund

Byron York is reporting on an tricky new policy that the Holder Justice Department has established in order to funnel money to favored interest groups. This is how it works:

The Justice Department has found a new way to pursue civil rights lawsuits, using the powers of the Civil Rights Division not just to win compensation for victims of alleged discrimination but also to direct large sums of money to activist groups that are not discrimination victims and not connected to a particular suit.

In the past, when the Civil Rights Division filed suit against, say, a bank or a landlord, alleging discrimination in lending or rentals, the cases were often settled by the defendant paying a fine to the U.S. Treasury and agreeing to put aside a sum of money to compensate the alleged discrimination victims. There was then a search for those victims -- people who were actually denied a loan or an apartment -- who stood to be compensated. After everyone who could be found was paid, there was often money left over. That money was returned to the defendant.

Now, Attorney General Eric Holder and Civil Rights Division chief Thomas Perez have a new plan. Any unspent money will not go back to the defendant but will instead go to a "qualified organization" approved by the Justice Department. And if there is not enough unspent money -- that will be determined by the Department -- then the defendant might be required to come up with more money to give to the "qualified organization."

If the purpose of the penalty is to compensate those who were originally harmed, then leftover money should go back to the defendant. If the purpose of the penalty was punitive, then the extra money should go to the Treasury. But not in Obama's administration. Not when there is the possibility to funnel money to their favored activist groups.

Republicans are particularly concerned that the "qualified organizations" money might end up with groups that are associated with the community organizing group formerly known as ACORN. Republican lawmakers want to avoid sending federal money to groups that Congress has deemed unsuitable to receive it.

But the concerns of Republicans, and perhaps some Democrats, go beyond ACORN and other activist groups. The new Civil Rights Division tactic represents a departure from a fundamental principle of such cases, which is the pursuit of justice on behalf of actual victims. "If the Department of Justice recovers funds for alleged civil rights violations, the money should go to compensate victims or to the Treasury," says Bob Driscoll, who was a top official in the Civil Rights Division during the first two years of the George W. Bush administration. "The practice of the Civil Rights Division steering settlement funds to favored advocacy groups is at odds with both civil rights laws and common sense. If Congress wants to fund certain advocacy groups or set up grants for agencies to award in order to promote non-discrimination, it can. But allowing the Civil Rights Division to steer a defendant's money to its ideological allies is offensive."

Yup, it sure is offensive. Holder has established a policy that lets him squeeze businesses and then channel the money to whichever groups he picks. Quite clever of him, isn't it?

And the man Holder put in charge of the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, Thomas Perez, seems to be just the guy to cast a large net to go after whichever business he perceives to have violated someone's rights.

Perez sometimes speaks emotionally about the vast scope of his responsibility. The job of the Civil Rights Division, he says, is to bring light to Americans "living in the shadows." There are "our Muslim-American brothers and sisters subject to post-9/11 backlash" and "communities of color disproportionately affected by the subprime meltdown," and "LGBT brothers and sisters ... forced to confront discrimination" and "all too many children lacking quality education." And many, many more.

Every business is now at risk for a Justice Department suit. York details this ridiculous threat against Amazon for what seems like an admirable experiment to facilitate students using Kindle readers for their textbooks. On the face of it, this experimental program sounds like just the thing that liberals would like.

Last year, the schools -- among them Princeton, Arizona State and Case Western Reserve -- wanted to know if e-book readers would be more convenient and less costly than traditional textbooks. The environmentally conscious educators also wanted to reduce the huge amount of paper students use to print files from their laptops.

Sounds perfect, doesn't it? It saves money and the environment. What could be the problem with such an idea? Ah, you must not be thinking like a civil rights activist. There is always a victim somewhere, and I'm not talking about the textbook publishers. Thomas Perez's Civil Rights Division decided to investigate if this policy violated the Americans With Disabilities Act because Kindle's menu functions require vision to operate and so discriminate against the blind. The blind could use the function on Kindle that turns text to speech, but they needed someone to turn it on for them. And so the Civil Rights Division came after Amazon.

In May 2009, Amazon announced the pilot program, under which it would provide Kindle DX readers to a few universities. It wasn't a huge deal; Princeton's plan, for example, involved three courses and a total of 51 students, and only in the fall semester of that year. University spokeswoman Emily Aronson says the program was voluntary and students could opt out of using the Kindle. "There were no students with a visual impairment who had registered for the three classes," says Aronson.

Nevertheless, in June 2009, the federation filed a complaint with the Justice Department, accusing the schools of violating the ADA. Perez and his team went to work.

"We acted swiftly to respond to complaints we received about the use of the Amazon Kindle," Perez recently told a House committee. "We must remain vigilant to ensure that as new devices are introduced, people with disabilities are not left behind."

The Civil Rights Division informed the schools they were under investigation. In subsequent talks, the Justice Department demanded the universities stop distributing the Kindle; if blind students couldn't use the device, then nobody could. The Federation made the same demand in a separate lawsuit against Arizona State.

The result? The schools agreed to drop the program. Better no one get to use the Kindle if blind students who weren't in the class couldn't use it.

And as York reports, the private market is taking care of the problem without any help from the Justice Department. They're issuing a new Kindle that the blind can use. Instead of wielding the heavy threat of a federal lawsuit, let the private market figure out how to make the product accessible to all possible customers. And get the government away from stopping everyone from gaining a benefit just because someone somewhere might not benefit.

And do you have any doubt that, if this whole issue hadn't been resolved as it was, Amazon might have been on the hook for a huge monetary penalty? And since there was no blind person actually affected by the program, there would have been lots of leftover money to go into Holder's slush fund to give to chosen activist organizations.

Guesstimating the "actual enumeration" in the Census

The Constitution requires that there be an "actual enumeration" of the population every ten years. But in today's age, that is becoming even more problematic, especially when there are Acorn-like procedures for how to count people. Federal investigators are looking into several allegations of workers falsifying the data they're collecting in California.

The California investigations aren't yet complete, but the whistleblowers who filed the complaints charge that the problems boiled down to management's demands.

"The goals had everything to do with speed, and nothing to do with accuracy," said Craig Baltz, a former worker in one of the Census Bureau's two Fresno, Calif. offices. "Instead of slowing down to ensure accurate data, we sped up."

Baltz charged that in some difficult-to-reach areas, "enumerators had two choices: Turn in accurate work and get written up or terminated, or falsify data and keep working." Baltz worked for the census from last October till July.

In one case, a former census worker allegedly tallied residents of a migrant farm workers' camp in California's San Joaquin Valley, but the camp itself was empty, abandoned because of the region's shortage of irrigation water.

But don't worry. The national office is on the case.

"There was abuse of authority and mismanagement," charged Nell Taylan, a veteran human relations specialist who worked in the Salinas office. "I've never seen anything like it."

Census Bureau officials say they've done everything possible to ensure an accurate population tabulation. Asked specifically about alleged problems in California, a spokesman referred to comments July 27 by [National Director] Groves in which he stressed the agency's nationwide quality-control efforts, which include double-checking answers from a sampling of households.

Groves said that suspicious errors that could mean falsification of data were made by "less than a thousand" of the 565,000 field interviewers nationwide.

Does anyone buy that the National Director of the Census has any ability to estimate how many interviewers falsified data? Then there are the possible IT problems. If there were problems in California, do you think that the other states are immune?

The Democrats are all about moral hazard

The Democrats with the help of some Republicans, including Bush, have been endorsing policies that encourage moral hazard - people acting differently because they are cushioned from the risks that their behavior run - since Obama became president. They rewarded GM Chrysler for their bad business decisions and union contracts by bailing them out. They decided that businesses were too big to fail and that people needed help with mortgages that they shouldn't have gotten in the first place. They gave money to the states in the 4800 billion stimulus to help pay for their teachers and other state employees that they couldn't afford. And now they're calling the House back in to help pay the states again for their teachers and Medicaid spending. As the WSJ reports, even though the states were told that the stimulus aid they got last year was a one-time deal, many states just went ahead building in that federal aid into their budgets.

We argued during last year's debate that the stimulus was a pretext for a huge permanent entitlement expansion, and what do you know. Thirty states had actually built the presumption of Congress extending this "matching rate" [for Medicaid] into their fiscal 2011 budgets, even though it was due to expire on paper. Democrats are rewarding states for making unaffordable health-care promises and handing Governors even more incentive to do so: The more they spend, the more political pressure Congress will feel to come to the rescue.

You'll hear a lot about how this is money for teachers. States that haven't made the necessary adjustments in their education spending will now get more money to encourage them not to adjust their budgets.

Another $10 billion will disappear into an "education jobs fund," which is meant to prevent states from laying off teachers and other public-sector employees this fall. Yet according to the Cato Institute, public school employment has risen 10 times faster since 1970 than student enrollment. There may not be another sector of the economy more in need of belt-tightening than public education.

The White House and the teachers unions enjoy sparring publicly for the press, but they both know they have each other's back at crunch time. President Obama praised the Senate bill in a statement Tuesday and promised to sign it in the name of "economic prosperity."

And of course, there is the phony math on how the federal government is paying for this new supposed stimulus package.

Senators Snowe and Collins say they were won over because this new spending won't increase the deficit—but Democrats merely gamed the budget math. In addition to unrealistic Medicaid phase-outs that will never happen in practice, they also "cut" funding for food stamps and subsidies for alternative energy that will be restored when the next "emergency" rolls around. The bill also includes about $10 billion in new taxes on U.S. companies with overseas subsidiaries.

In other words, Democrats are taxing productive businesses that will now employ fewer people in order to increase welfare transfers and protect their Big Labor base. Meanwhile, the White House will continue to lecture everyone about how extending the Bush tax cuts is "irresponsible."

Since the federal government keeps bailing out the states, the states can avoid the painful choices that they need to make in order to balance their budgets. And so they don't. I know that in my state, North Carolina, the legislature passed a budget presuming that they would be getting this extra money. They knew that the Democrats in Washington had their back. But what will occur next year? Does anyone expect that the revenues the states will get for 2010 are going to cover the spending that the states would like to make? We're going to be in a permanent state of emergency - all because the Democrats keep shielding people from the consequences of their bad decisions.

Barbara Boxer on partial-birth abortion

George Will recalls this classic expression of how far Barbara Boxer is willing to take her support for a mother's right to kill her baby.

In a letter in last week’s NEWSWEEK, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said that, in the previous issue, this columnist got her position on late-term abortion “wrong” by “taking my words out of context.” Well.

C-Span recorded her words in the Oct. 20, 1999, Senate colloquy that can be seen today on YouTube. The colloquy concerned the procedure commonly called “partial-birth” abortion. Boxer and other maximalists regarding the “right to choose” prefer the more anodyne but less descriptive phrase “late-term” abortion. Readers can decide which is the more candid denotation of this: The baby is about 80 percent delivered, feet first, until a portion of the skull is exposed. Then the skull is punctured and collapsed as its contents are sucked out.

In the 1999 colloquy, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said: Suppose during this procedure the baby slips entirely from the mother’s birth canal. “You agree, once a child is born, is separated from the mother, that that child is protected by the Constitution and cannot be killed? Do you agree with that?” Boxer: “I think when you bring your baby home, when your baby is born … the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights.” Santorum persisted: “Obviously, you don’t mean they have to take the baby out of the hospital for it to be protected by the Constitution. Once the baby is separated from the mother, you would agree—completely separated from the mother—you would agree that the baby is entitled to constitutional protection?” She would not say “yes.” Instead, she said, understandably: “I don’t want to engage in this.”

Two issues ago, this column said, “It is theoretically impossible to fashion an abortion position significantly more extreme than Boxer’s, which is slightly modified infanticide.” Her “when you bring your baby home” criterion means that a born baby acquires a right to life only when a mother or family decides to confer that right.

She also says she opposes partial-birth abortion “except in cases to save the life or health of the mother.” But the “health” exception is widely recognized as a loophole designed to, and large enough to, vitiate any law banning the procedure: An abortion-providing doctor can say that a mother’s mental health is threatened by depression or anxiety about being denied an abortion, however late in the third trimester of gestation.

Barbara Boxer in an intellectual argument with George Will - it's like a kiddie basketball team taking on the Los Angeles Lakers. Just not pretty.

Cruising the Web

Daniel Henninger looks at Charlie Rangel and the idea that long-term incumbent politicians seem to get that they can do what they want to simply because they're just such "great guys." Ruth Marcus takes the same approach. Perhaps if these politicians didn't come from gerrymandered districts so that they don't have to worry about reelection that they stay around forever thinking they're above standard ethics rules.

John Podhoretz looks at the parallels between the Republicans in 2006 and the Democrats this year. They are both similar in their surprise that people don't seem to like them very much and are blaming for conditions in the country. And if the Republicans regain power this year, some analysts may be writing similar stories a couple of elections down the road.

Despite President Obama's pretense that, on health care, he is standing with the people against the special interests, it seems that the hospital lobby in Missouri spent $400,000 opposing the Missouri proposition against ObamaCare. Democrats want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to pass their desired policies and rake in money from special interests and then turn around to pontificate about how they're the ones fighting against the very interests that are supporting their positions.

The newest bailout bill to send $10 billion to public school teachers will also end up sending about $40 million to the public teachers unions. That's a nice payback for the millions that the teachers have and will spend to elect Democrats.

James Pethokoukis warns of a possible plan by the Obama administration to have Freddie and Fannie forgive the mortgage debt of millions of Americans that are underwater.

Allahpundit calls this web ad from Allen West the best campaign ad of the year. See what you think.

The report from Senators McCain and Coburn on the wasteful spending in the stimulus bill is well worth perusing. It is clear that the thing was just stuffed through with special requests from the Democrats and had absolutely nothing to do with job promotion. Adam Freedman points to some of his favorite research grants

*Over $700,000 for Northwestern University researchers to develop "machine generated humor."
* The emotional response of monkeys to inequality,
* Improved methods to predict the weather on other planets,
* Brand new sidewalks, to be built by a convicted felon.

Yup. All this will help people find jobs.

David Freddoso looks at Newsweek's coverage of Tuesday's elections and finds that it was overvalued at $1.

A.B. Stoddard anticipates the battle of think tank reports as the Democrats and Republicans get set for the debate over extending the Bush tax cuts. There is a study to support everyone's arguments.

Rob Port is impressed by the "incoherence" of Kent Conrad who likes to pretend that he's a deficit hawk except for when he's voting for big spending today. Right now he's against either cutting spending or raising taxes. That's a way to be popular with everyone no matter what this does to his fiscal cred.

Ah, what cameras in schools can find out. It seems that a Brooklyn teacher faked a fall down the stairs to avoid a classroom observation by her supervisor. And the school video cameras caught it all on tape.

Jeff Jacoby notes the media double standard in how they treated Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic rants and that of Oliver Stone.

Susan Estrich worries that the President just doesn't get it. The upcoming vacation at Martha's Vineyard is just the last straw for her.

We're just tired of the casual contempt from our elites

More and more it seems that opinions held by many people, often by majorities of Americans, are being denigrated by the nation's elites as simply being expressions of hatred or racism. And then our better attempt to explain to us how hateful we are and the ugly emotions our opinions are expressing. Thus, if you're against an expanded federal government it must be because you have racist feelings towards poor minorities or President Obama. If you oppose a mosque being built at Ground Zero it must be because you hate Muslims and don't understand the concept of freedom of religion. Never are our opinions respected as coming from reason. What the elites think is that their opinions are so clearly right that the only reason someone would disagree would be our deep-seated hatreds.

Dorothy Rabinowitz has just had enough of what she calls this "liberal piety" most recently expressed as our betters attempt to explain freedom of religion to us over the Ground Zero mosque.

Americans may have lacked for much in the course of their history, but never instruction in social values. The question today is whether Americans of any era have ever confronted the bombardment of hectoring and sermonizing now directed at those whose views are deemed insufficiently enlightened—an offense regularly followed by accusations that the offenders have violated the most sacred principles of our democracy.

It doesn't take a lot to become the target of such a charge. There is no mistaking the beliefs on display in these accusations, most recently in regard to the mosque about to be erected 600 feet from Ground Zero. Which is that without the civilizing dictates of their superiors in government, ordinary Americans are lost to reason and decency. They are the kind of people who—as a recent presidential candidate put it—cling to their guns and their religion.

She reminds us of how Mayor Bloomberg will stretch himself into a logical pretzel in order to avoid the conclusions that are obvious to so many others.

mmediately after the suspect in the attempted car bombing near Times Square was revealed to be Faisal Shahzad, of Pakistani origin, Mayor Bloomberg addressed the public. In admonishing tones—a Bloomberg trademark invariably suggestive of a school principal who knows exactly what to expect of the incorrigibles it is his unhappy fate to oversee—the mayor delivered a warning. There would be no toleration of "any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers."

That there has been a conspicuous lack of any such behavior on the part of New Yorkers or Americans elsewhere from the 9/11 attacks to the present seems not to have impressed Mr. Bloomberg. Nor has it caused any moderation in the unvarying note of indignation the mayor brings to these warnings. It's reasonable to raise a proper caution. It's quite something else to do it as though addressing a suspect rabble.

It's hard to know the sort of rabble the mayor had in mind when he told a television interviewer, prior to Shahzad's identification, that it "could be anything," someone mentally disturbed, or "somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the health-care bill." Nowhere in the range of colorful possibilities the mayor raised was there any mention of the most likely explanation—another terrorist attempt by a soldier of radical Islam, the one that occurred to virtually every American who had heard the reports.

We saw the same jump by elites to try to deflect our attention away from what was clearly obvious after Mayor Nidal's Fort Hood shooting.

The notion that it is for the greater good that the people be led to suspect virtually any cause but the one they had the most reason to fear reflects a contempt for the citizenry that's of longstanding, but never so blatant as today. It is in the interest of higher values, Americans understand—higher, that is, than theirs—that they are now expected to accept official efforts to becloud reality.

Such values were the rationale for the official will to ignore the highly suspicious behavior of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who went on to murder 13 Americans at Fort Hood. A silence maintained despite all his commanders and colleagues knew about his raging hostility to the U.S. military and his strident advocacy on behalf of political Islam.

Those who knew—and they were many—chose silence out of fear of seeming insensitive to a Muslim. As one who had said nothing in the interest of this higher good later explained, Maj. Hasan was, after all, one of the few top-ranking Muslim officers the army had.

Rabinowitz is exactly right to deride the notion that is constantly being pushed at us that we need to do something or other for the rest of the world to believe that we respect the principles of our founding.

Here was an idea we have been hearing more and more of lately—the need to show the world America's devotion to democracy and justice, also cited by the administration as a reason to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City. Who is it, we can only wonder, that requires these proofs? What occasions these regular brayings on the need to show the world the United States is a free nation?

It's unlikely that the preachments now directed at opponents of the project by Mayor Bloomberg and others will persuade that opposition. Those fighting the building recognize full well the deliberate obtuseness of Mr. Bloomberg's exhortations, and those of Mr. Cuomo and others: the resort to pious battle cries, the claim that antagonists of the plan stand against religious freedom. They note, especially, the refusal to confront the obvious question posed by this proposed center towering over the ruins of 9/11.

It is a question most ordinary Americans, as usual, have no trouble defining. Namely, how is it that the planners, who have presented this effort as a grand design for the advancement of healing and interfaith understanding, have refused all consideration of the impact such a center will have near Ground Zero? Why have they insisted, despite intense resistance, on making the center an assertive presence in this place of haunted memory? It is an insistence that calls to mind the Flying Imams, whose ostentatious prayers—apparently designed to call attention to themselves on a U.S. Airways flight to Phoenix in November 2006—ended in a lawsuit. The imams sued. The airlines paid.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser—devout Muslim, physician, former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy—says there is every reason to investigate the center's funding under the circumstances. Of the mosque so near the site of the 9/11 attacks, he notes "It will certainly be seen as a victory for political Islam."

The center may be built where planned. But it will not go easy or without consequence to the politicians intent on jamming the project down the public throat, in the name of principle. Liberal piety may have met its match in the raw memory of 9/11, and in citizens who have come to know pure demagoguery when they hear it. They have had, of late, plenty of practice.

Being instructed by our supposed betters on the principles of our nation is backfiring. We know that we are not racist simply because we oppose the President's policies. We know that building the mosque at Ground Zero has nothing to with bigotry. We know that wanting to keep our borders secure doesn't mean that we hate immigrants. And the more that we're told otherwise by elites, the less we're interested in hearing from those elites in the first place. Argue about the policy instead of trying to ascribe ignoble motives to those who disagree with liberal positions.

The Dirty Waters that emerge when we start draining the swamp

Daniel Wood of the Christian Science Monitor looks at the mixed opinions of Maxine Waters. Some people just love her and have deep respect for her rise to power from her origins as a garment worker. But just because someone rose to a job as a leading member of the House of Representatives doesn't mean that she's an admirable human being. And she's been a sleaze for a long time.

In 2005, 2006, and 2009, Washington's Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics named Waters one of the 15 most corrupt members of Congress. Citizens Against Government Waste named her "Porker of the Month" in 2009 for directing an earmark to the Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center. And a 2004 investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed that some in Waters's family had made more than $1 million from 1996 to 2004 by, among other things, doing business with businesses that Waters had helped politically.

Waters is being investigated for her role in arranging meetings in 2009 between US Treasury officials and representatives of minority-owned banks, including one in which her husband, Sidney Williams, owns stock. The Office of Congressional Ethics issued an 80-page report Monday showing its bipartisan board had voted unanimously that Waters might have violated US House rules concerning conflicts of interest.

When family members are making millions from a congresswoman's votes, something very stinky is going on.

She's going to fight the present ethics charge with every claim of phony racism that she's used for years. Bring it on.

Any day when Maxine Waters' face and record of corruption is in the news is a good day for the Republicans. I hope her trial lasts a good long time. People will pay attention and already have very low opinion of Congress. Let's shine a cleansing light on the dirty corruption behind the sorts of actions Waters has been doing for years. Let her fall be a pointed lesson for all 535 members of Congress.

Now that's a good way to drain the swamp.

What the CBO thinks of Obama's policies

Thomas Sowell explains how the recent CBO report "Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis" is a big thumbs down on Obama and Democratic policy choices. And remember, the head of the CBO was picked by the Democrats since they control both houses of Congress.

Without naming names or making political charges, the Congressional Budget Office last week issued a report titled "Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis." The report's dry, measured words paint a painfully bleak picture of the long-run dangers from the current runaway government deficits.

The CBO report points out that the national debt, which was 36 percent of the Gross Domestic Product three years ago, is now projected to be 62 percent of GDP at the end of fiscal year 2010-- and rising in future years.

Tracing the history of the national debt back to the beginning of the country, the CBO finds that the national debt did not exceed 50 percent of GDP, even when the country was fighting the Civil War, the First World War or any other war except World War II. Moreover, a graph in the CBO report shows the national debt going down sharply after World War II, as the nation began paying off its wartime when the war was over.

By contrast, our current national debt is still going up and may end up in "unfamiliar territory," according to the CBO, reaching "unsustainable levels." They spell out the economic consequences-- and it is not a pretty picture.

Although Barack Obama and members of his administration constantly talk about the so-called "stimulus" spending as creating a demand for goods that is in turn "creating jobs," every dime they spend comes from somewhere else, which means that there is less money to create jobs somewhere else.

There is no reason to believe that all this runaway spending is creating jobs-- on net balance. The fact that the unemployment rate remains stuck at nearly 10 percent belies the idea that great numbers of jobs are being created-- again, on net balance.

White House press Secretary Robert Gibbs' recent rant against Rush Limbaugh for criticizing the bailout of General Motors went on and on about how this bailout had saved "a million jobs." But where does Gibbs think the bailout money came from? The Tooth Fairy?

When you take money from the taxpayers and spend it to rescue the jobs of one set of workers-- your union political supporters, in this case-- what does that do to the demand for the jobs of other workers, whose products taxpayers would have bought with the money you took away from them? There is no net economic gain to the country from this, though there may well be political gains for the administration from having rescued their UAW supporters.

The same principle applies to money that came from selling government bonds, thus adding to the national debt. People who bought those government bondshad other things they could have invested in, if those government bonds had not been issued.

As the Congressional Budget Office puts it, if the national debt continues to grow out of control, a "growing portion of people's savings would go to purchase government debt rather than toward investments in productive capital goods such as factories and computers; that 'crowding out' of investment would lead to lower output and incomes than would otherwise occur."

Just paying the interest on a growing national debt can require higher tax rates, which "would discourage work and saving and further reduce output," according to the CBO.

When the CBO starts sounding like a more scholarly and staid version of Rush Limbaugh, the Democrats should start paying attention.

Ah, now that's a bellwether!

Missouri had a ballot proposition that purports to allow Missouri to opt out of ObamaCare. The voters finally got a chance to vote on the whole shebang and the result is overwhelming.

With most of the vote counted, Proposition C was winning by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1. The measure, which seeks to exempt Missouri from the insurance mandate in the new health care law, includes a provision that would change how insurance companies that go out of business in Missouri liquidate their assets.

Of course, it is questionable what the meaning of the new law is since federal law will trump a state law. But it does augur poorly for politicians who voted for ObamaCare. Other state legislatures have been working on similar measures concerning the individual mandate.

Legislatures in other states have passed similar measures. But Missouri is the first state to challenge aspects of the law in a referendum.

Missouri's law prohibits the government from requiring people to have health insurance or from penalizing them from paying for their own health care. That conflicts with a federal requirement that most people have health insurance or face penalties starting in 2014.

As the state cases against the individual mandate work their way through the court, having states pass such laws will help serve as an indication of evolving standards. We know how the Supreme Court likes to look for signs of such evolving standards - well, Missouri has just given them a big sign. The Missouri Secretary of State's site provides this map of Missouri's support for the referendum.

With results like this, expect Republicans to be running hard against ObamaCare. And expect to see other states have similar referenda. The Show Me state showed us yesterday what people think of the whole Democratic plan on health care.

Of course, the Democrats will pooh pooh the result saying that it was just a low-turnout primary. But they sure don't want such a proposition to be placed on ballots during the general election.

Supporters of ObamaCare have been dismissive of the vote in Missouri, arguing that it occurred during low-turnout primaries, and on a day in which the Republican races garnered more attention.

“The assumption that those critics would make is that this would not have passed on a November ballot,” he said. “And I don’t think that’s true. I think this would pass in Missouri whenever we put it on the ballot.”

As evidence, he noted that originally the measure was intended to be on the general election ballot in November, but Democrats fought it, fearing that it would help boost turnout among conservatives.

Hmmm, maybe Scott Brown's election in true-blue Massachusetts on a platform of voting against ObamaCare wasn't such a fluke.

Ignoring how Palestinians are treated by their fellow Arabs

A Jordanian of Palestinian heritage, Mudar Zahran, writes that the international focus on Israel and the portrayal of everything through the prism of the Israeli-Arab conflict has ended up hurting Palestinians by taking the focus off of how Palestinians are treated in Arab countries.

Amazingly enough, the international media, and particularly the Western ones, pay very little attention to the conditions of the Palestinians living in Arab countries, despite the extreme oppression they have been enduring for decades in most Arab countries.

These Palestinians do not have someone to speak for them in the global media, possibly because a news story about countries other than Israel is less interesting or “sexy” by media standards. This tendency to blame Israel for everything has lead to the development of numerous myths about the situation of the Palestinian there that have provided an excuse to purposely ignore and compromise the human rights of the Palestinian in many Arab countries.

Palestinians who fled Israel during the 1948 war or the 1967 Six Days War are still being held in refugee camps in Arab countries.

Lebanon, a country with some of the most hostile forces to Israel, has been holing up Palestinians inside camps for almost 30 years. Those camps do not have any foundations of livelihood or even sanitation and the Palestinians living there are not allowed access to basics such as buying cement to enlarge or repair homes for their growing families. Furthermore, it is difficult for them to work legally, and are even restricted from going out of their camps at certain hours. Compare this to the fact that Palestinian laborers were still able to go to work every day in Israel while Hamas was carrying out an average of one suicide bombing per week a few years ago, and until recently launching missiles daily on southern Israel. Not to mention the fact that Israel allows food items and medications into Gaza if handled through the Palestinian Authority.

But the media doesn't cover the mistreatment of Palestinians by Arab countries because it just isn't as sexy as blaming every ill among the Palestinians on Israel.

The Lebanese atrocities toward the Palestinians have been tolerated by the international community, not only by the media. Today, while some Israeli military commanders have to think twice, in fear of legal consequences, before they visit London or Brussels, well-known Lebanese leaders who had directly participated in mass killings of Palestinian civilians, during and after the Lebanese civil war, are becoming world-respected political figures – Nabih Berri, for example, the leader of Amal Shi’ite militia who enforced a multi-year siege on Palestinian camps, cutting water access and food supplies to them. The Palestinians underBerri’s siege were reported to be consuming rats and dogs to survive. Nonetheless, he has been the undisputed speaker of the Lebanese parliament for a long time. He travels frequently to Europe and criticizes Israel for its “crimes against the Palestinians” on every occasion.

MANY OTHER Arab countries are no different than Lebanon in their ill-treatment and discrimination against the Palestinians. Why do the media choose to ignore those and focus only on Israel? While the security wall being built by Israel has become a symbol of “apartheid” in the global media, they almost never address the actual walls and separation barriers that have been isolating Palestinian refugee camps in Arab countries for decades.

It just doesn't fit the template of blaming the Jews so those who are happy to march against Israel and vote against them in the UN close their eyes to far worse treatment of Palestinians by their fellow Arabs. And, of course, it never gets discussed in any international confab on human rights.

While Palestinians targeted by the IDF are mostly fighters pledging war on Israel, the world swiftly overlooked the Sabra and Shatila massacre in which Lebanese Christian and Shi’ite militiamen butchered thousands of Palestinian women and children. Unsurprisingly, the international media accused Israel of being responsible for the massacre, despite the fact that live testimonies aired by Al-Jazeera satellite television a few years ago show massacre survivors confirming that IDF commanders and soldiers had nothing to do with the killing.

The demonization of Israel by the global media has greatly harmed the Palestinians’ interests for decades and covered up Arab atrocities against them. Furthermore, demonizing Israel has been well-exploited by several Arab dictatorships to direct citizens’ rage against Israel instead of their regimes and also to justify any atrocities they commit in the name of protecting their nations from “the evil Zionists.”

This game has served some of the most notorious Arab dictatorships, and still does today, as any opposition is immediately labelled “a Zionist plot.”

This model had served Gamal Abdel Nasser in ruling Egypt with an iron fist until he died, and was the main line for Saddam Hussein, who was promoting that “Iraq and Palestine are one identical case” in his last years in power.

The global media must be fair in addressing the Palestinians’ suffering in Arab countries and must stop demonizing Israel. It should start focusing on the broader conditions of the Palestinians in the Middle East region.

There is much to see.

The hypocrisy of the media and international community is so stark. And the ones they're truly harming are the Palestinians they purport to want to help. But they only want to help those whose ills they can blame on the Israelis not Arabs.

Cruising the Web

With Congresswoman Jane Harman's husband buying Newsweek for $1 plus assuming the magazine's liabilities, customers should ask why they should pay five times that to buy it on the newsstand. How perfect that Newsweek is now being owned by a Democratic congresswoman's husband - can we now give up the pretense that the rag is anything besides being a Democratic mouthpiece?

No matter his new lows in Gallup, Andrew B. Wilson thinks that Obama is still continuing to reach new highs in the PSA Index - the Presidential Self-Adulation Index.

When civil-rights groups such as the NAACP and National Urban League come out condemning charter schools, you know that they have decided to fall down on the side of the teachers rather than the students. As Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West of Harvard point out, many charter schools serve minority populations and are increasingly popular among minorities. These organizations are ignoring the needs of the families who are crying out to get their children in the charter schools and out of the regular public schools.

Caroline May writes in the Daily Caller that, ten years after the 2000 election mess, we still are not guaranteeing that servicemen and women abroad are able to vote. And there is a lot of concern that the Justice Department is doing all they can to ensure that they get their ballots in time despite a law that was passed last year to do just that.

Joel Kotkin at newgeography looks at the new battle between states based by whether they want expanded federal handouts or want to keep the federal government from taking over their state and local prerogatives.

Patrick Leahy pushed for the financial reform bill, but now he's realized that there are penalties for rushing through a bill without reading it. He's come out against the FOIA exemption for the SEC that was slipped into the bill that he voted for. The Washington Examiner explains why it's so important to have the transparency over SEC that FOIA provides.

Get ready for more arguments about how the federal government needs to start bailing out the MSM. Lee Bollinger, whose name became famous in the affirmative action suits against the University of Michigan where was the head, and then who went on to invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Columbia University, is now writing that the federal government needs to do something to help journalists. He figures that we should just follow the model of the BBC or NPR and PBS and extend that pattern towards newspapers and other journalistic institutions. After all, we have state-supported universities, why not have state-supported journalists? Great, just what we need - more NPRs and PBSs paid for by taxpayer dollars to spout the same liberal line you get from the vast majority of university professors. At least now, when the New York Times or Newsweek irritates me, I can vote with my pocketbook not to support them. Typical that a liberal like Bollinger thinks that the government needs to step in and change that.

The bill that no one read is still impenetrable

Remember how Nancy Pelosi told us we'd have to pass ObamaCare in order to know what was in it. We're still trying to figure it out.

Here is the chart that the Republicans have been putting out to illustrate all the bureaucratic entities created or involved in ObamaCare.The Congressional Research Service is also on the case trying to figure this monstrosity out. But there's a problem because there are just too many agencies and too much vague language for them to figure it out.

Don’t bother trying to count up the number of agencies, boards and commissions created under the new health care law. Estimating the number is “impossible,” a recent Congressional Research Service report says, and a true count “unknowable.”

The reasons for the uncertainty are many, according to CRS’s Curtis W. Copeland, the author of the report “New Entities Created Pursuant to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

The provisions of the law that create the new entities vary dramatically in specificity.

The law says a lot about some of them and a little about many, and merely mentions a few. Some have been authorized without any instructions on who is to appoint whom, when that might happen and who will pay.

Those agencies created without specific appointment or appropriations procedures will have to wait indefinitely for staff and funding before they can function, according to Copeland’s report.

And others could be just the opposite: One entity might not be enough and could spawn others, resulting in an “indeterminate number of new organizations.”

Thus is the tyranny of government born. The elected officials don't know what they voted for. That isn't just because they didn't read the bill, but because the bill doesn't even say. It's all just up in the air. It's all left up to people in the Department of Health and Human Services to figure out what they want to do.

The CRS report cites as an example a minority health provision that “requires the heads of six separate agencies within Health and Human Services to each establish their own offices of minority health.”

Another section, by contrast, says that the Patient-Centered Research Institute “‘may appoint permanent or ad hoc expert advisory panels as determined appropriate.’ How many such panels will be ‘determined appropriate’ by the institute is currently unclear.”

The CRC seems to be saying that we shouldn't pay attention to such a chart as the Republicans have put out - not because it's inaccurate, but because no one yet knows what is in the bill.

The Center for Health Transformation, founded by Newt Gingrich, recently estimated that the new law created as many as 159 new offices, agencies and programs. Republican staffers on the Joint Economic Committee determined that there were 47 bureaucratic entities.

“Although some observers have asserted that PPACA will result in a precise number of new boards and commissions,” the CRS document reads, “the exact number of new organizations and advisory bodies that will ultimately be created ... is currently unknowable.”

Now there's a defense for Democrats. "Your chart is all wrong because we still don't know what we voted for. That's a message to carry into the elections asking for votes. Don't you want to send back to the Hill people who still don't know what they voted for in the biggest transformation of American health care? All a Republican has to do is to tout some unpopular part of the bill - say the part saying that any small business has to file 1099 forms for any purchase over $600 - and then look into the camera and say: Did you know what you were voting for, and if not, why not? Or run an ad quoting the CRC saying that they still don't know how many bureaucratic agencies were created in the bill and then look in the camera and ask "Why is my opponent voting for bills that the Congressional Research Service still can't figure out what it says? Is that the type of judgment you're looking for in your elected officials?"

What I want in a political leader

I want a leader who will be honest with the public about the tough situation we're in and the possible solutions. I want someone who won't try to sell that we can have everything we want with no pain. And when there are tough choices to be made, I want someone who can make those tough choices and then get them through a legislature while letting the public know that the sacrifices will be shared as well as the benefits. That is one reason why people who are coming out of legislatures usually don't have the appeal for me that someone coming from an executive job would. Most in Congress seem to be looking for some way to vote for something before they vote against it or to pass their little pet bill without a wider look at the ramifications for the entire economy and polity of that bill.

The Republicans have a deep bench of attractive governors out there who may be attractive presidential candidates, maybe not for 2012, but for 2016. Rich Lowry writes about two of the most attractive governors, Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey. His metaphor for the type of leader he wants are that they need to be "adults."

If you could boil down the public's lament with Washington, it might be: "What happened to the adults?"

Not the adults of the Clark Clifford variety, the Washington fixtures who alternate between serving administrations and commenting on them sagely for PBS. But political leaders who make tough choices, take on problems directly and combine principle with pragmatism in a manner consistent with true statesmanship.

President Obama promised to be this kind of leader. He has instead proved -- with a few exceptions -- to be the servant of a limited political faction. He has exacerbated the nation's fiscal crisis without dealing effectively with its economic crisis, while piling on far-reaching legislation of dubious merit. His supporters still lament that Washington is "broken."

The sweep of Obama's ambition has necessarily forced congressional Republicans into a perpetual posture of "no," but they are reluctant to outline their own agenda of "yes." Out in the country, a populist movement of great moment and promise wants to pull the country back to its constitutional moorings. Its favored candidates, though, are often shaky vessels, the likes of Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada, who are always one gaffe away from self-immolation.

Both Daniels and Christie are demonstrating that it is possible to make tough choices to balance their state budgets. Since Christie has only been in office for six months, Daniels has the advantage in demonstrating that his common-sense conservative governing works.

When it comes to demeanor, Mitch Daniels is to Chris Christie what Miss Indiana is to Snooki. In his quieter way, and in less dire circumstances, the tightfisted two-term governor has slimmed down and improved his state's public sector. He inherited a $200 million deficit in 2004, which he turned into a $1.3 billion surplus just in time to ride out the recession. He's reformed government services and rallied his administration around one simple, common-sense goal: "We will do everything we can to raise the net disposable income of individual Hoosiers."

Both Christie and Daniels are happy (or, in the case of the latter, pleasant) warriors. They both are distinctive politicians, not what a political consultant would cook up in his laboratory. (Christie has too much girth and Daniels too little hair.) They both feel the weight of responsibility as the chief executives of their states in a way that hyperbolic congressmen and commentators don't. They prove that Republicans can govern, that budgets can be tamed, and that politics can work, so long as serious men and women put their shoulders to the wheel.

In short, they are adults. Their like can't gain control of Washington soon enough.

Ditto, ditto. These are both guys I could go to the mattresses for. They also have provided a model for other governors to follow. While other states can look to California, Michigan, or New York as models of what not to do. Now there are other models of what works. In our laboratories of democracy, governors like Daniels and Christie are proving that they are master scientists.

Cruising the Web

Daily Caller profiles Republican Wunderkind Aaron Schock. I knew about his getting elected to the school board at age 19. I didn't know about his entrepreneurial background that started when he was in 5th grade. What a go-getter. And then there is that six-pack. Hey, if he can play in Peoria....

Charles Lane ridicules the idea of thinking that the Chevy Volt is going to sell. And I didn't realize this little tidbit from the legal code:

Under federal Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency standards, carmakers can use the high fuel efficiency ratings of a few electric models to offset slower improvement in the rest of their fleets. In other words, the electrics clear the way for SUVs. The opportunity to game the Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency system—and California's zero-emissions vehicle targets—helps explain why car companies take advanced-vehicle subsidies in the first place.

That's cute, isn't it?

If you're aa criminal - don't get an iPhone. Cops love them for all the data they can retrieve from it.

Jerry Brown won't support replacing pensions for future California public employees with 401(k)s. It sounds like a great idea to get around the catastrophe that many states have purchased for themselves by overpromising pension benefits for their employees. And most citizens who aren't public employees are probably wondering why a plan that is good enough for their retirement benefits wouldn't be good enough for the public employees.

Politico looks at how the sleaze of the WWF might affect Linda McMahon's chances in her run for the Senate in Connecticut. Jonathan Last looked at this same subject a couple of weeks ago. It really is a dismaying story and I don't see how she avoids the taint of leadership in an industry built on steroid use. It's a shame that her money outweighs a good candidate like Rob Simmons who says he's now back in the race. I hope Connecticut republicans look past the pocketbook and questionable glitz of McMahon for the sturdier candidacy of Simmons, but I don't have much hope.

Even lib TV critic Tom Shales was distinctly unimpressed by Christiane Amanpour's debut. Her self-conscious puffery of her foreign policy cred was annoying. It will never be as good as it was when David brinkley was the host, but they should have kept Jake Tapper around instead of bringing in the unjustly ballyhooed Amanpour.

Taxpayers for Common Sense reports that earmarked money is down about 40% this year. Most of that drop comes from the self-imposed moratorium on earmarks. That's a good start guys. Now see if you can keep it up.

Hmmm. Are officials in the Department of Transportation sitting on a report on Toyota and the accusations of sudden accelerationbecause the results show that the problems were driver error not manufacturing problems?

Since March, the agency has examined 40 Toyota vehicles where unintended acceleration was cited as the cause of an accident, Mr. Person said. NHTSA determined 23 of the vehicles had accelerated suddenly, Mr. Person said.

In all 23, he added, the vehicles' electronic data recorders or black boxes showed the car's throttle was wide open and the brake was not depressed at the moment of impact, suggesting the drivers mistakenly stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake, Mr. Person said.

"The agency has for too long ignored what I believe is the root cause of these unintended acceleration cases," he said. "It's driver error. It's pedal misapplication and that's what this data shows."

Mr. Person said he believes Transportation Department officials are "sitting on" this data because it could revive criticism that NHTSA is too close to the auto maker and has not looked hard enough for electrical flaws in Toyota vehicles.

"It has become very political. There is a lot of anger towards Toyota," Mr. Person said. Transportation officials "are hoping against hope that they find something that points back to a flaw in Toyota vehicles."

Meanwhile, Walter Olson at Overlawyered notes that some in Washington want to rush through a major expansion of the federal auto safety law and that a report exonerating Toyota wouldn't fit the storyline.

Obama's war on low-income people trying to get ahead

Roger Hedgecock writes about how the Obama administration is targeting for-profit private colleges like the University of Phoenix.

There are 14 of these publicly traded private colleges in the U.S., enrolling about 1.4 million students. These private largely non-union colleges provide instruction connected to jobs and careers, using the best technology available, and flexible hours, to allow students to work and learn at the same time. Enrollment is booming as unemployed and underemployed folks seek new training and skills.

Students attending these private colleges are eligible for federal student loans. In Obama's world, this is an intolerable subsidy of the college’s profits.

In a study released this week, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions criticized these colleges for the profit they make, alleging that tuition is higher, student loans larger, and defaults on those loans twice those of public colleges.


The report also charges that students drop out at higher rates, are not properly supervised, and take classes that are not accredited.

The report states that 30% of students from these for-profit colleges have defaulted on their student loans since 1995, as compared with just 15% of public-college students.

The Obama Department of Education moved last Friday to cut off student loans to private colleges where a too-high proportion of the students fail to repay their loans.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D.-Iowa) called for even more stringent federal control of private colleges to ensure that "tax dollars are not wasted and students are not cheated".

This entire attack is bogus. Here at last—transparency in the Obama regime. A transparent power grab.



Most of the students who enroll in these colleges are people who want to get ahead by earning a degree on their own time, maybe while holding down a job. They can't afford to take classes on the schedule of a regular university. They're getting degrees in truly vocational training that most universities don't offer. And the arguments about how they charge more than public colleges and have higher default rates are simply bogus.

Tuition is higher at private colleges because "tuition" at public colleges is heavily subsidized by taxpayers to start with. Therefore, student loans are larger at these private colleges to cover the real cost of the education. The truth is that tuition at these private colleges is much lower than the true cost of public colleges when you add the "tuition" and the taxpayer subsidies.

The default rate for private-college students is also higher because these private colleges are providing the flexible, technical education to minority and poorer students that public colleges refuse to do.

In private colleges, you work on your schedule, at your pace, using the computer with much less (if any) class time. Many of these students "drop out" short of a degree to gain a job when their skill level is high enough. By contrast, public union-run colleges still make students work to the college schedule in centralized campuses with high costs.

Such schools aren't for everyone, but they do serve their particular niche in the education market.

Proprietary schools charge a lot more than public colleges—an average of $14,174 this year, compared with $2,544 at public two-year institutions and $7,020 for in-state tuition at public four-year institutions, according to the College Board. But students frequently choose proprietary schools over public colleges because for-profits do so much to limit the hassle of enrolling and applying for aid, and because students can take the classes they need quickly and get on with their lives. Ms. Ford, the Kaplan student, said she chose it for her nursing degree "because I could get into the class without having to wait."

Still, there are plenty of horror stories about career-college students who never graduate, or those who leave with large student-loan bills and then fail to get jobs. Students from proprietary institutions borrow more than students in other sectors of higher education, and have the largest student-loan default rates. But they graduate from two-year programs at a much greater rate than do students at community colleges: 60 percent in 2007 compared with 26 percent, according to the U.S. Education Department. In addition, for-profit university leaders say their students are bound to have higher loan-default rates because they are more likely than students on traditional campuses to be low income, to live on their own—without their parents' support—and to be the first from their families to attend college.

When it comes to jobs, some for-profit institutions have become key suppliers of workers in certain markets. Keiser University, a privately owned institution with 15 campuses in Florida, has been the No. 1 producer of associate-degree graduates in health professions and related sciences in the state for three of the last five years. "Students like our culture," says Arthur Keiser, founder and chancellor of the university. "It's very personal."

And employers like his graduates. The Cleveland Clinic Florida has hired more than 50 Keiser graduates in the last five years. Keiser students, who become radiology or surgical technicians and medical assistants, for example, are more mature and focused than those from other institutions, clinic officials say.

But they have the word "profit" in their model and the Obama people just can't stand that so they're trying to end federal subsidies for students who, on their own, choose these schools. And so they compare oranges and apples and conclude that they should change the rules for federal loans going to these students.

Avoiding Chelsea's example

Hey, if the Clintons want to spend a few million dollars on their only child's wedding, that's their business. That's what wealthy people do - they spend their money on what they want. Doug Ross has a fine rant about the hypocrisy of the Clintons and their supporters and he contrasts the Clinton's ostentatious spending on their daughter's wedding with the far more modest wedding that the Bushes threw for Jenna Bush. Ross points out that the Clintons could have had a smaller bash and given the difference to Haiti since that is supposed to be Bill's concern. And he points out the fine irony of having the Clintonites defending their spending on the wedding as money that will help the economy. Suddenly, they are now the biggest advocates of trickle-down economics.

But for the rest of us who don't have the spare millions to throw around on one day's celebration, here is some personal finance advice from the WSJ.

People get angry when I point this out. But if your money earns, say, 4% a year above inflation, every dollar you save at age 20 will grow to about $6 by the time you retire. So that $17,500 will grow to about $100,000. If you're financially secure, maybe it doesn't matter so much. But most middle-class Americans are in a far more precarious situation than they realize. They have saved little, if anything, for their retirement, and they are deeply in debt. (Household debts are about twice what they were a decade ago.) And we've seen what can happen to jobs and wages in a slump. In these circumstances, saving money instead of spending it matters very much.

So if you or your child is getting married any time soon, discuss whether the memories of an expensive wedding will compensate for not having that money sitting in the bank gathering interest. There may come a day when that little nest egg put away in place of the fancy cake and flowers and the joy of entertaining a few hundred of your closest friends.