The Economist: Obamaville — it gets better!

The effort in St Louis to rename Delmar Boulevard is not certain to succeed. Some wiser heads recall that a decade ago the city renamed part of an interstate highway after Mark McGwire, a baseball player for the St Louis Cardinals whose record-breaking home runs were later tainted by accusations of steroid use.

Glorifying a president may be tempting fate again.

The Economist: Obamaville

Municipalities across America are racing to rename some of their streets and schools after Obama before he is inaugurated next Tuesday (I am honestly wondering why). Here is an excerpt from a paragraph that caught my attention:

“Rural, mostly black Perry County, Alabama, has already gone one better, declaring the second Monday of November as Barack Obama Day. Government offices will be closed and the county’s employees will have a paid day off.”

Way to go indeed! On the other hand, the craze has also one positive side:

“Fueled by a deluge of Obama products from commemorative coins to hand towels, from bobbing-head dolls to glossy books, the Obama industry is one of the economy’s bright spots.”

Which reminds me of:

Benefits of Obama’s tax proposal don’t extend to…

Although Obama is offering a new series of tax breaks, they undermine rather than improve economic incentives.

Source: The American

On Obama’s hopes of taxing windfall profits

Mr. Obama didn’t bother to define “reasonable,” and neither did Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Senate Democrat, when he recently declared that “The oil companies need to know that there is a limit on how much profit they can take in this economy.” Really? This extraordinary redefinition of free-market success could use some parsing.

Although the WSJ’s opinion is not from today (it was published on Monday), it nonetheless lucidly explains the questionable nature of Mr Obama’s latest economic proposals. In one he suggests giving Americans a stimulus check in the value ranging from $500 to $1000 (depending on circumstances) which should be paid for from the proceeds of a new, so called windfall, tax imposed on Big Oil. Big Oil is a group of America’s largest oil companies and is often a subject of criticism for its notably large nominal profits; its most prominent member, Exxon-Mobile, suffered a severe criticism last week when it unveiled its quarterly financial results that showed the company earned $11.8 billion, the largest profit ever. This fact allowed Obama to find a persuasive scapegoat in his agenda of striving to help average people; he proposed tax every oil company which profits grow by more than 10% and which doesn’t “sufficiently invest in exploration of renewable energy sources” by 25%. I call this ludicrous and am further convinced that Obama is nothing but a prime-time celebrity that is willing to sell his soul to whatever might win him the votes of undecided voters. The Wall Street Journal analyzes the background of Obama’s latest idea and ridicules its obviously flawed nature.

D. Brooks: Talking Versus Doing

The $307 billion farm bill that rolled through Congress is a perfect example of the pattern. Farm net income is up 56 percent over the past two years, yet the farm bill plows subsidies into agribusinesses, thoroughbred breeders and the rest.

The growers of nearly every crop will get more money. Farmers in the top 1 percent of earners qualify for federal payments. Under the legislation, the government will buy sugar for roughly twice the world price and then resell it at an 80 percent loss. Parts of the bill that would have protected wetlands and wildlife habitat were deleted or shrunk.

David Brooks’s NYT column is the last one I would like to point at today. The quotation above explains the core of the problem, the farm bill, but that’s not the core of the article.

Brooks argues that by supporting this bill (although not casting a vote in favor or against it), Obama has betrayed his promises about ending the support to “special interests.” The author points out that this bill, largely aimed at farmers in Iowa, might serve as Obama’s tactics to insure his popularity in Iowa, despite all the negative outcomes associated with the legislature.

McCain, on the other hand, has voted against it, claiming “It would be hard to find any single bill that better sums up why so many Americans in both parties are so disappointed in the conduct of their government, and at times so disgusted by it.” And he’s right.

It’s just not a good week for Hillary

International Herald Tribune:

Former Sen. George McGovern, an early supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton, urged her to drop out of the Democratic presidential race and endorsed her rival, Barack Obama.

I’m confused.

Obama lost to Clinton by a slim margin of 0.2% in Indiana yesterday. Everyone seems to endorse him. He’s getting all the money. Petite young women are recording videos and posting them on YouTube, singing about their crush on him.

Nevertheless, his chances of winning the presidential race are considered to be lower than Clinton’s. And the presidential prospects of both are smaller than McCain’s, because they both are too polarizing personalities. Does it mean that the democrats’ mutual efforts to discredit each other will keep the Republicans in the White House? It’s ok with me…