Free Frank Warner

In China, ‘one child’ policy results in 115 boys for every 100 girls

Strategy Page:

China’s “one child” policy (to halt population growth), and the unanticipated appearance of cheap sonograms (enabling parents to determine the gender of their child while there was still time for an abortion) has caused an imbalance in the gender ratio. There are now 115 boys for every 100 girls.

Young men are having a problem finding wives. Wealthier urban males attract more women from the rural areas (where 70 percent of Chinese still live), leaving a lot of lonely, poor and angry young men in the countryside. The smaller generations means that the proportion of elderly (made wealthier and healthier by the booming economy) is skyrocketing, while the workforce is shrinking.

Love and war. Others have hypothesized that, in addition to frustrating the romantic aspirations of young men in China’s countryside, the “too-many-boys” policy makes China’s decision-makers unusually willing to go to war. I’m not so sure this theory works, but the idea is that a nation with too many boys is less reluctant to engage in activities that incidentally reduce the number of boys.

I’m surprised that the 115-100 ratio, which the Chinese are keenly aware of, hasn’t spurred a trend toward too many Chinese baby girls. Girls have to be in heightened demand. But apparently, the Chinese want boys, not only to carry on a family name, but because boys’ muscle power remains an important economic advantage in China’s primarily rural society.

Frank Warner

Bush proud of liberating 50 million people

In an interview on his legacy, President Bush says he is proud that his record includes the liberation of 50 million people – half Iraqis, half Afghans.

“I’d like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace,” he said.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush led a military coalition against repressive regimes known to abuse their “own people” and to support the killing of innocents in foreign nations.

Against the cynics. In both cases, Bush had to ignore the world’s appeasers, many of whom argued against halting Saddam’s deadly fascism or the Taliban’s brutal fanaticism. Especially large numbers of cynics opposed the liberation of Iraq, despite the fact that Saddam had killed at least 10 times as many people as the Taliban and al-Qaida, and despite the fact that Saddam’s repression had lasted much longer than the Taliban-al-Qaida alliance.

By toppling Saddam in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and by helping those two nations establish elected governments, Bush also set the stage for a lasting peace. History has shown that there is no real peace without freedom, and that democracies seldom make war with one another.

Bush is a liberator indeed. By removing tyrants in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush has given peace a real chance. It’s a record to be proud of.

Frank Warner

Bridget Johnson: 'Pakistan is a cancer on its neighbors'

Thousands have died in Afghanistan. More than 190 are dead in India.

Pakistan now is a willing host to bloodthirsty jihad gangsters.

Frank Warner

President Bush: Iraq is free, but war isn’t over

President Bush, speaking about Iraq today at Fort Campbell, Kentucky:

Because we acted, the dictator, his sons, and their regime are no more. More than 25 million Iraqis are free. And a young democracy has taken root where a tyrant once ruled. Removing Saddam Hussein was the right decision then -- and it is the right decision today.

With Saddam gone from power, our mission turned to helping the Iraqi people defend their freedom against violent extremists, including al Qaeda. In 2006, our efforts were faltering. So I reviewed our strategy and changed course. Instead of retreating, I ordered more troops into Iraq. And to lead the surge, I chose a former commanding general of the 101st Airborne -- the man formerly known as Eagle Six, General David Petraeus.

Our troops conducted this surge with resolve and with valor -- and nobody knows the impact better than the Screaming Eagles. When the “Bastogne” Brigade deployed to Salah al-Din last year, the province was still struggling to recover from the bombing of the famous Golden Mosque. But you partnered with the Iraqis to restore security. Schools and businesses are now open. The Golden Mosque is being rebuilt. Throughout the province, hope is returning; the terrorists are being driven out. The Iraqi people have the Screaming Eagles to thank.

Across Iraq, the surge has produced similar results. Since the surge began, violence and sectarian killings have fallen dramatically. Iraqi security forces have taken responsibility for 13 out of Iraq’s 18 provinces. Slowly but steadily, economic and political progress is taking place. Iraqis are working together for a more hopeful future.

As conditions on the ground continue to improve, we will further reduce American combat forces in Iraq – it’s a strategy I call “return on success.” So far, we’ve brought home a Marine Expeditionary Unit, two Marine battalions, six Army brigades without replacement -- including the Rakkasans. And by the end of January, we’ll have brought home more than 4,000 additional troops.

As conditions on the ground continue to improve, we're also making progress toward completing a strategic framework agreement and a security agreement with the Iraqi government. These landmark agreements will pave the way for a future of economic and diplomatic and military cooperation between our two countries. Iraqi lawmakers in Baghdad are now debating these agreements through the democratic process. It’s a good sign that Iraq has become a strong and vigorous democracy -- and it’s a testament to the success of our men and women in uniform. The war in Iraq is not over. But we’re drawing closer to the day when our troops can come home. And when they come home, they will come home in victory.

The work you have done and are going to do is historical work. You see, the consequences of success in Iraq will resonate far beyond that country’s borders, and will resonate when your children and grandchildren begin to study the history of peace. Success will frustrate Iran’s ambitions to dominate the region. Success will show millions across the Middle East that a future of liberty and democracy is possible.

V-I Day. Many of us have celebrated several Victory in Iraq Days this year. The president, who was overly optimistic about ending major combat in May 2003, now holds back on declaring the war over, or victory won. For one thing, if he declared victory, the next administration might be tempted to withdraw U.S. forces too quickly.

But clearly victory is in hand. Iraqis have primary control of 13 of Iraq’s 18 provinces. Democracy is taking root, and the Iraqis seem to like it.

Frank Warner

What prolonged the Depression?

Three months ago, a UCLA study concluded that FDR’s “New Deal” actually prolonged the Depression by seven years. Everyone trying to prevent another deep recession should study that study.

At a time when President-elect Barack Obama and fellow Democrats are talking about borrowing yet another $700 billion to “stimulate” our economy out of its bad-debt-driven stall, it would be wise to review why the Depression lasted an unusually long 15 years.

The studies’ two authors, both UCLA economics professors, warned that protecting big business from competition and pushing too much government stimulation are likely to produce the opposite of the intended boost.

“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,” said Harold L. Cole, one of the study’s two authors. “So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”

Currently, Obama and Congress are considering a $25 billion bail-out of Detroit’s struggling Big 3 automakers. They aren’t proposing price collusion, but the bail-out itself would interfere with competitive market forces.

The UCLA study found that a federal stimulus can be toxic, more likely to further slow a dormant economy than to revive it.

“We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies,” said Lee E. Ohanian, the study’s other author.

High wages, prices. By pushing wages and prices too high, the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) priced many workers out of the marketplace and made too many products unaffordable, driving up unemployment and adding to widespread misery, the study found.

Most Americans have high respect for Franklin Roosevelt because he gave hope to the unemployed when he took office in 1933 and later led America through World World II.

But FDR’s revered place in history should not prevent us from asking which economic forces dragged out the Depression, from 1929 all the way through 1943. Previously, most American recessions and financial panics lasted one to five years.

Debt on debt. It should give all of us pause to consider that the current financial panic was touched off by high-risk mortgages and soaring energy prices, and yet few federal proposals have anything to do with reducing home-loan risks or reaching real energy independence.

We’re already feeling a real stimulus of temporarily plummeting gasoline prices. It’s hard to imagine how adding $700 billion in “stimulus” debt to the $700 billion in financial “rescue” debt will help us in the short- or long-term. And those debts eventually must be paid back.

Just examine the Depression with an open mind. Learn from the mistakes. We’re a long way from a Depression today. In this panic, let’s avoid the temptation to pretend we’re helping if it’s more likely we’re hurting.

Frank Warner

* * *

Update: Just to clarify my position, I’m not against government stimulus programs in a time of recession. But there has to be a limit to the stimulus or we risk rolling into another recession with even fewer resources to bail us out.

I’m alarmed by the numbers being proposed. Just nine months ago, Congress approved a $168 billion stimulus program to give every adult American $600. That borrowing was nearly half the size of our entire defense budget.  It seemed a lot.

Then two months ago, Treasury Secretary Paulson proposed a $700 billion “rescue” of our biggest financial institutions. The unusual action seemed necessary, and it had an “upside”: we’d have the banks’ mortgages or stocks, and the federal government eventually could get all that $700 billion back.

Unfortunately, since Paulson’s plan was approved, Congress has looked at $700 billion as chump change. Now our congressional leaders are talking about a separate $700 billion “stimulus,” no strings attached. That’s far too much, even if it pays for apple pies, American cars, and bridges to somewhere.

Keep in mind, it is estimated the Chinese dictatorship already holds about $700 billion in U.S. debt. It took a long time for China to accumulate that many U.S. loans. Do we want to double that overnight?

As I said, the dramatic drop in gasoline prices is our best stimulus right now. It was the high gas prices of the last three years that turned $1 trillion of risky home loans into $1 trillion in bad home loans.

Some stimulus is appropriate, but we have to recognize there are limits to everything. We have other debts and obligations coming due -- most notably Medicare and Social Security -- and we cannot pretend the U.S. dollar can be leveraged to infinity.

Remember hydroelectric power?

The United States hasn’t built a major new hydroelectric power station since 1981, when the 2,038-megawatt Dalles Dam was built on the Columbia River in Oregon.

China is completing the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. It already is the largest hydroelectric plant in the world and by next year will be producing 22,500 megawatts, the equivalent of about 20 nuclear power plants.

America’s largest hydroelectric plant is at the Grand Coulee Dam, a 6,809-megawatt station on the Columbia River in Washington State. The Grand Coulee was built in 1942, with improvements in 1980.

The other top U.S. hydroelectric plants are:

Chief Joseph Dam, Columbia River, 2,620 megawatts, 1958.

Niagara Falls Dam, Niagara River, 2,515 megawatts, 1961.

John Day Dam, Columbia River, 2,160 megawatts, 1971.

Hoover Dam, Colorado River, 2,080 megawatts, 1936.

Dalles Dam, Columbia River, 2,038 megawatts, 1981.

Four of those dams are on one river, the Columbia. Imagine the regulatory and political nightmare of trying to build another hydroelectric dam on the Columbia today.

Twenty-seven years after the Dalles Dam, we’ve added little hydro power, started no nuclear power plants, leveled off our coal production, cut domestic oil production by a third, banned oil drilling in areas most likely to have major oil reserves, and doubled our oil imports.

And we wonder why energy is pricey? Maybe it’s because supply is low.

Frank Warner

$4 a gallon gas was the last straw

Lest anyone blame the current financial panic on high-risk mortgage loans alone, don’t forget that our economy generally tolerated that debt until gasoline prices passed $3 a gallon.

Judith Klinghoffer writes:

Subprime mortgages are a problem but they are not the cause of the collapse. The collapse was caused by an OPEC generated precipitous rise in oil prices. Subprime mortgage buyers could no longer pay their mortgages because too much of their pay check had to go to pay for gasoline. Yes, I know, gas prices have since declined but not before Humpty Dumpty, the American consumer, was broken.

As they did in 1973 and 1979, the oil producers pushed the price up too far, well beyond $4 a gallon last summer, eviscerating the goose (or the Humpty Dumpty) that laid their golden eggs. OPEC backed off on oil prices in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s because they had learned a lesson. Over the last two or three years, they’d forgotten that lesson.

The Chinese approach. Of course, we’d all like to cut ourselves loose from our dependency on foreign oil, and we’d like to do that with cleaner “alternative” energy sources. But don’t count on it in the next 20 or 30 years.

We’d like to hope that a densely populated nation like China might lead the way on “green” alternatives to oil. But China isn’t even considering it. It has built the giant Three Gorges Hydroelectric Dam on the Yangtse River, and it’s building a new coal-fired power plant every week. It’s also building nuclear plants and drilling for oil all over the world.

The United States is taking almost none of the measures China is taking to expand energy supplies. We keep talking about wind and solar and geothermal, as if they’re economically feasible. But they’re not. And we simply cannot switch to energy that is five or 10 times more costly than oil and coal and nuclear, and expect to compete with China for very long.

Klinghoffer has some predictions:

If all goes well, the American consumer (excluding its poorest component) will have a short memory and it will renew its reckless spending. If it turns  thrifty, the recession will last longer. Either way, the new, less confident developing world consumers are no longer likely to follow suit and the corporate world is going to be much more  risk averse.  In other words, the era of fast paced global development is probably over and the poor will stay poorer longer.

What is to be done? We must use this crisis to make major strides towards energy independence.

The urgency. Natural gas, converted to car fuel, might be a helpful compromise in the quest for U.S. energy independence. But if we don’t want OPEC pulling our plug every two or three decades, we’d better follow the Chinese energy plan, with better environmental controls. We’d better act quickly.

Frank Warner

VI Day - Victory in Iraq!

T Y R A N T S   A R E   D E F E A T E D . A P P E A S E R S   A R E   S H A M E D .
F R E E D O M   I S   T R I U M P H A N T .

The U.S.-led coalition, which chased Saddam’s invaders from Kuwait in 1991 and toppled Saddam’s fascist regime in 2003, now has secured Iraq’s first democracy. Thanks to the sacrifice and courage of millions of Americans a long way from home, the Iraqi people are free.

Let’s salute these liberators as the heroes they are. They stood for us democrats in the war for freedom, and freedom won.

Today, we celebrate. It’s Victory in Iraq Day!

Frank Warner

Angry that Lieberman opposed fascism in Iraq, Daily Kos wants Joe punished

Daily Kos’s  Markos Moulitsas was so intent on returning Iraq to fascism that he now insists the Democratic Party punish Sen. Joe Lieberman for pushing through the victory of Iraqi freedom.

Kos and the other friends of totalitarianism wanted the Senate Democrats to strip Lieberman of his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. But the Democrats under Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday they’ll let Joe keep that post.

Why is Moulitsas upset?

“To me, it was sort of a spit in the face of everybody who voted for change, to keep one of the chief architects of the Bush-McCain agenda in office, in the head if a committee in a Democratic Senate...,” he said.

“But there’s also disdain for the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush-McCain-Lieberman policies. But in a city known for tone-deafness, there clearly isn't a more tone-deaf group than the Senate Dems.

“I’m done with Reid as Senate leader.”

Why voters voted. Kos referred to the “discredited Bush-McCain-Lieberman policies.” That’s quite a smokescreen. He must have been talking about the liberation of Iraq, and yet Iraq wasn’t the voters’ primary concern in the recent presidential election. For Lieberman, Iraq was vital. His dedication to victory there is why he backed the Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain.

The economy is what moved most voters against the idea of another Republican in the White House. Ironically, had a Democrat, Rep. Barney Frank, not turned Fannie Mae into a multitrillion-dollar bad-loan factory, we might not be in the financial mess we’re in today, and McCain might be president-elect. Beyond that, American voters were tired of five years of tough fighting in Iraq, but few favored withdrawing before Iraq’s new democracy is ready to go it alone (though increasing numbers believe Iraq already is ready).

Kos wanted Lieberman to lose the job because Lieberman was committed to a secure democracy in Iraq, and Kos just doesn’t see freedom as a right to non-Americans. For Kos, slavery is fine, especially if the slavemaster is willing to insult Republicans.

Shame of history. That should look good on Kos’s resume of appeasement and selfish racism. Kos would rather have 25 million Iraqis living again in repression, genocide and endless war than support a Republican-led liberation.

Kos’s brand of vindictive partisanship will suffer the shame of history. It also is destined to disappointment, because rather than embrace despots, as pseudo-liberals like Kos do, Democratic officeholders are more likely to wake up to their new responsibilities as leaders of the Free World.

Frank Warner

America cooled during Bush administration

If January through October are any indication, this year will turn out to be the coolest year in the United States since 1997.

Why shouldn’t this make me doubt the central global warming claim that the atmosphere is getting hotter each year because of increases in CO2 emissions?

Chris Horner says the planet has been cooling the last 10 years. I’d like to see more numbers, but this is interesting, considering we haven’t reduced CO2 emissions. We should be spending trillions to fix what?

Frank Warner