Tuesday 6 September 2016
Photo, left: Cover of the just-published book JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity, by Lawrence Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior advisor; & Cumulus Media radio
Hour One
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 1, Block A: Sudeep Reddy, economics reporter, WSJ, in re: Kennedy launched an eight-year boom; the investment tax credit part was already in place in 1962; then in ’63 JFK announced he was fighting with Douglas Dillon anent lower taxes across the board; Kennedy finally with Dillon. He gave a blockbuster speech at the Economics Club of New York – he knew he needed 5% economic growth in his first year to get re-elected. Then Ronald Reagan duplicated it. . . . US GDP long grew at 3% PA.
Here in the seventh year of the recovery, a slowdown in hiring. We may be close to the end of the bz cycle; how can the Fed judge what a sustainable rate of job growth is? Complex. Disappointing ISM report and on services. Mark Skousen: Gross Output – look under the hood at B-to-B and the supply chains – these have been slumping for over five years. . . Stanley Fisher spoke admiringly of negative interest rates [eek]. . . . Taylor Rule: 2010, QE2, that’s when they should have raised interest rates 1 to 1.5 points . . . Bz tax cuts, infrastructure, education, many ways to accomplish this, but much needs to be done.
JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity, by Lawrence Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic
Book Review: Lawrence Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic's, JFK and the Reagan Revolution <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001hOiN306Cl1Z2R9sl0vwoqj2Ld51k-ZC8jENyYAtDomaA17lu9-EuXewiGcRWHxWMQ_--CDQq1ZERIAJTIBuhWctuAQBzl574HznSYsR7CEeI3o_ZCINDxLzVFAYXmm-q_qQb_3QMUemi-bwStjBMbZ3Td0hI-sbtOhjKxUvSzlYTSoVbGq3AlarlqIF2AvBcVIkTX4RyFIwb5VTpnSSquNhhqGScCET0>
By John Tamny, Forbes.com
Larry Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic remind readers that the policies of growth needn't be Democratic or Republican. With their discussion of what brought about JFK's support of tax cuts and a stable dollar in their important new book, JFK and the Reagan Revolution), they show that both major political parties have a modern history of embracing what works. They properly view economic growth as easy, while acknowledging that neither party in the 21st century has embraced the economic ideas that animated Kennedy and Reagan.
It's hard to imagine any of this nowadays, but if you were for income tax cuts in the 1970s you were an oddball. Neither Democrats nor Republicans were in favor of reductions in the tax burden. Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush both said tax cuts would unleash inflationary pressures. No less than Alan Greenspan observed about the ta- cutting economist Arthur Laffer back then that, "I don't know anyone who seriously believes his argument."
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 1, Block B: Sudeep Reddy, economics reporter, WSJ, in re: IMF is worried about protectionism . . . What the G20 ought to have worked on is GLOBAL CURRENCY STABILITY. . . . We’ve had slow growth for a while; there’s no big driver of the global economy – once was the US, then was China, now no one is at the locomotive of the train. In this situation, all it takes is one small shock to pull everyone down into recession. Hillary travelled the globe pushing for the Trans-Pacific Partnership; now she pretends it's a bad deal.
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 1, Block C: Michael J. Boskin, Hoover senior Fellow via Project Syndicate, in re: 62 days till the election. Only way to pay is a large tax increase on the broad population. Liabilities dwarf Clinton’s proposed income. LK: Hillary is e pro-recession candidate; why doesn't Trump focus on that. MJB: Trump’s tax plan has been significantly revised; lower corp tax rate to 15%, and ump’s current tax pan has been significantly Hillary’s regulatory agenda – worrisome. Cumulative impact – thousands of regs – is a very big burden on small bz. People who've been left behind by globalization. LK: Trump is good at rolling back regs. Election issues: number 1 is the economy. Immigration and trade, both around 8. Majority of population say that income inequality is very important, and do not want the govt to do anything and so gum it up worse. Kennedy was wrong in saying, “A rising tide will lift all boats” – but it does it better than any other way. She subscribes to redistribution. LK: Hillary says, “We’ve had thirty years of disastrous trickle-down economics” – but her husband was in the thick of it. Solve poverty: need education, and fathers in families, and growth. Kevin Brady’s plan would be a big impetus to growth. From 1948 to the great recession we averaged >3% growth; haven't had that since then. We need to get incentives right in our economy. We've created perverse incentives.
Clintonomics vs. Trumponomics Little more than two months from America’s presidential election. Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by five points in opinion polls, nationally and in several important swing states.
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 1, Block D: Larry Kudlow, in re: A Philip Randolph in the early 1960s: poor economic growth was blocking any economic progress for African- Americans after Brown V Board. The 1967 Civil Rights Act was limited.
Needed to break up an unholy alliance of unions; voted against tax cuts, wanted the status quo of segregation. LBJ got George Meany (AFofL-CIO) on board. See the book. Growth is essential to the American psyche.
Hour Two
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 2, Block A: Stephen F. Cohen, Prof. Emeritus of Russian Studies/History/Politics at NYU and Princeton; also Board of American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com); in re: President Obama, who has weighed ruling out a first use of a nuclear weapon in a conflict, appears likely to abandon the proposal after top national security advisers argued that it could undermine allies and embolden Russia and China, according to several senior administration officials.
Mr. Obama considers a reduction in the role of nuclear weapons as critical to his legacy. But he has been chagrined to hear critics, including some former senior aides, argue that the administration’s second-term nuclear modernization plans, costing up to $1 trillion in coming decades, undermine commitments he made in 2009.
For months, arms control advocates have argued for a series of steps to advance the pledge he made to pursue “a world without nuclear weapons.” An unequivocal no-first-use pledge would have been the boldest of those measures. They contend that as a practical matter no American president would use a nuclear weapon when so many other options are available.
Former Defense Secretary William J. Perry said in a recent interview, “It’s the right time,” noting that the pledge would formalize what has been America’s unspoken policy for decades.
But in the end, Mr. Obama seems to have sided with his current advisers, who warned in meetings culminating this summer that a no-first-use declaration would rattle allies like Japan and South Korea. Those nations are concerned about discussion of an American pullback from Asia prompted by comments made by the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump.
Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Secretary of State John Kerry also expressed concern that new moves by Russia and China, from the Baltic to the South China Sea, made it the wrong time to issue the declaration, according to senior aides in the Defense and State Departments. Secretary of Energy Ernest J. Moniz, whose department oversees the nuclear arsenal, joined in the objections, administration officials confirmed.
The New York Times interviewed more than a half-dozen administration officials involved in or briefed on the nuclear debate. All insisted on anonymity to describe internal administration deliberations on nuclear strategy.
The United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II in 1945 — the only example in history of a first use, or any use, of nuclear weapons in warfare. Almost every president since Harry S. Truman has made it clear that nuclear weapons would be used only as a last resort, so the pledge would have largely ratified unwritten policy.
Administration officials confirmed that the question of changing the policy on first use had come up repeatedly this summer as a way for Mr. Obama to show that his commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons in American strategy — and thus the risk of nuclear exchanges — was more than rhetorical.
But the arguments in front of the president himself were relatively brief, officials said, apparently because so many senior aides objected. Mr. Carter argued that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, could interpret a promise of no first use as a sign of American weakness, even though that was not the intent.
The defense secretary’s position was supported by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Moniz, two architects of the Iran nuclear deal, who cautioned that such a declaration could unnerve American allies already fearful that America’s nuclear umbrella cannot be relied upon. Mr. Trump talked explicitly in interviews about withdrawing military forces from Asia unless Tokyo and Seoul paid more for their presence, and said in March that he was willing to see them build their own nuclear arsenals rather than depend on Washington.
According to one senior administration official, Mr. Kerry told Mr. Obama that a no-first-use pledge would also weaken the nuclear deterrent while Russia is running practice bombing runs over Europe and China is expanding its reach in the South China Sea.
Mr. Obama and his national security team have rejected a second option: “de-alerting” nuclear missiles ready to fire on short notice. The fear is that in a crisis, “re-alerting” the weapons could escalate a conflict.
Earlier, Mr. Obama and his aides also decided against eliminating one element of the “triad” of land-, air- and submarine-launched weapons. The idea was to remove the missiles based in silos across the American West, which are considered outdated and vulnerable to a first strike. But the Pentagon argued strongly that the ground-based missiles were the part of the system with which they had the most assured communications, and that it was too risky to get rid of them.
In the past year, arms control advocates, including some of Mr. Obama’s former aides, have argued that . . . http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/science/obama-unlikely-to-vow-no-first-use-of-nuclear-weapons.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 2, Block B: Stephen F. Cohen, Prof. Emeritus of Russian Studies/History/Politics at NYU and Princeton; also Board of American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com); in re: extreme populist and nationalist movement in Kiev; threatened to hang Poroshenko if he moves against them. Biden “runs Ukraine” at the behest of Pres Obama, and one of Biden’s sons has a large financial stake in Ukraine. . . . (2 of 4)
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 2, Block C: Stephen F. Cohen, Prof. Emeritus of Russian Studies/History/Politics at NYU and Princeton; also Board of American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com) (3 of 4)
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 2, Block D: Stephen F. Cohen, Prof. Emeritus of Russian Studies/History/Politics at NYU and Princeton; also Board of American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com) (4 of 4)
Hour Three
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 3, Block A: Dr Lara M Brown, George Washington University; and Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune Review; in re: Trump and Clinton Begin Final Sprint Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump “ran virtually parallel campaigns on Monday as they geared up for the final stretch of the presidential race. She made nice with the news media by opening up her campaign plane and chatting with reporters. He followed suit, inviting a smaller group of reporters on to his plane and answering questions during the 30-minute flight,” the New York Times reports. (1 of 2)
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 3, Block B: Dr Lara M Brown, George Washington University; and Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune Review; in re: Trump and Clinton Begin Final Sprint Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump “ran virtually parallel campaigns on Monday as they geared up for the final stretch of the presidential race. She made nice with the news media by opening up her campaign plane and chatting with reporters. He followed suit, inviting a smaller group of reporters on to his plane and answering questions during the 30-minute flight,” the New York Times reports. (2 of 2)
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 3, Block C: Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs, in re: Analysis. Two historical great Eurasian heartland powers, Russia and China, in 2016 broke free of their centuries’-old geostrategic containment by the great maritime and rimland powers. This leads to the need for debate as to the evolution of heartland-rimland theories as espoused by Sir Halford Mackinder and others to meet evolving global realities.1
Russia has broken through, geopolitically, to its south; China has broken through to its West as well as to its East, and both processes are evolving rapidly.
The separate historical and gradual processes of the containment of Russia and China had been spearheaded by the maritime exploration of Portugal, the Netherlands, and then Britain, and finally subsumed under the leadership of the US, but it had also engaged Spain, France, and Japan, and a variety of allies.2
Russia and China have, in separate ways, now been enabled to commence implementation of their strategies to replicate the maritime powers’ control or dominance of the maritime global commons, particularly ports, straits, and choke-points. In other words, they have begun to seek command of both the land and the seas, a process likely to evolve over decades. (1 of 2)
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 3, Block D: Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs, in re: Analysis. Two historical great Eurasian heartland powers, Russia and China, in 2016 broke free of their centuries’-old geostrategic containment by the great maritime and rimland powers. This leads to the need for debate as to the evolution of heartland-rimland theories as espoused by Sir Halford Mackinder and others to meet evolving global realities.1
Russia has broken through, geopolitically, to its south; China has broken through to its West as well as to its East, and both processes are evolving rapidly.
The separate historical and gradual processes of the containment of Russia and China had been spearheaded by the maritime exploration of Portugal, the Netherlands, and then Britain, and finally subsumed under the leadership of the US, but it had also engaged Spain, France, and Japan, and a variety of allies.
Russia and China have, in separate ways, now been enabled to commence implementation of their strategies to replicate the maritime powers’ control or dominance of the maritime global commons, particularly ports, straits, and choke-points. In other words, they have begun to seek command of both the land and the seas, a process likely to evolve over decades. (2 of 2)
Hour Four
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 4, Block A: Harry Siegel, New York Daily News and The Daily Beast; in re: Conditions on Rikers Island in New York City: a “temporary” city jail where vast numbers of impoverished and, as is later proven, entirely innocent people are housed in horrifying circumstances of filth, major physical danger, and the scorn and laughter of corrupt guards and managers. One very young fellow was accused of stealing a backpack (as it turned out, he clearly did not); was held for three years because he had no funds for bail; at the end, he was so traumatized that he committed suicide. Every New York mayor for decades has known all about this and done nothing, from the sweetie-pie David Dinkins to the rapine Rudy Giuliani. So far, only the current mayor, Bill deBlasio (demonstrably a rather poor manager in other matters) has stepped forward to start to clean up the nightmare. Bravissimo, Mayor deBlasio!
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 4, Block B: Josh Rogin, Washington Post, in re: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2016/09/06/trump-and-clinton-roll-out-more-generals-as-political-props/
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 4, Block C: Robert Zimmerman, behind the black, in re: Less than a month before Rosetta’s mission ends the spacecraft’s high-resolution camera has finally located Philae in its final resting spot on the surface of Comet 67P/C-G.
The images were taken on 2 September by the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera as the orbiter came within 2.7 km of the surface and clearly show the main body of the lander, along with two of its three legs. The images also provide proof of Philae’s orientation, making it clear why establishing communications was so difficult following its landing on 12 November 2014.
The image on the right clearly shows the lander on its side with one leg sticking up, as theorized by the Rosetta engineers based on the small amount of data they had received before Philae went dead. Furthermore, the wide image at the link above shows that the lander landed exactly as predicted by data, up against a wall — in this case a large boulder — which placed it in shadow most of the time. http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/philae-found/
Tuesday 6 September 2016 / Hour 4, Block D: Robert Zimmerman, behind the black, in re: NASA’s 1960s vaporware spacesuits. NASA spent a few hundred thousand K to build a robot to test their spacesuits (power-driven articulated dummy) total waste of money, thing is now on auction.
Russia: can’t afford to do as many cargo missions each year, is working on increasing h volume per launch. Delay Angara/Vostochny launch for a year, to 2021 (by which time it’ll probably be obsolete). Meanwhile the US depends on Russia for the ISS. They make a pretty penny from the US for Soyuz freighters, so they won't cut that program till last.
China: Yanggong 2, this fall. ESA found Philae!
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