Charles Krauthammer today shows why he's much better writing on foreign policy than on economics. He proposes a gas consumption tax to create a $3 at-the-pump floor, in order to spur consumption. To keep it revenue-neutral, any money collected would be refunded through payroll or income tax refunds. I've been thinking this over, and I can't see any way that this does anyone any good.

First of all, promising to refund the amount of this tax is like promising to put Social Security in a lockbox. What you're really doing is giving the government a chance to create some complicated refund formula that I guarantee will leave it holding more of my money.

But let's say the government tries to play fair. Think about who's going to do the most to conserve. It's going to be the middle class, in particular, the well-educated middle class who always responds better to these incentives, and who has the means to buy a new Prius even if they didn't really plan on it for another 5 years or so. The guys as the very top don't care. The guys at the bottom couldn't scrape together enough to replace that 1973 Malibu anyway, which is why they're still repairing it, and this tax isn't helping them to save the money to do it.

You can't link the savings to income tax. That wouldn't be fair since the wealthly would get all that money back and they don't drive any more than I do. Also, the guys at the bottom end would get slaughted by this thing, and they may not pay any income tax to begin with. You can't link it to payroll tax. If I'm upper-middle, or even middle-class, much of my income isn't covered by payroll tax, but I'm probably doing the most to conserve.

There's another problem with one of Krauthammer's assumptions. Suppose I'm a Saudi prince. Now, I'm Jewish, so I'm a Saudi prince who can't get a visa to visit him home country, but bear with me. Why on earth should I not restrict output to force the price up to $3 a gallon? Well, you say, that may not be the optimal supply-demand curve for you. No, it may not be, but while I'm producing at $2 a gallon, gas is being consumed at $3 a gallon. I'm not reducing consumption by raising the price, because the US Government has already done that for me. All I'm doing is making sure I don't leave anything on the table for it or the oil comapnies to take.

Which goes to Krauthammer's last point. The money won't be recycled through the American economy, anyway. Even if it were, why should we believe that the government can cycle it better than or more wisely than consumers can, in the long run?

In fact, the first couple of paragraphs provide the solution to the problem, and we've been there before:

In the mid-1970s, the twilight of America's oil innocence, the average new American car was a monster weighing 4,000 pounds. The oil shocks induced belated rationality into American oil habits. By 1981 the average car was down to 3,202 pounds.

By the mid-'80s, rational consumer reaction to high prices -- home insulation, fuel-efficient appliances and lighter cars -- had actually solved the energy crisis. We had OPEC on the run. In July 1986 oil plunged to $7 a barrel.

We've solved this problem before. Why not again?

Trunk over at Powerline believes that we're reliving the Nixon Era, and compares Wallowing in Watergate to Wallowing in Abu Ghraib. Evidently, the Washington Post's Executive Editor, Leonard Downie, Jr., agrees. From today's online chat about the Post's coverage of Abuse Ghraib:

Arlington, Va.: Looks like trial by media to me. I don't intend to make light of what happened in Iraq, but don't you think that The Post is just feeding a lynch mob? It would be better to wait for a court to establish what happened, and go from there.

Leonard Downie Jr.: It is our First Amendment responsibility to inform the public as fully as possible regardless of what happens in courts or, in this case, inside the military justice system. To cite just one example, that is what we did with Watergate.

Hindrocket, over at Powerline, finds the idea that large numbers of people claim that the economy is worse for them personally to be perplexing. I think it comes down to gas prices.

First of all, gas prices really putting a crimp in people's budgets. If a family has two cars that get, say, 25 mpg each, and both parents work, they could easily end up spending another $1 a day in gas. Which doesn't seem like much until you compare it to their other monthly bills. Cable. Phone. Electricity.

Then, on top of that, gas prices are ubiquitous. We may not know how much a gallon of milk costs, but you see the price of gas roughly 437 times on the way into work. Big, black and white letters that used to start with a "1", and not so long ago started with "0", now start with "2".

Some of use are old enough to remember when prices shot up through $0.55 a gallon. One gas station in my neighborhood was caught so off-guard, they didn't have any "5"'s to put up, and had to turn the "2"'s backwards. Fortunately for them, prices quickly went to 60 cents, so the embarassment was short-lived.

People remember the last time this happened, and it wasn't pretty. Yes, cars may get better mileage. Sure, oil may be a much smaller part of our economy. I know, it's absolutely a smaller part of the family budget. Thank Greenspan, the Fed knows that printing money probably isn't the best way to control inflation.

But prices are still more likely to go up than down for now. There's a sense that this is going to get worse before it gets better. "Jobs" are proxy for these fear. "Jobs" are a proxy for a "tight job market" which promise a relatively easy answer for the average worker. Now that comfort is gone, and the unease, not yet turned to fear, is strong again.

So, by the way, is the apparently ingrained American resistance to arithmetic. I heard an NPR story this morning that mentioned a woman from Kansas who had put herself on a budget to afford a trip out to California to see her sons. Now, at $2 a gallon, plus 2 cheap motel stops each way, and meals, and she's looking at almost $500. If you want to count wear-and-tear on the car, the extra 3000-mile oil change, the sand-blasting to get the bugs off the windshield (I've driven through Kansas in the summer, folks), and she might want to think about this little thing called an "airplane ticket."

She's so convinced that driving is cheaper than flying, that's she'll put herself on a budget to spend two nights each way in the Bates Motel, super-sizing herself to save money, and paying extra for the AAA gold plan so when the car breaks down 100 miles from the nearest exit she doesn't have to pay an extra $1 a mile for towing.

This woman isn't stupid. Maybe she just likes driving. I do. But I think it's more likely that the local paper, or even the regional one, hasn't bothered to tell her that the reason millions of people will take off their shoes and put their computers in a separate tub this summer is that it costs less.

They're too busy with Abu Ghraib.

When even the American Prospect is worried about President Bush making inroads into the Jewish vote, you know there's something to it. Then Ken Baer goes and proposes a strategy for Kerry to hold onto that vote:

He can make inroads with the pro-Israel community by continuing to emphasize his personal connection to the country as well as his personal conviction in doing anything necessary to win the war on terrorism. In addition, Kerry needs to stay out of the weeds -- especially detailing the role he wants the United Nations and the international community to play in Iraq and in fighting terrorists (no matter how necessary both may be) -- and use tough language that makes it clear that the same man who did not hesitate 35 years ago to kill America’s enemies in a war that he didn’t believe in will not hesitate to kill terrorists in a war that he does.

Ken Baer is a former speechwriter for Al Gore, so I guess it makes sense that his first instincts would be for the candidate to deny his true self. Barring a drastic Bush reversal on Israel, leading Jews to ask if Kerry can be any worse, is anyone really going to buy this?

Jews will still vote mostly for Kerry, because Jews aren't single-issue voters until someone's burning crosses in their front yards. President Bush could move the embassy to Jerusalem, send the 101st Airborne to secure Rafah, and personally buy the concrete to build a fence 100ft above and below the ground, and it still wouldn't be enough for some people out here. (That picture, by the way, is about 20 years old. Vanity, thy name is....) If Kerry has a Jewish strategy, it has to lie not in trying to persuade people that his name in the Old Country was Herzl, but in trying to persuade them that it doesn't matter.

By now, pretty much anyone who's read this space for any length of time knows that my b-school ethics professor is an old-time Democrat, who once headed the party up in this state. Yesterday, it was our turn to talk about the environment.

For some reason, the question was framed as "Green by Conviction," or "Green When It's Profitable." For some reason, "Green Only When the Government Makes You Scream in Pain," didn't make the list. He actually went so far as to tolerate, without comment, a slide arguing in favor of Malthusian population dynamics, which nobody believes any more. Evidently, the environmental question, at least in this class, isn't played between the 40-yard-lines, but well within the Left's field goal range.

With most cases, there's some sort of flanking maneuver available. Not with this case. The only option left was to tunnel underneath and explode a mine from below. So of course, I had to ask about the quality of the research, and the tendency of environmental advocacy groups to do science by press conference rather than in peer-reviewed journals.

There are a million answers to this, many of them covered by my friend Ronald "Beetle" Bailey, here, in today's WSJ. Arguments for which he has no answers, but which appear to have no perceptible effect on his opinion, or on the range of debate allowable in class.

He's also an ex-Presbyterian minister, who still claims to love the sinner (capitalism) while despising all the mayhem it works throughout the world. Now, he seems to have transmitted his religious fervor to the environment.

Julian Simon once asked an audience of his whether or not there was any data, any data at all, that he could present to make them question their opinions. When met with silence, he apologized for not being dressed for church.

I'm not happy having to come to class dressed for church.

Maybe this is why South Carolina kept Fritz Hollings as its junior senator for decades.

Every president since 1947 has made a futile attempt to help Israel negotiate peace. But no leadership has surfaced amongst the Palestinians that can make a binding agreement. President Bush realized his chances at negotiation were no better. He came to office imbued with one thought -- re-election. Bush felt tax cuts would hold his crowd together and spreading democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote from the Democrats.

Nurse, I know it's hard to get the Senator to take his meds, but you see what happens when you don't...

Does anyone wonder why Ms. Bryant hasn't been called to testify? Time to recycle this oldie but goodie.

No matter how dumb he was, officialdom was always dumber

Mark Steyn

National Post

When last in this space, 10 days ago, I was writing about whether political correctness kills. This was apropos the 9/11 nutters: "Everything they did stuck out. But it didn't matter. Because the more they stuck out, the more everyone who mattered was trained to look the other way."

I didn't know the half of it. The other day, Johnelle Bryant, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, gave an interview to ABC News in which she revealed that Mohammed Atta and three other September 11th terrorists had visited her Florida office seeking government loans. America, it seems, came this close to having the World Trade Center incinerated at the taxpayers' expense.

Mr. Atta swung by in May, 2000, and Ms. Bryant remembers quite a bit about it. "At first," she says, "he refused to speak with me," on the grounds that she was, in his words, "but a female." After he'd reiterated the point, she pulled rank: "I told him that if he was interested in getting a farm-service agency loan in my servicing area, then he would need to deal with me." Throughout the hour-long interview, he continued to dismiss her as "but a female."

Ms. Bryant says the applicant was asking for $650,000 to start a crop-dusting business. His plan was to buy a six-seater twin-prop and then remove the seats. "He wanted to build a chemical tank that would fit inside the aircraft and take up every available square inch of the aircraft except for where the pilot would be sitting."

Hmm.

When she explained that his application would have to be processed, Mr. Atta became "very agitated." He'd apparently been expecting to leave the office with cash in hand. "He asked me," recalls Ms. Bryant, "what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat and making off with the millions of dollars in that safe." Try this with your Royal Bank loan officer -- I find it works every time. But Ms. Bryant replied politely that there was no money in the safe because loans are never given in cash, and also that she was trained in karate.

His fiendish plan stymied at every turn, Mr. Atta then spotted an aerial view of Washington hanging on the wall behind her. He told her he particularly liked the way it got all the famous landmarks of the city in one convenient picture, pointing specifically to the Pentagon and the White House. "He pulled out a wad of cash," says Ms. Bryant, "and started throwing money on my desk. He wanted that picture really bad."

She told him it wasn't for sale, but he only tossed more dough at her. "His look on his face became very bitter at that point," Ms. Bryant remembers. "He said, 'How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it,' like the cities in his country had been destroyed?"

Hmm.

Mr. Atta then moved on to other prominent landmarks in other American cities, and enquired about security at the World Trade Center. Ms. Bryant had a Dallas Cowboys souvenir on her desk, and he asked her about their spectacular stadium and, specifically, the "hole in the roof."

At that point, the chit-chat turned to Mr. Atta's own country, which he claimed was Afghanistan. "He mentioned Osama bin Laden," she says. "He could have been a character on Star Wars for all I knew." So Mr. Atta helpfully explained that this bin Laden guy "would someday be known as the world's greatest leader."

Alas, the interview ended badly from the terrorists' point of view when Ms. Bryant informed her visitor that the loan program is for farm-based projects and a crop-dusting business did not qualify.

A few weeks later, another September 11th killer showed up, Marwan al-Shehhi, seeking half-a-million bucks supposedly to buy a sugar-cane farm. Accompanying him was Mr. Atta, but he was cunningly disguised with a pair of glasses and claiming to be someone else entirely, attending in his capacity as Mr. al-Shehhi's accountant. Sportingly, Ms. Bryant went along with the wheeze. I'm reminded of the time my sister tried to wangle her boyfriend a day off work. She called up the receptionist and, adopting a fake accent, told her that she was the dentist's secretary and he needed to come in immediately for critical dental work. "My God, that's terrible," said the receptionist. "I'll tell him at once." She then buzzed through to the boyfriend: "Stewart, Karen just called pretending to be the dentist's secretary. Do you think she needs to see a doctor?"

But Ms. Bryant didn't think Mr. Atta was sick. The safe-breaking, the throat-slitting, the fake specs ... why, he was just being charmingly multicultural! "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from," she says. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could." Unfortunately, his imaginative business plan for a crop-duster capable of crop-dusting Texas was frustrated by the unduly onerous restrictions and bureaucratic torpor of the USDA program. By late summer, Mr. Atta and his chums had concluded the government was never going to buy them their own twin-props and they'd have to make do with the aircraft that were already up there. So they switched their flight training courses from small planes to large jet simulators, and told their instructors to skip all that takeoff and landing stuff.

Ms. Bryant has come forward now because she thinks "it's very vital that the Americans realize that when these people come to the United States, they don't have a big 'T' on their forehead." No, indeed. In some cases, they have a big "T-E-R-R-O-R-I-S-T" flashing in neon off the end of their nose. Ten days ago, I pointed out that these fellows made virtually no effort to blend in. They weren't in "deep cover," they were barely covered at all. Atta was the brains of the operation, and he did a marginally better job of it than Leslie Nielsen would have. His one great insight into Western culture was his assumption that he could get a government grant to take out the Pentagon. Yet no matter how dumb he was, officialdom was always dumber.

"If they watch this interview and they see the type of questions that Atta asked me," Ms. Bryant told ABC News, "then perhaps they will recognize a terrorist, and make the call that I didn't make." Meanwhile, here are some signs to look for:

1) He threatens to cut your throat.

2) He talks about the destruction of prominent landmarks.

3) He enquires about security at said landmarks.

4) He hails Osama bin Laden as a great leader.

There'll be more of these stories, tales of men virtually screaming their intentions but up against a culture sensitivity-trained into a coma. A stump-toothed Appalachian mountain man would get slung out on his ear if he was that misogynist and abusive in a government office. In a Hollywood movie, the guy refusing to deal with the little lady and demanding to see the real boss would be a sexist Republican Congressman. In the new motion-picture blockbuster The Sum Of All Fears, the Islamic terrorists of Tom Clancy's novel have been replaced with neo-Nazis -- a safe villain that won't offend our delicate multicultural sensibilities.

The good news is we're up against idiots. The bad news is we're also up against the suppler idiocies of current Western orthodoxy. Thus, the U.S. government's new plans to photograph and fingerprint visitors from countries "believed to harbour terrorists" have already been attacked by Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights honcho who's never met an Arab dictator she didn't like. Islamists want to kill us in the name of Islam. Regrettable, but there it is. If we pretend otherwise, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Islamic Society of Britain might be nice to us. But, speaking personally, I can't say I care. If Islamic lobby groups throughout the Western world really want to hitch their star to a bunch of psychopathic morons, good luck to them. It's a free country. Hey, we'll even give you a government grant to tell us how racist we are.

Thomas Lifson over at American Thinker suggests that the administration is trying to control the UN Oil-for-Food scandal so that it can use any potential revelations as leverage over our friends the French, Germans, Russian, and the UN bureaucracy itself. When we need their help, in whatever capacity we choose, we'll be able to get it at a relatively low cost.

While I consider American Thinker to be one of the best "thinker" blogs around, I'm afraid that Mr. Lifson may be praising the administration for purchasing a tactical victory at strategic cost. Consider the possibility that only Iraqis, who don't matter to the UN, and conservative Americans actually care that half of the civilized world, and virtually all of the self-appointed arbiters of the international order, were on Saddam's payroll. Why on earth would we want to do anything to bolster the credibility of this organization?

Note that this support comes at the mere price of blackmail. We don't demand organizational reform. We don't demand fairer rules, better accounting, or even the heads on a platter of the people who were busily stealing from the Iraqi people they profess to love so much. We don't even demand the elimination of the insidious bloc system, which implies that neighborhoods are more powerful than values, permanently and progressively locks out Israel from meaningful participation, and promotes the illusion of pan-Arabism that helped put us in Iraq in the first place.

We don't demand any sort of permanent change, because the system is essentially unfixable. It's even an open question as to whether blackmail, which requires some level of shame, can work on people who clearly have none.

No, what we're liable to be left with is a rehabilitation of the Sick Man of Turtle Bay. The UN was shown to be irrelevant, unwilling to enforce its own dicta, because it was so thoroughly corrupted by the very countries it was supposed to be watching. We should keep the UN on the sidelines, where is barely belongs, and certainly not risk investing it with moral authority it so clearly doesn't deserve.

For years now, the University of Iowa business school has been running an electronic market where you can buy shares of a candidate. The shares come in two flavors: chance of winning, and percentage of vote total. This market has been among the most accurate of "polls" in the last few elections. For some time now, the Bush/Kerry race, despite the ups and downs in the polls, has been pretty steady, at Bush 52%, Kerry 47%. The last week or so, though, has seen the Kerry numbers climb up from about 46% to 48%. Here's the graph.

A couple of points. The movement is small, and it hasn't broken through the previous high, so it may not be significant. Also, Bush's numbers haven't deteriorated at all. Finally, sometimes it take a while for people to believe that a candidate really is vulnerable, and then the deterioration happens quickly. This happened to Bush pere in 1992, and should serve as a warning.

At the same time, Tradesports, which did a nice job with the California recall election, only has a winner-take-all proposition. The numbers there show Bush's chances settling in at about 55%, after peaking just after Saddam's capture. They're basically moving sideways at this point.

Just to show you how far my head has been into my books this last week, it was through the Intermountain Jewish News that I found out that Alan King had died. He was relatively young, 76. King got his start in the Catskills, but was part of the great stand-up era of the 60s and 70s. He had been talking about comedy as much as actually doing it in recent years, but was still one of the funniest guys around.

I remember seeing him debate, in 1986, at the Oxford Union, the question: "Resolved: the British are Funnier than the Americans." He and Steve Allen showed up for the Americans; Jasper Carrot and John Wells defended the Brits.

For some bizarre reason, PBS chose Bud Collins to do the superfluous color commentary. It must have been his association with Wimbledon. Both Oxford and Wimbledon are British and snooty, and Collins had had plenty of practice saying nothing in-between the real action, so he was the obvious choice.

Steve Allen strolled out, and did about 10 minutes of the dry humor, his best, that had the Brits in paroxysms of chuckles. But King stole the show. Not only did explain the difference between "funny" and "witty," he demonstrated it brilliantly. When he said, "funny," emphasizing the "f" and holding his hands out, you knew the American humor was something visceral rather than intellectual. You also knew you were in for 10-15 minutes of the funniest stuff you'd ever heard, and that you'd find out just how well the Brits could laugh at themselves. (Not well enough; the proposition carried handily.)

I hadn't laughed so hard in years. King said (among many other things), "The British are not only not funny, they're carriers. Because Canada isn't funny, Australia isn't funny, and South Africa certainly isn't funny."

From the New York Times, from the days when it wouldn't reflexively have taken the other side:

Mr. King's best example of the English lack of a sense of humor was an incident that he said truly happened when he met the Queen, and she said, ''How do you do, Mr. King?'' Mr. King, of course, replied: ''Fine. How do you do, Mrs. Queen?'' She did not laugh, and the English are not funny, he declared resolutely, waving an unlit cigar at the crowd as though it were stick.

''Other nations are not funny, like England, but they don't sit around like this all night making an issue of it,'' he continued.

King tried to do serious stuff now and again, and had the face to pull it off, as in Casino, but that wasn't really his style.

We've been losing a lot of these guys in the last few years. Enjoy them while they're around.