Thursday, February 28, 2013

Essays From the Heartland: Number 1 - Elections Have Consequences


ESSAYS FROM THE HEARTLAND
NUMBER ONE

ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
or
10 THINGS THAT WILL HAPPEN
AS A DIRECT RESULT OF
OBAMA’S 2012 RE-ELECTION

November 13, 2012 and February 28, 2013

There is nothing inevitable about the course of history. World power does not march inexorably from East to West, the end of the American century is not certain, and the Marxist dialectic is not a natural law. Anybody who thinks otherwise has not studied history. However, events do have consequences, and we can predict some consequences as more probable than not, and such predictions are of course more accurate the shorter the horizon. Several things may not be as certain as night follows day, but they are almost certain to happen as a direct result of the re-election of Barrack Obama as President of the United States and the Democratic control of the Senate. I began writing this the week following O’Bama’s re-election  and nothing that I thought then seems less likely 3 months later – quite the contrary. I invite you to critically examine my analysis, and refute any of these predictions.

1.     Obamacare will go into effect, and will fundamentally change the structure of health care in the United States:
a.      Last year, the US Supreme Court declined to declare Obamacare unconstitutional. The last best chance to prevent the enactment of Obamacare died on November 6, 2012. It will begin to go fully into effect in 2013. The winners in Obamacare are those people who did not have access to healthcare before Obamacare. The losers are everybody else.
b.     The fundamental premise of Obamacare is to bring more medical care to more people in lower income groups. Obamacare is designed to neutralize the advantage in access to goods and services that derives from higher income and wealth, in favor of “redistributing” that access to people who have less income and wealth. However, there will not be a radical increase in hospitals, doctors or nurses. This inevitably means that people and resources will be stretched to serve more people. It is a simple mathematical equation: the same supply divided by more demand equals less healthcare for each person so that more people can get some healthcare. As doctor shortages begin to appear, appointments to see the doctor will be more difficult to make, and you will have to wait longer. Appointments will be pushed further down the healthcare chain to nurses and physician’s assistants.
c.      This is exactly why the law includes a 15 person panel to determine what services will be provide under Obamacare to what persons. Whether or not you wish to call them a “death panel,” their indisputable purpose is the rationing of available health care. It is inescapable that this requires judgments on the value of medical services to different groups of people. This is triage on steroids. There have already been reports that there will be “age limits” on such things as joint replacements. In this competition, older people who are already consigned to a kind of limbo at the end of their lifespan will lose to younger people who still have more “value.”
d.     Obamacare will destroy the system of employer provided health insurance. Businesses with 50 or more employees must provide healthcare under this law: the number of companies with 49 employees will increase dramatically, throwing more people who would previously have had employer provided healthcare into the public healthcare system. (In the 1980’s, Italy enacted a law that companies of 50 or more had to hire as their next employee a disabled person selected by the government; predictably, the number of 49-person Italian companies skyrocketed.) Larger businesses either have to provide healthcare or pay a fine: the $2,000 fine is much less expensive per person than the current cost of providing healthcare insurance, and the cost of healthcare has been the fastest rising cost of doing business for years. In a price competitive environment where overhead and operating costs make the difference between profit and loss, which includes most businesses, more and more companies will elect the more predictable and less expensive path, drop healthcare and force their employees into the public healthcare system. With comprehensive control and administration, legal ownership becomes irrelevant, because ownership is really the right to use and control. The government will have “market power pricing” through Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare to control both what services are offered (by what services the government will pay for) and what their prices will be (by how much the government will pay for the services), with little if any effective competition from the private sector. When you control both delivery of services and the price of services, there is no need to be the owner or employer of the service delivery system – in fact, it is preferable if you do not, because then you also have a fall-guy to blame for poor delivery of services.
e.      The average quality of healthcare in the United States for those who had healthcare before Obamacare will tend to decline. This is always the effect of dilution. It has never been otherwise. When you “democratize” something, the standards never rise, they always decline to the lowest common denominator. Obamacare itself requires cuts in Medicare and reductions in Medicare reimbursements. With cuts in reimbursements, more doctors will resist accepting Medicare schedules, and therefore, Medicare patients. With more governmental control of pricing, average incomes of doctors and nurses will also likely decline. I am no expert on running a medical business, but the only way I can see this not happening is if there are enough new patients who previously were not paying at all but who will now pay at government mandated rates to offset those that previously were paying higher than the government mandated rates but who are now forced into government rate-set programs. And if that does not happen by itself, physician incomes will likely be reduced by government fiat. There are already proposals being floated in Congress to attack this only area of high cost in medical care that Obamacare has not addressed. As this happens, fewer highly qualified people will elect to shoulder the sacrifices of decades of education and training necessary to be a physician, and those that do will likely retire earlier; and/or, the standards of admission to the medical profession will be loosened to meet the demand, and the average quality of a physician will decline. On way doctors can try to protect their incomes from the pressures of increased numbers of patients with government-controlled fees is to increase the use of  “below physician level staff” to see and treat patients, allowing the physicians to charge higher fees as specialists. This will result in fewer general practitioners (already in short supply) and patients seeing nurses and physician’s assistants rather than physicians.
f.      Although the average level of care for those who had healthcare before Obamacare will decline, the cost of that healthcare will increase. Many of those on Medicare will forego treatments that are no longer covered. The CBO has already projected that the average cost for a family of 4 for a private healthcare premium under Obamacare will exceed $20,000. Hardly anybody can pay that. This will force more and more people onto the government run plan – which is really the objective of Obamacare, to have one universal healthcare system run by the government – and steadily reduce the pool of people available to be insured by the private sector. No pool, no insurance: the essence of insurance is pooling. The not-very-much-talked about limit on incomes for executives of health insurance providers of $500,000 per year should give you a clue of what Obamacare truly intends.
g.     Obamacare will reduce the incomes of lower income employees. Under Obamacare, coverage is mandated for all employees who work 30 hours or more per week. Conversely, coverage is not required for employees who work 29 hours per week. To avoid the costs of Obamacare, employers will adjust their workforce by reducing the number of employees who work 30 hours per week, which will mean that many employees who are now working 40 or more hours per week will be frozen at 29 hours per week, nominally a 25% cut in income. This will begin happening with a vengeance in late 2013 before the 30 hour rule becomes effective in 2014.  It is already happening in the food and retail sales sectors.
h.     The ultra-rich will not be affected. While the middle class and the upper middle class will find health care harder to get and probably not as good, those who have the resources will still demand the highest quality medical care, and there will be plenty of countries that will gladly capitalize on this opportunity. Medical centers of excellence will arise outside the United States in the Caribbean Basin (the Caymans, the  Bahamas, etc.), where people with money can go to obtain the medial care they want without government interference. The trend that began with things like exotic cancer cures or “experimental” surgeries to cure diabetes in places like Mexico, and the training of doctors in secondary medical schools in places like Aruba, will accelerate. Those extra-US health care centers will become very, very prosperous.
i.       Medical innovation in the US will tend to reduce. A government run healthcare system will target the “obscene profits” of pharmaceutical companies. The price of Pfizer’s stock has already fallen dramatically. Without Obamacare, the average time to bring a new drug to market has doubled from 6 years to 12 years, and now costs $1.2 billion (Source: Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America). Lower drug prices mean lower profits, and lower profits mean less R&D, and less R&D means fewer new drugs being brought to market. Obamacare imposes a tax on medical device manufacturers (hip and knee implants, for example), and the Obama administration has openly threatened the medical device manufacturers if they try to pass the tax along to consumers in price increases. If they can’t pass the price along, they will make less in profits, lower profits mean less R&D, and less R&D means less fewer innovations in medical devices.
2.     Taxes will increase: A central plank in the Democrat platform is to raise taxes to reduce deficit spending – although they refer to it as revenue enhancement, not taxes. Republicans bluster that they will stand firm against raising taxes on anybody, but the history of past government shutdown standoffs teaches that they will likely cave rather than risk the political consequences of being blamed for the “fiscal cliff.” The Republican “solution” is pure sophistry: they claim they will not raise tax rates, but they will close loopholes and reduce credits and deductions. Either way, more money will be transferred from private individuals to the government, and that is a tax increase. Regardless, the Republicans have already lost the battle against tax increases. As part of the “fiscal cliff” compromise, the “Bush tax cuts” have ended for higher income earners, and taxes on dividends and capital gains (“passive income”) have been increased. The “holiday” on payroll tax deductions was allowed to expire on December 31, 2012, and all wage earners have already been hit with a 2% increase in their payroll tax deductions. On average that works out to a $960 increase on every wage earner in the country, or $1,920 on a two income family. The Obamacare “mandate” (which Justice Roberts characterized as a tax) of 2.5% on an individual’s AGI if they decline to buy insurance is estimated at an average cost of $3,400. Obamacare also increases the Medicare payroll tax on those making more than $200,000/year (or couples at $250,000), the new excise tax on medical device manufacturers and another one on indoor tanning salons, among many other limitations on deductions such as a higher threshold for medical expense deductions and new caps on various kinds of tax reduction devices such as HSA’s. The states also have budget deficits they need to close. The total tax burden consists of sales taxes, real estate taxes, income taxes, and fees on everything from license plates to tolls to park admissions that are not called taxes. If the recessionary environment continues, there will be pressures to increase all of these sources of revenue from those who are still paying. Already, 50% of the adults in this country do not pay federal income taxes. The pressure will only increase on the remaining taxpayers as more people go on unemployment, disability, government retirement pensions, and social security. The Republican Governor, House and Senate of Virginia just passed the biggest increase in taxes that state’s history. Close to home, the new Governor of Indiana was elected on a platform of enacting a 10% state income tax cut to spur growth, but members of the legislature from both parties have declined to move on that pledge because they fear the looming costs of Obamacare that will hit later in the year. In the fight over sequestration, Obama has threatened – of course, you guessed it - higher taxes. Plainly, it is as certain as certain can be that taxes will increase over the next 4 years. This is not a good thing. Ever since the Great Depression, it has pretty much been Gospel that raising taxes in a recession is a very, very bad idea, because it will further depress the economy. Raising taxes will have the same effect on a barely growing economy that is teetering on a “double dip” recession.
3.     Government spending and deficits will not be reduced: It is well known that deficits under Obama are already three times what they were under George Bush – and this is before Obamacare hits. There are no proposals from the Obama administration to reduce government spending in the next four years – none, nada, zilch. Instead, they propose to move toward a more balanced budget by increasing taxation. This administration is an unapologetic devotee of Keynesian economics, believing that the way out of a recession is government spending to stimulate the economy. It has been tried twice in the past four years, and the economy is still lethargic, to be kind, with the slowest recovery from recession in history. (Growth is currently projected at 2.55 maximum for 2013, before considering the impact of the payroll tax hikes, which many predict will shave ½% off that already anemic projected number – and that is if nothing goes wrong and all goes well!) The administration is discussing the need for a third “economic stimulus” through “quantitative easing”, which is basically just newspeak for printing more money. Either way, deeper recession or a third quantitative easing, it means greater government spending and larger deficits. In 2011, Standard and Poors lowered the rating of the United States debt for the first time in history, from AAA to AA+. The other two major credit ratings agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, have recently all but promised that they will also reduce the US credit rating in 2013 due to out of control deficits. This problem is not limited to the federal government. California is a financial basket case, and other states like Illinois and New York are not far behind. Does anybody really believe that these states, all Democrat strongholds, will be allowed to go bankrupt and default on their pension and other obligations? And to prevent that, where will they- where must they - turn for help? The only place possible is the federal government, which will use tax dollars collected from residents of other states to bail out our profligate cousins. If you believe spending, taxes OR deficits will be reduced in the next 4 years, you probably also believe in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
4.     The value of the dollar will decline, and inflation will increase: Do deficits matter? Aren’t we only borrowing from ourselves? Surprisingly, among economists there is not a consensus as to whether government deficits do, or do not matter. There is a school of thought that increasing the supply of money, including credit – which definitely is happening, that is what quantitative easing is – increases prices, i.e. is inflationary. Vietnam-era deficits were certainly blamed for increasing inflation. While there are those who contend that deficits do not cause inflation, I don’t know anybody who argues that printing more money reduces inflation: that result would certainly be counter-intuitive. Lay people have an instinctive belief that you can’t go on spending without paying your debts forever. But let me ask you this: if deficits don’t matter, why doesn’t the government just print whatever it needs? For that matter, why collect taxes at all, why not just print more money? It’s because deficits do matter at least when they begin to impact your credit rating or the perceived value of your currency. If you have any doubt about whether over the long term huge government deficits matter, please consider what is happening in Greece. Without getting into the arcanery of when deficits may be good, and regardless of whether you agree that Obama’s polices cause inflation (I come down on the side that they do), two things are clear: 1) those policies are going to continue without change, because they are Keynesians; and, 2) you can’t just run the printing presses forever because that will eventually affect the perceived value of the currency and our credit rating. Paper money has no intrinsic value. Its only value is in its perceived value as a medium of exchange (that is why some people still argue for a gold standard). If countries or people lose their belief in a currency as a medium of exchange because it’s all just “worthless paper money,” the economy is in deep, deep trouble. So far, the Federal Reserve has (almost miraculously, in my view) suppressed raging inflation in face of printing bucket-loads of money through very low interest rates, and because most of the money that has printed has round tripped without stopping at Go, without ever hitting the economy in the form of individual spending, and is sitting in bank accounts of the banks and of large corporations (and to a much lesser degree, individuals) hoarding money. Despite this, inflation is increasing, and the Fed is also now talking about increasing the interest rates. The Fed has said that it will increase interest rates only when the unemployment rate falls to 6.5% and the economy is growing at 2.5%, which they say will mean the US economy is safely out of danger from falling back into recession. However, a counter school is pressing for raising interest rates sooner, fearing that 4.5 years and more of artificially low interest rates will lead to uncontrolled (read raging) inflation. The consensus is that the Fed will not raise interest rates any time soon, which is a major reason why the stock markets are hitting all time highs. The fear is what happens when the inflation lid begins to come off. But, is the lid already coming off? Yes. Although our government says that inflation as measured by the CPI is running at less than 2%, for you and me that is a completely specious number because the CPI excludes food prices and energy. It would be nice if we could really run our household budgets without worrying about food and gasoline prices, wouldn’t it? The reality is that both food prices and energy prices are increasing much, much faster than 2%. Gasoline costs us double (or more) what it did 4 years ago. As I write this, the average price of gasoline at the pump is back up to $3.80/gallon, and moving higher. Have you tried to get out of McDonalds for less than $8.00 lately? Four years ago, you do it for around $5. Massive increases in the wholesale costs of food have not fully worked their way into the weekly grocery bill in part because retailers do not want to be the first to pass on increases and lose market share – but it is happening. I trust my own experience at the check out counter more than Labor Department statistics, which report food inflation from flat to 5% per year, at an average of about 1.6% per year. I want to know where they are shopping! Instead, let’s compare prices on individual food items as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics year-over-year from 2010 to 2011: hamburger up 11.1%; butter up 27%; coffee up 16%; potatoes up 7.1%; lettuce up 5%; chicken up 4.3%; milk up 2%.  This was when the economy was anemic, supposedly growing at about 2%. The simple fact is that our money is buying less: that is inflation. Hotel rates are projected to increase this year by 3-9%. Coffee, corn, steel and many other commodities are ready trading at record highs. Some are predicting a 10% increase in the cost of clothing in 2013 because of the record high price of cotton. That is inflation. The reality is that the government cannot indefinitely control inflation except by putting us back into recession, which they are going to avoid like the plague. And if the Fed adds fuel to the inflation fire by increasing interest rates, what will happen to the stock market? That is the next nightmare. The market recently dropped 3 figures just on rumors of an increase in the Fed rates. And amidst all of this comes the administration’s proposed hike in the minimum wage by over 24%! ($1.75/$7.25). This alone is inflationary, but perhaps not greatly so – but the unappreciated impact on the economy are escalator clauses in union contracts that require an adjustment of union pay scales in response to an increase in the minimum wage. That will be hugely inflationary. One thing for certain if the increase in the minimum wage passes, and right now it seems sentiment is in favor of that happening – many of those 29 hour a week jobs will become 0 hour a week jobs. In addition, over the past 10 years, the strength of the dollar against the major world’s currencies has dropped a median of 24% (exactly that amount against the Chinese yuan, where so many Americans buy products through Wal-Mart). Over the past 5 years, that figure is only negative 3%, buoyed by increased value against the Indian rupee (!), the Mexican peso and the troubled Euro. When the dollar drops against foreign currencies, our dollar can buy less of their goods and services – so domestic inflation and a dropping international exchange rate is sort of a double whammy. It is a virtual certainty that our currency will continue to lose value. But not to worry, for now at least you can still go to Mexico and drown your troubles in cheap tequila! It has always been true – always – that the longer the cure to economic woes is delayed, the more difficult the recovery becomes. Inflation is coming, like a freight train. The only questions are how fast and how high, and it could get just plain scary.
5.     The economy will hardly grow, and unemployment will remain high: Even the most aggressive prognosticators are projecting growth only in the 2% range. Any world upset could reduce that rate. Increased taxes will tend to reduce that rate. That kind of economic growth cannot generate jobs fast enough to significantly reduce the unemployment rate. Touted increases in jobs created each month have not been large enough to cover the net increase in new people entering the workforce each month. The true unemployment situation is much worse than the +/- 8% “unemployment rate” that is reported each month.  The reported unemployment rate excludes those who have stopped looking for work (dropped out of the job seeking market because they cannot find a job). It does not include retirees who would like to (need to) keep working as “unemployed.” It does not include those who have taken part time jobs as “unemployed.” It does not include those who have taken any job, despite having had and/or being qualified for a much better paying job, the so-called under-employed, as “unemployed.” This will not change until the economy begins growing again at about twice its current rate. That is just not going to happen any time soon. See points 2 and 3 above.
6.      Constitutional rights under the 2nd Amendment will probably erode: The movement to limit the right of US citizens to keep and bear arms took a hit when the US Supreme Court ruled a scant few years ago that yes, that is what the 2nd Amendment protects. But, a renewed assault on the 2nd Amendment was virtually guaranteed by the slaying of 26 school children in Newton, Connecticut by a deranged whack job, coupled with the return of Congressman Gabrielle Giffords to Congress (shot in the head in Tucson in 2011). In the infamous words of Rahm Emmanuel, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Heeding his advice and leading the charge, Obama issued 23 Executive Orders and has proposed other gun ownership controls. The apparent target of this renewed effort is “assault weapons.” Ms. Giffords has started a new organization “to raise money to fight gun-rights groups” and do something about “weapons designed for the battlefield” on our streets. No less than the Vice President of the United States has opined during a televise interview that home shotgun is adequate for self-defense, so there is no need for citizens to have an assault weapon. Mayor Bloomberg of New York is funding pro-gun control advertisements in 20 markets including Tucson, Roanoke, Denver, Milwaukee and Washington DC, calling for a ban on guns that have certain cosmetic features and high-capacity magazines. Governor Cuomo has already signed legislation in New York State that bans military-style semi-automatic firearms and magazines that hold more than 7 bullets. Ironically, no assault weapon was used at Newton or Tucson. Those killings were accomplished with pistols. Further, automatic weapons (which include “assault rifles”) have been regulate since 1934.  And, anybody who knows anything about firearms recognizes that a shotgun is probably a better weapon choice for close quarters mass mayhem than an assault weapon. Regardless of which side of the “gun debate” you are on, these are all facts. It is also a fact that there is now an enormous effort underway to additionally restrict and limit the availability of guns to American citizens. How it will all turn out is open to question, because there are already Constitutional challenges to these measures making their way through the courts, a future President could roll back (or ad to) the Executive Orders, and many states have already passed or have legislation pending to invalidate any similar federal laws or regulations. However, history teaches that in a power struggle between the federal governments and the state governments, the federal government is likely to prevail.
7.     Organized labor will have increasing influence: Considering that organized labor represents a smaller and smaller proportion of the population, and considering that more and more states are enacting “right to work” legislation, that directly hits unions in their pocket books, this prediction is down right weird. However, it is fair to say that the heavily unionized urban populations of New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and similar large cities provided Obama his margin of victory. Unions spent hundreds of millions of dollars electing Democrats at the state and federal level in 2012 (over 91% of union political contributions went to Democrats), and its payback time. Especially after they lost the fight (and the recall, and the court battle) in Wisconsin stripping public sector employees of certain bargaining rights, and several more states have passed Right to Work legislation, I would expect the unions to resume trying to push through “card check”, eliminating the secret ballot, and for that mater, elections, in union organizing campaigns. Pro-business forces seemed to win a victory when the Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously invalidated as un-Constitutional President Obama’s recess attempt to pack the National Labor Relations Board with pro-union activists, but the NLRB has (amazingly) chosen to simply ignore that ruling pending appeal and conduct “business as usual.” Regardless of how that turns out, Obama will eventually get some more pro-union members appointed to the NLRB.  The bare knuckles gutter fights over union power at the state level will continue, but at least at the federal level, the unions have the edge – at least until the next election.
8.     American military power will decline: Already, 48% of the American people think the US is weaker than it was 4 years ago; 24% think we are stronger, which leaves 28% in the duh category. Stating it differently, 67% of those who have an opinion think the US is weaker now than it was 4 years ago: that’s called consensus. Regardless, in the next 4 years, US military power will get weaker (still?). Our current policies will accelerate this trend. During and since the Clinton Presidency, the Democrat Party has consistently (tried to) cut the budget of the American military to pay for social programs. That is also part of their 2013 agenda. In the age old debate between guns and butter, the Democrats are opting for butter. The new Secretary of State is John Kerry, the new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel: need I say more? The Navy has the fewest ships in service than it has had in decades, it has already cancelled the deployment of the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman to the Persian Gulf and the carrier Abraham Lincoln sits next to it at the Naval Station in Norfolk instead of beginning its past due scheduled 4 year overhaul and refueling, sequestration cuts will hit the Defense Department budget hard, Obama has reversed the decades old US military doctrine of being prepared to fight war on two fronts, and Obama famously “whispered” to the Russian President that he would be able to be more “flexible” in arms control negotiations (read, US reductions in force) after the election. In fact, within the first day after the election, Obama personally contacted the United Nations to urge fast commencement of arms control treaty talks. Obama is implementing a pullout of Iraq and a draw down in Afghanistan, based on a domestic political timetable regardless of the situation on the ground over there. The mullahs in Iran have to be very happy. This and Hagel, too? Allah Akbar!  Patton famously said, “There is no substitute for victory.” Did we win? I must have missed it. In the past 6 months, 3 of our acknowledged very best generals have stepped down, one in “disgrace” over an extra-marital affair, one to take care of his ailing wife, and the most recent for unspecified reasons. What’s really going on here? It is impossible to compare defense budgets for a clue as to where we are headed as our federal government under this administration has not passed or adopted a budget in years, but what actually is being spent can provide that clue. In his 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, President Obama stated that nuclear reductions under the 2010 New Start Treaty depended on a modernized nuclear infrastructure, and specific funding targets were established to modernize and replace the nuclear triad over the next 10 years. Going into the third year, that funding is already $770 million short of what was promised. Senator Corker says, “It’s likely that additional cutbacks will appear in the fiscal year 2014 budget request. Indeed, virtually all nuclear-modernization programs are now delayed by at least two years, or in the case of a new ICBM, have yet to be announced.” Military power is not an absolute thing: it is a relative thing, in comparison to our rivals. While the US is reducing is navy and is not modernizing its nuclear force, and it’s acknowledged best-of-the-best generals are disappearing, North Korea and Iran are collaborating in their race to develop ICBMs - and so far nothing we have done has deterred them. China is steadily building its military along with its growing economy, and making increasingly noisy claims to islands owned variously by Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam. The news today is full of stories about Chinese cyber attacks against the US, and the lack of US response. Russia has also been flexing its muscles: they invaded Georgia (during the Bush administration) and stole two provinces, and they are still there. The list can go on. Relatively speaking, the US is not a strong as it was just a few years ago. I don’t see any indication of anything reversing that trend.
9.     American influence in the Middle East will continue to decline correspondingly with the increase in power of fundamentalist Islamists: The Obama administration Middle Eastern policy has been characterized by distancing the US from Israel, courting the surrounding Islamic states, and reducing military commitments to the region. This will continue. How is it working so far? Syria is in the midst of a civil war. Hamas and Israel are shooting at each other, Israel is again threatening to invade the Gaza Strip and Hamas is trying to bring in Egypt.  Hamas is the dominant ruling faction in the Gaza Strip, is supported by Iran, and has reportedly been emboldened by the rise of the supposedly “moderate” Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt, which replaced Mubarak as the governing faction there. Facts: Hamas is designated by the United States as Foreign Terrorist Organization; Hamas was founded in 1987 and according to its founding charter is a branch of the Islamic Brotherhood; the Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by an admirer and supporter of Adolf Hitler, and actively supported the Nazis in World War II; and, all the founders of Al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, were members of the Islamic Brotherhood. Moderates? Compared to what? The Islamic Brotherhood President of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi recently called on the US to release the “Blind Sheik” who was the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, issued the fatwah that justified jihad against the US and inspired Osama Bin Laden. Whatever the Egyptian Brotherhood ultimately turns out to be, Mubarak and his predecessor, Sadat, both clearly supported the US. Sadat was assassinated after making peace with Israel, and under his successor, Mubarak, it was clear that Egypt was not going to war with Israel. This is no longer so. On September 11, 2012 there were riots directed at the US Embassy in Cairo (and in Yemen and other places in the region, as well). Speaking of Al Qaeda, the US consulate in Benghazi was attacked by an Al Qaeda affiliate, was burned and the American ambassador and three other Americans were murdered; nobody has been forthcoming about what really happened in Libya, but now arms from Libya have turned up in the hands of Al Qaeda insurgents in Mali. Since the assassination of Osama bin Laden, relations with Pakistan appear to be at an all time low. Meanwhile, during the Obama administration Turkey’s secular government has tilted toward an Islamic state, is no longer working closely with Israel, and is taking a more assertive role with regard to Syria. Even where the US stands with respect to Israel no longer clear. Recently Israel’s status as an “ally” has been openly questioned. The US has put itself between the proverbial rock and a hard place: if it backs Israel, any progress from Obama’s overtures to the Islamic states will be trashed; if it does not back Israel, US relations with Israel will be trashed. There really is no middle ground. Given history, straddling the fence is a move toward Hamas. The US has attempted to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons through sanctions through the UN, but is opposed in that effort by both Russia and China. The US has announced a pull out from both Iraq and Afghanistan without having achieved stability or even a secure clearly pro-Western government in either country. During the past four years, the Obama administration took a hands-off approach to protestors in Iran, declined to put “boots on the ground” in Libya, and has not taken an open position on the civil war in Syria other than “Assad should go.” God knows what is actually going on behind the scenes. However, it seems clear that the position of the US has not improved over the past 4 years and that these policies are likely to continue for the next four years. Couple that with a (documented) perception that Obama is a weak President, with the undeniable reality of declining US military power, with the withdrawal of US forces from the region, and with a continuing weak American economy, and the only reasonable conclusion can be that the waning of American influence in the Middle East will accelerate.
10.  The American standard of living will decline: Higher inflation, reduced quality of health care, and a slow growth economy. QED.

During the 2008 election, Barrack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” America. Welcome to the dawning of the new America.

I think I have depressed myself…