Today’s ‘Read the Whole Thingers’ (051507)

Don Luskin says the near term for the economy and the markets looks very good, with troubling indicators “out there.” He also gets in deserved shots at those who are always seeing a recession just around the bend:

Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard people say a million times “the consumer is 70% of the economy” — so a month’s weak sales means a depression is right around the corner. I think not. The consumer may be 70% of the economy, but the producer is 100% of the economy. And the producer is going gangbusters.

The ISM surveys of both the manufacturing and services sectors show that business has picked up briskly. And this week’s jobless claims, below 300,000, show that the labor market is nice and tight. People are making money. People will spend that money. It will be fine.

And corporate earnings have been booming — no, surging! Consensus earnings estimates for the coming year — the expectations that form equity valuations — have been rising at a nearly 16% annualized rate over the last month.

….. The economy’s going to keep on growing and stocks are going to keep on floating higher. That’s the way things naturally work unless something interferes to stop them. And while there are threats on the distant horizon, for the time being nothing’s getting in the way of growth.

….. The good news is that, so far, more than six months since the election that swept the Democrats to power, they’ve done essentially nothing. None of the horrible antigrowth economic policies they campaigned on have been implemented.

….. The other big threat to growth is the Fed.

….. Eventually the Fed is going to raise rates. Inflation’s not going away, and the economy isn’t going to be weak enough to force the Fed to lower rates. When the rate hikes start, we’ll be at a point of real risk — because if history is any guide, once it gets started the Fed isn’t very good at stopping.

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What did politicians do to change the economics of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) to the point of their becoming a viable lighting alternative in many situations? Of course, nothing. Now that they are, Paul Jacob bemoans the trend towards forcing their use — and outlawing the incandescent light. How is it that even good ideas morph into top-down freedom-inhibiting mandates once they become politically correct?

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The story of arrested spy Leandro Aragoncillo is covered in detail at Information Week. It leaves you wonder how much more of it might be going on.

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Mary Grabar is an up-and-coming columnist worth checking out. Her “Sarkozy and Me” riff on Sunday holds nothing back. She rips the New York Times for its “objective” front-page headline and story on the French election (”Sarkozy Wins the Chance to Prove His Critics Wrong”), including an “interesting” game of translation word play the world press has played (bold is mine; a few para breaks added by me):

This harsh assessment emerges in part from Nicolas Sarkozy’s reference to youths in the Paris suburbs, who are prone to setting cars ablaze, racaille, which has been translated as “scum” by the New York Times (but as “riff-raff,” according to my dictionary).

Oh, the insensitivity!

New York Times approval or not, the French people, especially blue-collar workers and women, elected a man who called rioters something other than the liberal-approved terms, “disadvantaged,” “downtrodden,” “underprivileged”—or, perhaps, pyromania-impulse-control-challenged.

Personally, as someone who grew up with rioters all around me in Rochester, New York, in the 1960s and 1970s, I think even “scum” is much too weak a term to apply to those who joyfully destroy private property and beat up innocent people. I thought this when I was seven, when they beat up Otto, the man who lived in the apartment above his corner store. With saintly patience this middle-aged man picked out the penny candy that I carefully selected for the nickel I had earned for walking the kindergartner to school—my first paid employment.

I haven’t changed my mind about those rioters. And I would still call those who ran down the halls of my high school smashing glass and beating up teachers worse than scum. My French lesson that day was interrupted by being locked in the classroom, hearing the principal over the p.a., and then stepping over broken glass and blood, as I rushed home terrified. And I won’t tell you what I think of the rioters who beat up to near death Reginald Denny, the truck driver who happened to drive onto the wrong street after the Rodney King verdict.

What’s worse than the rioters are the defenders and jury who let the rioters go virtually unpunished. Or my teachers who used rioting as an opportunity for more “racial dialogue” in the place of the things I should have been studying in high school, like Latin or philosophy.

….. It may take the son of an Eastern European immigrant to get these spoiled children of the West on the right track. Sarkozy’s support was strong among blue-collar workers, probably the best hope for the future of the West. I hope he cracks down hard on rioters and keeps children safe from the hoodlums promoting the cause of the spoiled Marxists. I hope he bodes well for the 2008 elections here in the U.S.

So I raise a toast. It will be good to drink French wine again.

The Times and its affiliate, the International Herald Tribune, just looooove to use the word “polarizing” to describe almost anyone to the right of center. But apparently Sarkozy is especially threatening. According to Roger Cohen in the IHT, he is “a personality almost as polarizing as George W. Bush.”