Daily Read - 1/20/10

A 6.1 aftershock hits Haiti. "The U.S. Navy ship Comfort is to arrive midmorning Wednesday in the flattened capital. U.S. helicopters will ferry patients aboard, bringing relief to overloaded hospitals and clinics."

Yesterday's election in Massachusetts shows again that Americans prefer divided government over one-party rule:
'It is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights."
—Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, January 8, 1789. (quoted here)

Jay Cost at RCP's HorseRaceBlog ponders Obama's next move. He doesn't "know what Obama will do next. His political biography is so slender that none of us really do...Obama is a mystery, though he has written two autobiographies about himself."

A Washington Post article about FHA "plans to increase the amount of up-front cash paid by all new borrowers and to require higher down payments from those with the poorest credit". It's about time. Ironically, if a private bank that received TARP funds tightened credit like this, Obama would be calling for their heads.

Meanwhile, the government can't get around to letting banks know how much capital they are required to hold: "The U.S. Treasury Department has missed the first deadline in its work to draft tougher capital standards" (Reuters, here) Until the government figures this out, banks will keep holding extra cash, and lending less. Of course, Obama will call for their heads.

The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins on more Washington duplicity (here):

"Crediting themselves with mending the crisis, President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ruled that banks were on a solid footing because private investors would provide fresh capital and banks would be free to book profits and earn their way out of trouble.

That was then. Today it's politically convenient to bash banks for the very same profits, and to punish the very same investors with a new Obama bank tax. First, the government coaxes banks into buying back the government's TARP stake (and therefore government's share of future earnings). Then it turns around and helps itself to a chunk of those earnings anyway.

Say it isn't so - "President Barack Obama's top goal as he enters a second year in office is to lift U.S. job creation and revitalize the economy, the White House said on Tuesday" (Reuters, here). Can't you just stay out of the way?

NBC is going to pay Conan O'Brien $40 million to go away. Isn't that taxpayer money going to pay for a mistake made by fat cat CEOs? GE owns NBC, and GE received government bailout money. Where's the compensation czar when you need him?

Megan McArdle at the Atlantic on the cost of health care reform: "anything Obama does to "pay" for this program is something that cannot be done to "pay" for our growing Medicare problem. Slashing provider reimbursements, Medicare advantage, etc, if it is done, is something that should be done in order to close the projected 3.4% budget gap in 2019. Once we've used them for new entitlements, we are less able to pay for the entitlements we've already got." This was posted in September, but worth thinking about today.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says to ignore their "poorly substantiated" prediction that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, but "don't think it takes anything away from the overwhelming scientific evidence of what's happening with the climate of this earth."