What Democrats should learn from Chinese riots

Gordon Chang writes in Forbes, "What The Riots In China Really Mean."

his week, rioting left scores dead in Urumqi, the capital of China's troubled Xinjiang region. The latest official death toll is 156, but that number undoubtedly understates the count of those killed. The disturbances are accurately portrayed as ethnic conflict--Turkic Uighurs against the dominant Hans--but they also say much about the general stability of the modern Chinese state. ...

The Chinese regime can fail because, as we are seeing in Xinjiang, the Party is losing hearts and minds, and ... a ruling organization is vulnerable when that happens. In most other parts of China, ethnic tensions are not a factor, but the Communist Party has other problems. Almost nobody believes in its ideology, and everyone can see its failings as a ruling organization. ... The Party stays in place largely due to apathy, fear and a failure to imagine that China can be better.

So this is a dangerous time for the one-party state. For three decades, its primary basis of legitimacy has been the continual delivery of prosperity. In the current economic downturn, however, it has been arguing that it deserves to remain in power for other reasons. As the Party tries to change the basis of its support, it puts its future at risk.

Now over to Jay Cost, who writes that last November's election enables President Obama to "feasibly claim some kind of mandate to get the economy out of recession."

The 2008 election is a typical American response to economic woes. The country has been voting for out-parties during economic slowdowns since 1840, when it tossed Martin van Buren out on his duff. The United States votes for prosperity. It always has. It always will.

That's why I have been so perplexed by the Obama administration's legislative strategy this year. ...

All in all, the process that produced the stimulus bill was not a good one. Rather than use his enormous political capital to construct a bill designed to confront the economic crisis head-on, the President left its construction mostly up to Congress, which is inclined to particularism and waste. ...

This moment is calling for a focus on the economy. That's why Barack Obama has the top job. It's not because of cap-and-trade, not because of health care, not because of his magnetic presence on the campaign trail - but because the economy was shrinking at a 6.1% annualized rate by Election Day. Americans were voting against recession by voting for him. This gives him a claim to a mandate, which not every President enjoys. He now has an opportunity to put his stamp on the country's economic policy in the name of recovery. Yet he's not doing that. ...

I think this is a strategic mistake. My scan of the history of American politics does not indicate that we've been governed so much by "alignments" - the systems of 1860, 1896, 1932, 1968, and so on. Instead, I see a country that votes for growth. That's the true American ideology. Left, right, or middle - the average American wants prosperity. When the majority party fails to deliver growth after having been elected to do so - the electoral consequences can be significant.

And yet the administration's and Congress's' agenda, led by the president, is a scattershot of issues and initiatives - health care and greenism predominating. None of these other agendas hold the slightest promise of turning the economy around despite the Democrats' promises of jobs "saved" or created. Stimulus spending is focused almost exclusively on infrastructure, which was tried and failed during the Great Depression, such that even its architect, John Maynard Keynes, finally decided that federal infrastructure spending is of practically no value in pumping up the economy.

Meanwhile, federal income revenues are falling while spending is skyrocketing. According to usgovernmentrevenue.com:

• 2007 total revenue: $2.568 billion, deficit, $161 billion.
• 2008: $2,524 billion, deficit, $459 billion
• 2009: $2,157 billion, deficit $1,841 billion

2010's deficit is estimated at $1,258 billion. How is the shortfall made up? By selling debt - this one-party rule is the unparalleled master of debt:



And though it did not start on January 20, the Fed is throwing money out the door faster than ever:



Sooner or later the chickens will come home to roost. Meanwhile, unemployment approaches 10 percent, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics computes that published job losses are between 150,000-200,000 lower per month than reality. Nouriel Roubini, professor at the Stern Business School at New York University, explains why and why the economy's bottom is not close.

John Stewart gets the last word:

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