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Opinion
Reece Terry, publisher
Mark Boehler, 4A • Wednesday, September 10, 2014 editor Corinth, Miss.
Questions give clues of budget narrative JACKSON — Writing a state budget is not only about numbers. It’s also about narrative. With most Mississippi lawmakers seeking re-election in 2015, everyone who helps write the budget, or simEmily ply votes for it, will be eager Wagster to tell constituents that the Pettus spending plan is one of the strongest and most efficient Capitol Dome in state history. Lawmakers who vote against the budget, or who see their ideas ignored, will criticize the plan as woefully inadequate to cover the needs in education, health care or other areas. It’s a narrative told with slight variations every year. Lawmakers’ tone is often selfcongratulatory, regardless which political party is in control. The Republican-led Joint Legislative Budget Committee will hold public hearings Sept. 30 through Oct. 3 to consider state agencies’ spending requests for fiscal 2016, which begins next July 1. Work continues during the final months of this year with the release of two proposed budgets for FY16 — one from the committee and one from Republican Gov. Phil Bryant. The legislative session begins in early January. If things run on schedule, the full House and Senate will adopt a budget by late March and the session will end in early April. To prepare for the upcoming hearings, the Budget Committee asked agency leaders to answer 26 questions. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the questions, many of which revolve around a theme of efficiency. Lawmakers ask how agencies have spent money they received in the past, and how taxpayers were served by that spending. Several questions reveal clues about possible policy debates and the budget narrative that will develop the next few months. One question asks agency directors if they’d like “freedom from the Personnel Board,” which means lifting civil service protection from some state jobs and making it easier to hire and fire workers. Among the other questions: “11. Over the past 5 years (FY 2010-2015), how much have your costs risen as it relates to state health insurance and the employer contribution for PERS?” Bipartisan narrative: Insurance and the Public Employees Retirement System are expensive and important to state government workers. Lawmakers want to show they’re taking care of pocketbook issues for those workers, who are very likely to vote in the 2015 elections. “12. Speaking of health insurance, what impact — in terms of increased costs, increased regulatory burdens, or both — has Obamacare had on your agency?” Narrative: Republican leaders, joined by conservative Democrats, say the federal health overhaul is expensive, burdensome and doomed to fail. Democratic leaders say Republicans are so determined to make political points by criticizing President Barack Obama that they’re willing to reject billions of federal dollars that Medicaid expansion would bring to one of the poorest states in the nation. “13. Are there any state statutory or regulatory changes that would help your agency operate more efficiently and spend taxpayer dollars more wisely? Are there regulations coming from the federal agencies that are affecting your budget? Explain what those changes are and how they would help your agency.” Bipartisan narrative: Legislators want to show they’re willing to cut through burdensome regulations. “22. If we are faced with having to fully fund MAEP this year and you are faced with budget cuts, what are you going to cut?” Narrative: The Mississippi Adequate Education Program is supposed to give school districts enough money to meet midlevel academic standards. The formula has been fully funded only twice since it was put into law in 1997, both times during election years. Fully funding K-12 education could mean saying no to spending requests from other government programs. (Daily Corinthian columnist Emily Wagster Pettus is a writer for the Associated Press based in Jackson.)
Prayer for today Heavenly Father, may I live that my spirit may never feel lost from thee; and when I am in great need of thee, even unto death, may I know that thou art very near. Amen.
A verse to share “And they that sat at meat with him began to say within themselves, Who is this that forgiveth sins also?” Luke 7:49
Obama’s delusions dispelled? Hope for change “If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart,” President Obama told Democratic mega-contributors last month in one of the 400plus fundraisers of his presidency. But not to worry. “The world has always been messy,” he said. “In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.” Like being beheaded by Islamist terrorists. Or having your country invaded by Russian soldiers. The president gives the impression of trying to reassure not so much his audience, as himself. For this is not what he expected for his presidency. The world was not supposed to fall apart. It was supposed to come together, as he assured thousands at Berlin’s Tiergarten in 2008 that their wall had come down because “there is no challenge that is too great for a world that stands as one.” So one hopes that, as Obama left the fundraiser trail and headed to NATO ally Estonia and the NATO summit in Wales, he arrived stripped of the delusions he carried into his presidency. They include, in no particular order, the following: ■ The delusion that
the world would love the United States once the first black president – a “citizen of the Michael world,” as he Barone called himself in Berlin Columnist -- took office. But symbolism important to American voters has less purchase overseas. The elites and chattering classes of other nations are always going to resent the enormous asymmetrical power of the United States and complain about its policies. ■ The delusion that once the United States withdrew all its troops from Iraq, tranquility would reign in the Middle East. The idea was that Middle Eastern Muslims were provoked by Americans’ bossiness and blunders. That takes no account of the longstanding hatreds, desires for revenge and religious fanaticism present in the region. ■ The delusion that the key to solving the problems in the Middle East is to arrange a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. The problem here is that there are no Palestinian interlocutors willing to make or able to deliver on a promise to live in peace with Israel.
■ The delusion that the hatred of Islamist Muslims for the United States would disappear once Barack Hussein Obama (as he referred to himself in his June 2009 Cairo speech “to the Muslim world”) was its leader. Like an American politician recalling his Italian or Polish grandmother, Obama assumed that having a common background would be appealing. The fact that his father was a (very unobservant) Muslim and that he attended Muslim schools cut no ice with Islamists. ■ The delusion that relations with Russia were ready to be reset now that the cowboy who provoked Vladimir Putin was back in Texas. The fact, as George W. Bush belatedly understood, was that Putin, seething with resentment, was bent on restoring something like a czarist or Soviet empire. His aggression in Georgia in 2008, and in Ukraine this year, were the result not of misunderstanding, but of deliberate intention. These delusions may or may not have been dispelled. But Obama’s recent speeches suggest that Obama still clings (bitterly?) to others. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” he likes to say, “but it bends toward freedom.” Not necessarily, unfortu-
nately, and one headed to Estonia should understand this. In the summer of 1940, Hitler and Stalin were allies, in control or threatening to take control of most of the landmass of Eurasia. Lithuania and most of Poland went to Hitler, Latvia and Estonia to Stalin. Britain was under bombardment and Franklin Roosevelt, bucking public opinion, was only beginning to send aid. The triumph of the West was not inevitable. What if Hitler had not invaded Russia in 1941? What if America had not joined the war? George Orwell, in England during the Blitz, described one possible outcome in 1984. That outcome was avoided not by appeals to history but by application of military force. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died in that effort. Military force and the credible threat thereof are necessary to bend the arc of history the right way. Let’s hope Obama is no longer deluded about that. (Daily Corinthian columnist Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.)
Obama strategy: Success or failure? Those people who say that President Obama has no clear vision and no clear strategy for dealing with the ISIS terrorists in the Middle East may be mistaken. It seems to me that he has a very clear and very consistent strategy. And a vision behind that strategy. First the strategy – which is to get each crisis off the front pages and off television news programs as quickly as he can, in whatever way he can, at the lowest political cost. Calling ISIS a junior varsity months ago accomplished that goal. Saying before the 2012 elections that “bin Laden is dead” and that terrorism was defeated accomplished the goal of getting re-elected. Ineffective sanctions against Iran and Russia likewise serve a clear purpose. They serve to give the illusion that Obama is doing something that will stop Iran from getting nuclear bombs and stop Russia from invading Ukraine. This forestalls the massive and enraged outcries there would be if the public were fully aware that he was doing nothing serious
Reece Terry
Mark Boehler
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editor editor@dailycorinthian.com
Willie Walker
Roger Delgado
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enough to prevent either of these things from happening. Generations of Americans Thomas yet unborn Sowell may curse us all for leavColumnist ing them hostage to a nuclear terrorist Iran. But generations yet unborn do not vote, so they carry no weight with Barack Obama. There is always someone else to blame for whatever goes wrong in the Obama administration. Supposedly the intelligence services had not kept him informed about how imminent the ISIS threat was. But others who received top-secret briefings by the intelligence services say otherwise. Some people are wondering how someone of obvious intelligence like Barack Obama could be so mistaken about so many things, especially in deadly foreign policy issues. But there is no way of knowing whether anyone is succeeding or failing without first knowing what they are trying to do.
If you assume that Barack Obama is trying to protect the safety and interests of the United States and its allies, then clearly he has been a monumental failure. It is hard to think of any part of the world where things have gotten better for us since his administration began. Certainly not in Iraq. Or Iran. Or Libya. Or China. Things went from bad to worse after Obama intervened in Egypt and helped put the Muslim Brotherhood in power. Fortunately for Egypt the Egyptian military took the Muslim Brotherhood out of power. If you start from the assumption that Barack Obama wanted to advance America’s interests, this is truly an unbelievable record of failure. But what is there in Obama’s background that would justify the assumption that America’s best interests are his goal? He has, from childhood on, been mentored by, or allied with, people hostile to the United States and to American values. His mentors and allies have all been very much like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, even if they
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were not as flamboyant. Barack Obama has succeeded in reducing America’s military strength while our adversaries are increasing theirs, and reducing our credibility and influence with our allies. That is completely consistent with his vision of how the world ought to be, with the West taken down a peg. We are currently at a point where we can either kill as many of the ISIS terrorists as possible over there – where they are bunched together and visible against a desert background – or else leave the job half done and have them come over here, where they will be hard to find, and can start beheading Americans in America. Everything in Barack Obama’s history suggests that he is going to leave the job half done, so long as that gets the issue off the front pages and off the TV newscasts. (Daily Corinthian columnist Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com.)
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