Government is forging ahead with a series of raids on defenceless consumers, with a green tax on everything that moves. Needless to say, I’m opposed, on a whole host of grounds: Green tax: another raid is coming

Hi all. It’s been over a year, and I keep getting asked when (or if) I’ll ever get around to blogging again. The answer is: I’m not blogging, but I am writing. This gives me little reason to blog and some good reasons not to.

Most Thursdays (and occasionally at other times) you can find a column on technology or telecommunications at ITWeb. Every Tuesday, my column on politics, economics and (anti-)environmentalism is published at the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Branko Brkic’s dearly departed Maverick magazine: The Daily Maverick. I also still write a monthly column for Brainstorm magazine, where the then-editor Brkic first convinced me to write opinion, and where current editor Samantha Perry continues to tolerate my invariably overdue mutterings.

Here’s what I’ve been up to since I stopped blogging, written while The Daily Maverick was still in pre-launch beta testing: Going cold turkey.

Since its launch, I’ve taken up one of my favourite cudgels: Too late to cool it? This week I penned a piece on the temerity of leftwingers who claim to oppose fascism: The irony of the left. I have many ideas lined up to fuel future arguments, so keep an eye on The Daily Maverick. Moreover, it is home to an eclectic group of brilliant reporters, photographers, analysts, commentators and columnists who offer some of the finest reading matter available on the South African internet. It is a pleasure and an honour to be published alongside them.

Elsewhere, this rant on power plugs for Brainstorm magazine elicited some vigorous nodding from readers, many of whom, unsurprisingly, share my pain.

Though a promising challenger has recently appeared (here’s to you, Duncan McLeod), ITWeb has for 15 years been the backbone and daily staple of the South African tech and telecoms scene. Among my recent ITWeb columns are an opinion about which commenters appeared to miss the point somewhat: Sure, fund the SABC with tax, an argument about who might be producing primary reporting in the future: Reviving the leisured classes, and a story about a man, The chief incompetence officer, which may yet have repercussions.

Discussion of or comments on my columns are best posted on the publishers’ respective sites, not only because they buy my bread and beer, but also because I’m more likely to read and respond there. I’ll post alerts of new articles and columns over here, however, so the many friends (and enemies) I’ve made here can follow me wherever I write. Speaking of following, I’m @IvoVegter.

Of course, the archives remain intact, and contain some 218 041 words in 520 posts, with 1 331 comments. Some of the topics I tackled, or responses I promised (but never wrote) will no doubt surface again on ITWeb, in Brainstorm or on The Daily Maverick.

Thank you all for reading and, most importantly, arguing with me. You’ve been a whetstone for my blade: sharpening my arguments, but innocent of how rashly I wield them. You rock — dangerous communists included.

The US government (and popular media) has a long history of blaming oil companies for “excessive profits” when the oil price is high. They don’t particularly care that when the oil price is low, oil companies risk huge losses, or that massive, long-term industrial investment projects can only be justified by future profits. No, every time Americans suffer at the pump, or think they do, oil companies are hauled before Congress to testify about their “price gouging”.

Turns out that they make less profit than you’d think, as Sterling T. Terrell shows eloquently in an article here. It’s a must-read, because it makes the price of fuel at the pump really, really simple. Taking into account inflation and tax, and despite higher demand from growing economies, higher demand from countries buying in currencies other than dollars, and restricted supply because of draconian environmental restrictions on exploiting domestic oil resources in the US, it turns out Americans aren’t paying all that much at all. Of the excess over base costs, two thirds goes to the government in the form of taxes. The “record profits” of billions of dollars that you hear about on TV might sound like a lot, but once you work it out in terms of the value of a typical oil company’s asset base, the volumes of product supplied, the cost base, and total revenues, they’re not “record profits” at all. Even water utilities make more profit, as do many other industries.

He argues, correctly, that price caps will lead, inevitably, to shortages. But that doesn’t stop politicians, here and abroad, from expressing grave concern about the impact of the high oil price on consumers. Smoothing the political path for intervention, no doubt.

I did a crude (haha) calculation myself, using various data obtained from Stats SA and the Department of Minerals and Energy Affairs. Starting with a 1998 base price of R2.28, which is what a litre of 91-octane unleaded used to cost inland, I compared the actual price to the inflation-adjusted price. For actual price I stuck to the highest octane available, as new levels (93 and 95) were introduced. If R2.28 is adjusted by inflation (average annual CPIX), the average fuel price in 2007 would have been R4.45. The average price in 2007 was actually R6.75. For the sake of simplicity, let’s put all of that disparity down to the steep oil price rise of recent years.

But we are a global leader in the production of synthetic fuel from coal. Sorry, says Sasol, we can’t give it to you cheaper than the government price. As a result, Sasol’s after-tax net profit margins, at 17%, are much higher than the 9.5% profit margin of US oil companies. Synfuel, however, accounts for only 30% or so of its business, but generates about 55% of the company’s profits. So the profit margin of the synfuels division alone is almost twice as high again, just because its costs are independent of the oil price, but its prices are determined by government and rise as the oil price goes up. So in reality, Sasol’s synfuel makes 3.3 times the profit that a typical US oil company makes. And the US companies are the ones being hauled before public hearings!

Profits would not be an issue in a free market, but they are an issue when they are made by a private monopoly in a highly-regulated, price-controlled sector. Worse than government-sponsored profits for Sasol, however, is that more than 20% of the fuel price goes towards unnecessary taxes (as opposed to the Road Accident Fund, which for all its bureaucratic chaos and mismanagement, is a more defensible levy). Take that arbitrary tax away, and the inflation-adjusted fuel price at the end of 2007 could have been R3.73, or if you account for the disparity between the inflation-adjusted price and the actual price — reflecting, in my simplification, the recent oil price rise — it could have been R5.29. (Disclaimer: So says the back of my envelope; corrections or refinements to this rough calculation would be welcome.)

Instead of R6.75 on average for 2007, we could have paid R5.29, and that’s without any change to the Sasol price policy or reduction in the price of oil. What effect might such a massive saving in transport cost have on food prices and general price inflation? Why does the government think it’s a good idea to tax fuel, and to keep raising those taxes?

Some might argue that fuel taxes discourage consumption, and therefore they are good for the environment. But fuel demand is notoriously inflexible. Face it, you’ve got to get to work, and producers have got to get bread and milk to the supermarket, no matter what the fuel price is. So the effect of taxation on demand is fractional. If you’re going to incur costs in the economy by using the fiscus to fund environmental improvement, almost any other investment would get you higher returns than fuel taxes.

So we have the absurd situation that on one hand, the US is holding hearings in populist efforts to claw back money from companies whose prices aren’t regulated, whose operations are bound by a myriad laws, and whose profits are by no means excessive. On the other, South Africa is doing nothing about sky-high monopoly profits that are a direct gift from the government, and which raise costs for every industry sector, limit economic growth, reduce our ability to alleviate poverty and create jobs, and limit our options in dealing with the energy crisis. And neither country has considered that of all the idiotic tax ideas a rapacious government can think of, slapping 20% taxes on fuel is possibly the worst. [Correction: that should read “27.2% taxes”. 27.2% tax results in a 21.4% share of tax in the final price, which I rounded to 20% here.]

Some economists say that South Africa is not headed for recession, despite the worldwide financial crisis, the weakening global economy, the critical shortage of electricity, and the rising oil price. I’m fairly pessimistic, however. I think the electricity crisis alone will be enough to cause a recession, because its effects permeate the economy. But even if the Bolt Effect, as I like to call it, is not as bad as I surmise, I’d be far more inclined to believe the optimists if the government were less keen to skim the cream off what’s left of the economy by taxing a basic commodity such as fuel.

Meanwhile, you have until this Friday, 25 April 2008, to comment on price cap proposals (Government Gazette link in PDF) on liquified petroleum gas. I’ve written about this before. If you want to know why you can’t find that nice cheap LPG at your local petrol station, look no further than government’s insistence on regulating every price in sight.

And every time we get shortages, or price inflation, or both, we wonder why. It’s because (and Mandy de Waal’s comment yesterday is a case in point) we simply don’t trust the profit motive as a driver of efficient capital allocation. We simply don’t trust the price mechanism to regulate supply and demand. In the end, we don’t trust our people with their freedom.

But really, do go read Terrell’s article. Evidence once more that Economics 101 is, well, elementary.

Jim Fedako wrote an interesting article over at the Mises blog musing about the nature of accounting in public services. It neatly captures the problem that the public provision of a public good is not meant to be done for profit, so how do you really account for government’s performance? An extract:

Government accounting is a true oxymoron. We can determine the cost of government, but what about the value produced? What is the product? What is its value? What is the bottom line? Of course, these unanswered questions do not stop government from playing business, pretending to create value and profit for society.

[…]

[W]henever government officials speak of fiscal accountability, they are only considering approved budget versus actual spending. They are not referring to worthiness of expenditures, only whether or not they spent revenue according to the budget, with no outright theft of money. Oh, sure, the officials will claim that fiscal accountability means that money was spent on productive activities since, as expected, it is assumed by the governmental entity that only productive activities were approved in the budget. Circular reasoning.

[…]

The implication is that a governmental entity that increases its tax revenue faster than its expenditures is performing a service for its constituents; the entity is achieving a profit for the taxpayers. Conversely, a governmental entity in a deficit cycle is creating a loss for its taxpayers. So, the more a government confiscates, the better off the taxpayers. Does that make sense? Down is up, and up is down. Somewhere, somehow, we ventured down the rabbit hole.

I’m not convinced this is the final word on the subject, but it certainly is food for thought.

Over at Commentary South Africa, Laurence notes an interview with fiction writer John Grisham, in which he says:

I think what the Republicans have done in past elections is brilliant. Because, they’ve convinced a lot of people to vote for them against their own economic self-interest, and they’ve done that by skillfully manipulating a handful of social issues, primarily abortion and gay rights and sometimes gun control. And the Republicans have used those to scare a lot of people into voting for Republican candidates. It’s skillful manipulation.

Laurence’s comment is that it’s morally questionable to expect that “people should use their vote as a tool for self-enrichment, by voting for whichever party promises to give them the greatest largesse from the state treasury”. And he’s quite right.

He also points out that the Republicans haven’t exactly been true to their small-government roots, but I’d argue (and the political promises seem to bear me out) the Democrats in the US would be considerably worse.

What few on the left recognise, or what they deliberately fudge, is that the Republicans in the US consist of an uncomfortable alliance between three constituencies: economic conservatives (i.e. small-government libertarians), foreign policy conservatives (hawks who believe the best defence is superior strength), and social conservatives (consisting mostly of the religious right). Even those constituencies are split, for example the foreign policy conservatives are divided between those who believe in strength as a useful tool in the service of liberty and democracy, and isolationists who believe government shouldn’t be entrusted with anything, including foreign wars. Calling all Republicans social conservatives is a false characterisation, and betrays either the rhetoric of a shallow partisanship, or a profound lack of understanding of American voters.

It’s a step too far, moreover, to say that people vote against their own economic self-interest. In fact, if they happened to be rich, undoubtedly their votes would be considered selfish. True, “the rich”, as leftists describe anyone who has achieved middle-class success or more, often know how a society creates prosperity. (The exception seems to be the populists in the ego-driven entertainment industry.)

But classical liberals, or economic conservatives — call them what you will — might vote against government handouts even if they’re not rich themselves. Not because they selflessly forgo them (or stupidly pass them up, as Grisham appears to believe, rather patronisingly). They vote against handouts because they believe those handouts are not in their self-interest. They believe that their individual right to determine how their income is spent and their capital is allocated is in their best interest, while tax-and-spend government programmes are not. They believe that individual productivity creates wealth, and government redistribution destroys it.

It’s true, as Laurence notes, that whether Republicans have been true to this economic view of small government and low taxes is debatable. Many on the economic right (as opposed to the social or foreign policy right) would argue that it has not. That it betrayed the Reagan legacy, and the Gingrich revolution, and that this cost them a heavy price in the 2006 mid-term elections, and might cost them even more later this year.

More interesting, however, is the general mischaracterisation of the economic right, because the same generalisations are made elsewhere in the world, including in South Africa. Those who argue the economic virtues of free markets, believing that they not only encourage wealth creation, but that this dynamic creates jobs and improves the quality of life of all of society, are all too often tarred with the same brush as the religious right and social conservatives. And they, in turn, are caricatured as bigoted.

When John Grisham says economic conservatives who vote Republican do so because of “abortion” or “gay rights” or “gun control”, he’s using exactly the same rhetorical technique as someone who caricatures the South African economic right — fiscal conservatives, free marketeers, classical liberals, free traders and libertarians — as “racist” or “counter-revolutionary” or “Uncle Toms” or “elitist” or “coconuts” or “Eurocentric”. Witness the more rabid partisans: the rhetoric of the ANC Youth League, for example, is littered with examples. The thing is, not only are such caricatures often false, but they miss the economic point entirely. And the thing is, they’re designed to miss the point.

A few weeks ago, Bush announced that he had agreed with Congress to steal from the rich to give to the poor, quacking, “Stimulus! Stimulus!” This was my reaction:

When US president George W Bush praises Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi for her leadership, as he did over the “stimulus package” he proposed, you know something bad just happened. When Pelosi beams broadly, and places emphasis on how the measures are “temporary”, you just know she means, “when the election is over, you’ll be paying for it, you gullible fools”. If there’s anything more distasteful than a misguided but principled partisan proposal, it’s a waffly but expensive bi-partisan cop-out.

Yesterday, Arthur Laffer, to whose explanation of how tax works in the real world I referred, wrote this:

Bipartisanship, a notion that stands as anathema to our basic political premise of checks and balances, has resulted in a stimulus package that will do enormous damage to the U.S. economy. [Cut detailed explanation why robbing Peter to pay Paul has zero stimulus effect, but discourages production.] Whenever you observe bipartisan cooperation, hold on to your wallet and run to the basement.

His exposition of the problem of tax rebates, as opposed to tax cuts, as a method of stimulating a sluggish economy, is clear and devastating. I disagree with him on one matter, though, or rather, think he missed a relevant point that leaves his otherwise sound argument open to dispute.

Laffer argues, in essence, that rebates amount to wealth transfers, and in this case were specifically designed to benefit the poor. Inasmuch as someone has to pay for them, this has zero stimulus effect, and has substantial negative effect in terms of disincentivised production on the part of the most productive. So far, entirely agreed.

One effect of a tax rebate that is not accounted for in this explanation, however, is that it brings forwards consumption. The rebates go to people who are more likely to spend it on consumption in the short term, and are taken from people who are more likely to save their money and defer consumption. It is true that the net effect is zero (and the costs make this negative). Instead of sending out $170 billion rebate cheques, you might just as well have ordered taxpayers to spend $170 billion and deduct if from their taxes due. (At least, in the latter case, people would have kept their own hard-earned money.)

The impact of a rebate, therefore, is to borrow from future consumption to stimulate present consumption. This would dampen the effects of today’s downswing in consumption, at the expense of tomorrow’s upswing, and therefore would have an effect. No positive net effect, true, but an effect nonetheless.

Not that such inefficient redistributionist intervention is advisable, of course. By every economic measure, tax cuts are preferable to tax rebates, but ignoring the dampening effect of a shift in consumption timing ignores the key reason Nancy Pelosi grinned so broadly: the “stimulus” is “temporary”, meaning it achieves nothing in the end except redistribution. That sounds like “fiscal responsibility”, because there’s no risk that it will actually make anyone (and heaven forbid, “the rich”) more prosperous in the long term. Such perverse economic logic warms the cockles of any socialist heart.

This is a sweet little election gimmick. It estimates what Barack Obama — who clearly is already the GOP’s main target — would spend in his first term, if he were to keep his campaign promises. Even adjusted for partisan bias, that’s a pretty hefty budget. He sure wasn’t kidding when he told his California supporters that, “I suspect a lot of this crowd — it looks like a pretty well-dressed crowd — potentially will pay a little bit more. I will pay a little bit more.”

(Hat tip: Ed Morrissey @ Captain’s Quarters)

Update: Over at the Tygrrrr Express, Eric has a great post arguing that the GOP isn’t going after Obama because they see him as the presumptive nominee, but because they’d rather fight Hillary Clinton in the election, and are salivating over the prospect. It includes this lovely paragraph:

The Clintons could deck Obama’s children, take their candy, and make them cry, and James Carville would mumble, “that’s just Arkansas politics.” The republicans would get blamed.

Despite his admitted lack of evidence for why Clinton will defeat Obama, it’s a worthy theory, and expressed (ha ha) with his usual from-the-gut flair for ranting eloquent.

Two well-written items on economics caught my attention recently. They’re worth reading to get some perspective on issues that are sure to be mangled, spun, highlighted or covered up by the political candidates running for president in the US.

One is an essay written by South African tech entrepreneur, Mark Shuttleworth, a couple of weeks ago, in response to the first of the Fed’s two panicky rate cuts. With admirable simplicity, it explains the impact of using interest rates to modulate the economy, and why the US Federal Reserve, both under Alan “Maestro” Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, must shoulder much of the blame for causing the credit crunch, and for eroding economic performance with inflationary monetary policy. Shuttleworth says people who take over at the bottom and lead upwards do so even if “their voodoo had no mojo”. Which, applied to central banking, is as good an explanation as any of where the real “voodoo economics” lies.

Another is an angry editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that takes offence at the fact that the fiscal stimulus on which the Bush adminstration and Democratic leaders in congress agreed will prove to be nothing but an injection that merely postpones the pain, and increases the budget deficit for no discernable long-term benefit. Worse, the resultant deficit will be unjustly wielded as a blunt weapon in the election campaign, and could derail what should have been one of Bush’s most durable and important legacies: making his tax cuts permanent.

Last year, after being cleaned out by armed robbers, I found myself in a tight financial situation. I had a lot to replace. So it seemed sensible to forgo the convenience of a laptop, in favour of a more powerful but less expensive desktop. Turns out I underestimated the catastrophic consequences of the government’s economic policies. Turns out I now need a laptop after all, just to maintain my income. My attempt at financial prudence has cost me dearly, and all I have to show for it is a treasured presidential apology.

Companies and individuals — those who can afford it, at least — have in the last few weeks spent fortunes recently on diesel generators, uninterruptible power supplies, solar power or water heating units, low-wattage lights, gas lamps and bottled gas, battery-operated electronic devices and batteries. Larger companies may be able to handle such expenses, but M-Net’s news magazine show Carte Blanche reported on one fellow who manufactures curious metal things for the mining industry, who is more typical of the thousands of small and medium-sized businesses that create most of the growth and employ most of the people in South Africa. He estimates that generating his own power will cost him at least a million rand a month, which his business simply cannot afford. Especially when his customers are shutting down operations. He’ll probably set up shop elsewhere, or go out of business. And he’ll be joining thousands of others, employing many more, who’ll shutter the doors as a result of such costs.

So who gets to carry the can for all these expenses? I’m not big into online petitions, and believe that even if they’re sensibly constructed, they carry little or no weight with policy makers. However, the sentiments expressed in this one are worth considering: have the taxman pay for everything. Just deduct all these unexpected and unbudgeted costs from your taxes with your next tax return. It’s a far simpler solution than having everyone sue Eskom and the government for the costs and lost revenue caused by their lies and incompetence.

When US president George W Bush praises Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi for her leadership, as he did over the “stimulus package” he proposed, you know something bad just happened. When Pelosi beams broadly, and places emphasis on how the measures are “temporary”, you just know she means, “when the election is over, you’ll be paying for it, you gullible fools”. If there’s anything more distasteful than a misguided but principled partisan proposal, it’s a waffly but expensive bi-partisan cop-out.

I couldn’t do a better job of demolishing the latest fiscal abortion than Kimberley Strassel, in Bush’s Economic Surrender. This editorial doesn’t do a bad job either. Bush has failed his citizens. Bush has failed his economic principles. Bush has failed the GOP candidates. Bush has failed the cause of sane tax policy. No stimulus at all would have been a better option than this ill-disguised redistributionist handout. Arthur Laffer, he of the famous Laffer Curve, follows on with an admirable explanation of how tax works in the real world, unpolluted by deal-making politicians.

So, I take back what I said about Bush. He may still have been the sheriff in DC in 2007, but it’s 2008 now, and he’s shaping up to be a lame duck, alright.

With Fred Thompson having dropped out of the race, it’s time to weigh up the alternatives for the Republican nomination, from my perch on the southern end of Africa. What matters to me in an American president is foreign policy, of course, and economic policy. Bonus points for not being a bigot, a prig, a whinger or a preacher, but as I’ve written before, whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried, is really up to them.

Mitt Romney looks like a conservative Bill Clinton. He’s trying to be all things to all people, and that’s going to make him the lowest-common-denominator in office. I don’t trust the fellow. Mike Huckabee is a social conservative, not an economic conservative, and I’m looking for the exact opposite. Besides, I can’t take someone endorsed by Chuck Norris seriously.

John McCain is likeable enough, but neither his individual freedom record, nor his economic policy, appeal that much. He’s also lent his name to a heavy-handed and misguided campaign-finance law, and thinks government-enforced cap-and-trade schemes are just great. He’s great on foreign policy, perhaps, and might be able to appeal to the broad centre, but those are qualities that aren’t unique to him, and the rest of his positions are not what a classical liberal would want.

Which leaves Rudy Giuliani. He’s worked successfully with Democrats. He cleaned up New York, which used to be a poster city for crime, decadence and decay. He impressed on 9/11. He’s not going to surrender the free world to radicals and extremists and terrorists and fascists. And he doesn’t whine all the time about attacks from the vicious and vast left-wing wopist conspiracy.

But the clincher, for me, is set out in an excellent article on his tax plan by Steve Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine and one-time candidate for president famous for his radical flat-tax proposals. Read it, and then tell me why Giuliani shouldn’t be the GOP nominee.

2007 turned out to be a pretty good year for George W. Bush.

Late last year, voters turfed Republicans out of Congress over either lack of spending restraint or dissatisfaction with progress in Iraq or both, depending who you ask. (Robert Novak: war; Alan Greenspan: spending; Rush Limbaugh: both, and liberals suck; Reason magazine: both, and government sucks.)

This electoral loss, which meant Bush could no longer rely on a compliant Congress to send him only bills he likes, merely reinforced the view that Bush now is a lame duck, unable to govern effectively. (CNN: Is Bush already a lame duck?; Lou Dobbs: Beware the lame duck; The Guardian: ‘Lame duck’ Bush faces struggle to push through new agenda; The Telegraph: Allies desert ‘lame duck president’; Dan Froomkin: How lame a duck?)

A few voices ran against the media herd, but looked like wishful thinkers. (Christian Science Monitor: Bush’s lame-duck advantage.)

But on Friday, Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal, and Steve Huntley of the Chicago Sun-Times (apparently independently) noted that Bush hasn’t had a bad 2007 at all. Moore’s item is worth quoting in its entirety:

Bush on the Comeback Trail

Just as Newt Gingrich was the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton, so Nancy Pelosi has become a great political asset to George W. Bush. Mr. Bush is on a roll legislatively and even his poll numbers are inching up while Congress’s have sunk into the teens. There’s nothing like having a foil in Congress to rehabilitate a president. Just ask Harry Truman.

This time last year it would have been inconceivable that Mr. Bush would have a successful 2007, or that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress would have fewer than one-in-four voters approving their performance. I’ve made a list of Mr. Bush’s policy victories over the Democrats:

1. S-CHIP — Mr. Bush vetoed the Democrats’ bill expanding middle-class health care subsidies and Democrats were unable to override that veto.
2. Alternative Minimum Tax — Democrats passed AMT reform without the offsetting tax hikes they had threatened.
3. Energy bill — What was a monster at the beginning of the year is now just a fairly harmless CAFE standards bill. Environmentalists are fuming.
4. Hate Crimes Legislation — Mr. Bush blocked it. The Congressional Black Caucus is furious.
5. War funding — Mr. Bush prevailed without any pull-out date. At the start of the year this looked impossible.
6. The Budget — Mr. Bush mostly prevailed on domestic spending totals.
7. No new taxes — all of the Democratic tax proposals were killed, including tobacco taxes, hedge fund taxes and energy company taxes.

It pretty much looks like the White House ran the table. Merry Christmas, Madam Speaker.

As I’ve noted before, US economic and foreign policies matter most to me as a foreigner: whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried doesn’t keep me up at night.

During the 2004 presidential elections, I said to a friend that perhaps the US needs a presidential term under a Democrat, if only to remind the people in general (and Republican voters in particular) that the Democrats aren’t very good at low taxes, low spending, light-touch environmental regulation and effective foreign policy. Either a John Kerry in 2004, or a Hillary Clinton in 2008, would achieve this goal, and as a result, cement the longer-term rise of the GOP. It now appears that Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco leftist in charge of the ineffectual Democratic Congress, may have achievedachieve this in just two years. Especially if the Democrats nominate Clinton (admittedly, Dennis Kucinich would do too), my money’s on a Republican presidential election win just less than a year from now.

Update: Repaired a grammatic blunder in stating Nancy Pelosi’s term: either she “may have achieved it in just one year”, or she “may achieve it in just two years” — my phrasing was inconsistent, and the former may yet be undone by a sparkling Congressional performance in 2008 (when Martians may land and I may win the lottery).