President-elect Obama became President Obama today. It is worth taking a minute to reflect on the nature of his office. Exactly what has he gotten himself into?
Good men rarely become president. Good people don’t even want to be president. Once in a while, one slips through the cracks. George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Grover Cleveland (not kidding). Maybe Barack Obama will be added to that list some day. It’s too early to tell.
I have some doubts. Here’s why: becoming president requires…
Great point by Carter Wood over at the excellent Shopfloor blog of the National Association of Manufacturers. Building on my point at NRO about the tension between infrastructure projects and existing regulation, Carter says:
There is good reason to fear that any significant project that promotes both quick economic investment and long-term competitiveness — say, modernizing and expanding the nation’s electrical grid — will immediately be hit by litigation lasting years and years and years. In which case the only thing being…
In his speech on the stimulus package Thursday, President (Elect) Obama promised to double alternative energy use in three years. How likely is this?
Well, for a start we don’t use much alternative energy to begin with - slightly less than 7 quadrillion BTU of the 101 quads we use as a nation annually. Of those 7, 2 quads are related to the use of wood as fuel, something which is not normally viewed as environmentally friendly, and 2.5 are hydropower, an energy…
I was cheered this morning by the news that Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago is to be the next head of OIRA, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. While not someone a libertarian conservative would necessarily appoint, he is possibly the best choice possible that Obama could have made, and his friendship with the President-elect suggests he will have some power. In particular, Prof. Sunstein has been a very strong opponent of the Precautionary Principle, which is the…
Major newspapers around the country including the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal are urging President-elect Barack Obama to pass the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement in the lame duck session. The Los Angeles Times said it bluntly, “It’s time to stop playing games with a trade pact whose economic and political benefits are good for both nations.”
Some reports of the meeting between the president-elect and President Bush said that the president had pushed for the trade agreement in exchange…
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