Public Spending's Day Of Reckoning

Desmond Lachman

The government's profligacy could spell doom for the U.S.

History is littered with examples of major economic and financial crises in countries that have engaged in profligate public spending. These sad experiences should be raising red flags in the U.S. Public finances suggest that the country could very well be on the path to either a destructive burst of inflation or an outright government debt default.

There is little question that U.S. public finances are on an unsustainable trajectory. In scoring the Obama administration's 2009 budget, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projected that government debt is set to increase at its fastest pace in peacetime history. Indeed, the CBO projected that on present policies the net U.S. government debt would approximately double from 42% of gross domestic product in 2008 to 83% by 2019. It also projected that the U.S. budget deficit would remain at between 4% and 6% of GDP even after the economy had fully recovered.

Disturbing as these debt projections might be, there are at least two reasons to believe that they understate the public debt problem in the U.S. First, the CBO projections are based on relatively optimistic economic assumptions. Second, they do not include President Obama's costly spending initiatives in the area of universal health coverage. Adjusting the CBO's estimates for these factors would take the government debt level to well over 100% of GDP by the end of the next decade.

This, of course, could not occur at a worse time--on the eve of the veritable explosion of the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security programs and as the U.S. demographic picture turns decidedly for the worse. In the absence of bold measures to scale back the size of these entitlement programs, U.S. government debt is set to increase to around 300 percentage points of GDP by 2050.

Herb Stein famously said that if something cannot go on forever it will stop. His insight certainly applies to our presently unsustainable fiscal position. The only two real questions are when and how the end to the lack of fiscal sustainability might occur.

In principle, there are only three possible end-games for an unsustainable fiscal position. The first and optimal end-game is for the government to adopt bold expenditure-reducing and revenue-enhancing measures that might return the public finances to a sustainable path. In today's context, the government would need to credibly commit to bold fiscal measures equivalent to at least five percentage points of GDP in order to convince markets that the budget was being placed on a sustainable medium-term path. After all, the government is presently running a primary budget deficit (namely a deficit that excludes interest payments) of around four percentage points of GDP.

Sadly, the Obama administration gives little indication of bold measures to redress public finances. While it does pay lip service to the need for sound long-run public finances, it has yet to commit itself to concrete measures to cut spending or to raise taxes that might give credence to its intention to restore fiscal sustainability.

The second end-game, to which the U.S. effectively resorted in 1931 when it devalued the dollar against gold, is for the government to default directly on its debt obligations. While in principle the government could default on its sovereign debt, there are compelling reasons to think that it will choose not to go down that path. Among the more important of these is the very high immediate cost that a default would impose on the economy by dislocating domestic financial markets. Also, unlike the case of many other countries, practically the entirety of the U.S. government debt is in local currency. As such, the government always has the option of issuing its own currency to service its debt.

This leaves the third option for the government: resorting to the monetary printing press to inflate away its debt obligations. While attempting to inflate away the government's debt might delay the country's day of reckoning, one would hope that the government will not underestimate the long-run cost of such action. Unless the government was to engineer a sudden and unanticipated inflationary burst, one would expect that, in anticipation of a pick up in inflation, market participants would both shorten the duration of their government debt holdings and demand higher interest payments on longer dated debt to compensate them for inflation risk. This would imply that inflation would have to rise to very high levels for an extended period of time to make any dent on the government's debt to GDP ratio.

If there is anything we should have learned from our experience with high inflation in the 1980s, it is the damage it does to overall long-run economic performance and the particularly heavy tax burden it imposes on the weakest members of our society. We should also have learned how difficult it is to wring inflation out of an economy once inflationary expectations have become untethered. It is urgent that the U.S. define a credible medium-term strategy to place public finances on a more sustainable path; it is the only way to find a sound basis for future economic growth.

Desmond Lachman is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he has written on topics such as the U.S. housing market bust, the credit crisis, the U.S. dollar the global financial crisis. Lachman was previously chief emerging market strategist at Salomon Smith Barney in New York and served as deputy director in the International Monetary Fund's Policy and Review Department.

China’s Public Enemy

The alleged instigator of the Uighur riots doesn’t talk like a terrorist. Demonizing her may backfire on Beijing.

HUGO RESTALL

Washington, D.C.

Rebiya Kadeer is undergoing a Chinese version of George Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate.” Separatist, extremist, terrorist—China’s state-run media has pulled out the rhetorical big guns to put her beyond the pale of civilized society. By condemning her as the mastermind of last month’s riots that killed 197 people in the northwest region of Xinjiang, Beijing has transformed an exiled businesswoman and dissident into public enemy No. 1 for 1.3 billion people.

Even Ms. Kadeer’s family in China has joined the campaign—under duress, she says. After blaming her for the loss of innocent lives, several of her children and other relatives exhorted her in an open letter, “Don’t destroy the stable and happy life in Xinjiang. Don’t follow the provocation from some people in other countries.” In scenes reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, the signatories have appeared on state television to publicly disavow Ms. Kadeer.

This blood-stained image is hard to reconcile with the diminutive grandmother, dressed modestly in black, who bustles about a cramped, U.S. government-funded office a block from the White House. Ms. Kadeer may be hated by many Chinese, but the president of the World Uighur Congress inspires admiration among the nine million ethnically Turkish Uighurs in Xinjiang and two million-strong diaspora. An indication of why she inspires such strong emotions comes as she responds to the first question; she speaks with a startling intensity, perching on the edge of a folding chair.

First of all, Ms. Kadeer denies she instigated the July 5 protests in her home town of Urumqi: “I did not tell them to come out on that day or that particular time to protest. It was the six decade-long repression that has driven them to protest.”

Ms. Kadeer’s own life is a graphic illustration of that repression’s ebb and flow. In the 1980s and early ’90s, she and her fellow Uighurs benefited from Deng Xiaoping’s loosening of controls in all areas of life. Like business pioneers around the country, she overcame obstacles created by Chinese officialdom to build a market stall into a business empire encompassing retail, real estate and international trade.

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Zina Saunders

Just as difficult was overcoming the Uighur community’s resistance to the idea of a woman taking the lead. Ms. Kadeer’s nickname was djahangir, a word of Persian origin meaning one who pushes forward regardless of the consequences.

The Uighurs are a fiercely independent people who have eked out a living in the arid Central Asian lands along ancient caravan routes and converted to Islam in the 15th century. During the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), China’s Manchu rulers managed to subjugate the Uighurs and other local tribes but had to fight off periodic revolts. After the collapse of the empire, the region briefly became the East Turkestan Republic before falling under the thumb of Mao’s People’s Republic. Many Uighurs still harbor dreams of eventual independence.

Once Ms. Kadeer succeeded in business, both the Communist Party and the Uighurs embraced her as a leader. In the mid-1990s she became China’s fifth richest person, and the party gave her a seat in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, part of the country’s rubber-stamp legislature.

But the tide was already turning against the Uighurs and other minorities. New policies and appointees from Beijing led to campaigns to assimilate the Uighurs and root out all dissent. That prompted Ms. Kadeer to make a fateful choice about where her true loyalties lay. She became increasingly outspoken about policies preventing Uighurs from sharing in the fruits of economic development. Finally, in March 1997, she gave an impassioned speech before the legislature enumerating the burdens faced by her people.

Immediately the party struck back. It took away Ms. Kadeer’s positions, then destroyed her businesses. Having once held her up as a model citizen, the official media tossed her accomplishments down the memory hole. Her rise from rags to riches is now said to be the result of “economic crimes,” including tax evasion and swindles. In 2000, a court sent her to prison for divulging “state secrets” for trying to send newspaper clippings to her exiled husband in the U.S. In 2005 she was allowed to emigrate to the U.S. in return for a promise not to engage in politics, a promise she promptly broke.

Now Ms. Kadeer is trying to garner support for the Uighurs from that most elusive of friends, the “international community.” Even as other parts of China continue to liberalize, she says, repression is intensifying in Xinjiang. She explains, for example, that there is new pressure to use Chinese rather than the Uighur language: “Even during the Mao years, he was a brutal dictator of course, but at least the Uighur people spoke their own language, and at least the Uighurs were free to live in their own courtyards.” Today, the government is flooding the region with Chinese immigrants, making the Uighurs a minority in their own homeland.

Uighurs face discrimination in education, employment, religion and even the ability to move around the country or travel abroad. Farmers are losing their small plots of land and being forced into the cities. Downtown Kashgar, the Uighurs’ cultural capital, is being demolished to make way for Chinese-owned real-estate developments.

But the final straw may have been a measure ostensibly designed to alleviate poverty: “Now the authorities force young, unmarried women to go to eastern China to work as cheap labor in sweatshops,” Ms. Kadeer says. “And this is a really provocative policy because it is against Uighur people’s culture, religion and way of life to send their unmarried daughters to far-away places they themselves have never heard of. This policy has tremendously backfired.”

One such deportation (villages are required to fill a quota) provided the spark for the July 5 protests. In April, some 400 Uighur men and women were sent to work in a toy factory in the town of Shaoguan in Guangdong province. At the end of June, after a disgruntled Chinese worker circulated a rumor that the Uighurs had raped Chinese women, a mob killed at least two of the outsiders.

Video of the riot quickly circulated on the Internet within Xinjiang, along with comments by Chinese that more Uighurs should be killed, while the authorities failed to announce measures to bring those responsible to justice. The city of Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, become a powder keg of discontent.

According to Chinese accounts, protests began at around 5 p.m. on July 5 in the center of Urumqi and only turned violent more than three hours later. Whether or not this shift was sparked by the police attacking protesters remains in dispute. What cannot be disputed is that Uighur rioters killed Chinese, smashed windows, and burned cars in a shocking orgy of violence.

The intensity of the anger says much about the pent-up resentment of the population, and seems to have taken the authorities by surprise: “After six decades of repression Chinese officials had become confident they had control, and they were shocked at how quickly they lost control,” Ms. Kadeer says. “They realized what six decades of repression and fake autonomy could lead people to, and of course that’s the failure of their policies . . .” The Party’s unwillingness to accept that failure meant it needed Ms. Kadeer as a scapegoat.

The best evidence Ms. Kadeer did not instigate the riots paradoxically comes from the Chinese themselves. A documentary provided by the Foreign Ministry entitled “July 5th Riot and Rebiya Kadeer” makes it clear the Chinese were listening to Ms. Kadeer’s phone conversations to China and Europe. The most damning evidence the government propagandists could come up with is that she telephoned her relatives in Xinjiang to warn them that something big was brewing.

It seems more likely the protests were organized among residents of Urumqi using cell phones and the Internet. Immediately afterward, the government shut down all telecommunications and is only now reopening the networks.

Ms. Kadeer denies having the ability to orchestrate events within Xinjiang, but she freely admits that she maintains contact with family members and friends. “Of course we have some influence, but we did not influence what took place. There is no organization there.”

Two of her sons have been jailed, she says, in a bid to stop her from speaking out. “Because the Chinese government failed to silence me by imprisoning them, now they are blaming me for the protests to silence my voice in the world.”

The same documentary contains a disturbing clip of Ms. Kadeer’s forced confession on the eve of her release in 2005, a scene reminiscent of the war crimes confessions of American soldiers captured by the Chinese during the Korean War: “My motherland is like my parents. I was born after the Liberation, the Communist Party is an eternal benefactor. Whoever seeks to separate his country will be the enemy of his nation. . . .”

The government’s insistence that any dissent is equivalent to separatism, which in turn is evidence of terrorism, explains why Uighurs have been driven to such desperation. “When Uighurs who are not happy about policies stand up to say something,” Ms. Kadeer explains, “the Chinese label them as terrorists, separatists or extremists, and arrest them and in some cases execute them.”

Yet she does not rule out Xinjiang remaining part of the Chinese state—so long as Uighurs have self-rule within a democratic polity.

Demonizing Ms. Kadeer as a separatist may end up backfiring on Beijing. Uighurs had failed to attract as much international support as Tibetans because they lacked a figure like the Dalai Lama to speak on their behalf. Now they have a spokeswoman who is attracting angry démarches from Chinese diplomats as she travels the world.

In the last couple weeks she has visited Tokyo and Melbourne, Australia. In Melbourne she spoke at a film festival where a documentary about her life, “The 10 Conditions of Love,” was shown for the first time. After Beijing failed to convince festival organizers to withdraw the documentary, Chinese filmmakers withdrew their own movies in a move widely seen as government-orchestrated.

Ms. Kadeer is not phased by the pressure, and indeed her stubbornness is again coming to the fore. She seems to have drawn a lesson from the failure of the Dalai Lama’s softly, softly approach: Beijing only respects strength. She is determined to stir the pot, not turn the other cheek, in order to force China to the negotiating table.

Asked whether Uighurs should wait for the advent of democracy in China, she answers that by that time they may have lost their cultural identity. As difficult as it may be, the onus is on her and other Uighurs abroad to pressure the Chinese government into talks on greater autonomy: “I urge peace to the Uighurs,” she says, “they should remain peaceful no matter what happens, because the Chinese government will use any excuse to further crack down on them. So it is up to us, it is our responsibility to negotiate with the Chinese government to resolve the situation on the ground.”

But the immediate outlook for the Uighurs looks bleak. as China’s top government official, Nur Bekri, has promised to crack down with an “iron hand.” Ms. Kadeer claims that 10,000 Uighurs were rounded up after the violence.

Perhaps even more frightening is the way in which the government’s efforts to obscure the real roots of the riots are stirring up Chinese nationalism. The day after the Urumqi protests, a Chinese mob took to the streets looking for Uighurs. “The . . . Chinese government is indoctrinating its own people with ultranationalism,” Ms. Kadeer says. “It used to be the security forces arresting and killing Uighurs. Now it is the Chinese mobs themselves [who] are after Uighurs, both in Shaoguan and Urumqi. They know they can kill Uighurs and the police will turn a blind eye and just say it is a clash between peoples.”

Perhaps the worst-case scenario for China is the possibility that some other individual will emerge as the “mastermind” of the Uighur movement. As a religiously moderate and largely secular figure, Ms. Kadeer is somebody Beijing might negotiate with.

But Beijing’s efforts to portray resistance in Xinjiang as another front in the war on terror could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if Islamic fundamentalism takes root among the restive Uighurs and the global forces of jihad begin to target China. The need to avert that tragedy is the best argument for China to acknowledge its past mistakes in Xinjiang and end the campaign to demonize Rebiya Kadeer.

Mr. Restall is the editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.

U.S. Doesn't Need the Ultra-Liberal Public Option

U.S. Doesn't Need the Ultra-Liberal Public Option

By Larry Kudlow

Why do we need President Obama's big-bang health-care reform at all? What's the real agenda here? If it's really to cover the truly uninsured, a much cheaper, targeted, small-ball approach would do the trick. But on the other hand, maybe the real goal is a larger, ultra-liberal plan aimed at a government takeover of the U.S. health system.

In a recent column, Larry Elder points to an ABC News/USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation survey that shows 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care. That means up to 250 million people could be happy with their plans. So why is it that we need Obama's big-bang health-care overhaul in the first place?

In a new Pew Research Center poll, only 41 percent of those surveyed believe the U.S. health-care system needs to be completely rebuilt. In early 1993, when Mr. and Mrs. Clinton started on health-care reform, 55 percent said the system needs a complete overhaul. So something has changed.

In a new CBS/New York Times poll, 38 percent say the economy is the most important problem facing the country, 19 percent say jobs, and only 7 percent say health care. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll on the same question, 24 percent say the budget deficit is today's most worrisome problem while only 11 percent say health care.

There's more. According to the U.S. Census Bureau we don't have 47 million folks who are truly uninsured. When you take college kids plus those earning $75,000 or more who choose not to sign up for a health-care plan, roughly 20 million people are removed from the list of uninsured. After that you can remove the 10 million who are not U.S. citizens and the 11 million who are eligible for SCHIP and Medicaid but for some reason have not signed up for those programs.

So that leaves only 10 million to 15 million people among the long-term uninsured.

Yes, they need help. And yes, they should get it. But not with mandatory universal coverage, or new government-backed insurance plans, or massive tax increases. And certainly not with the Canadian-European-style nationalization that has always been the true goal of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats.

Instead, we can give the truly uninsured vouchers or debit cards that will allow for choice and coverage, and even health savings accounts for retirement wealth. According to expert Betsy McCaughey, rather than several trillion dollars and socialized medicine, this voucher approach would cost only $25 billion a year -- with no socialized medicine.

Columnist Peter Robinson, writing for Forbes.com, relates an interview with the late free-market Nobelist Milton Friedman about the inefficiencies of health care. Friedman stated simply and clearly that the cost problems in our system can be traced to the fact that most payments for medical care are made not by the patients who receive the care, but by third parties -- typically employers or government.

"Nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as he spends his own," said Friedman. He also fingered the tax code, which allows for an exemption from the income tax only if health care is employer-provided. This is a free-lunch syndrome, one that removes incentives for competition and cost-control because we're all playing with somebody else's money. And in the case of Medicare and Medicaid, caregivers have become employees of insurance companies and the government.

A new government-backed insurance system will intensify this free-lunch syndrome. It also will surely lead to a government takeover of what's left of our private-enterprise system.

But the Democratic agenda has never really been just about the uninsured, has it? And according to the Congressional Budget Office, with a price tag of $1.6 trillion in new spending, it certainly hasn't been about real cost-cutting or budget restraint. Nor has it been even remotely about true market choice and competition. Nor has it been about tort/trial-lawyer reform, which itself would be a major cost cap.

And let's not forget a spate of new tax-hike proposals that would sink economic recovery: employer benefit taxes, higher payroll taxes, taxes on soft drinks and alcohol, a VAT tax, or another income-tax hike for successful earners. And remember, existing health-care entitlements are estimated to be roughly $80 trillion in the hole over the decades to come. Wouldn't it make sense to solve these bankrupt entitlements before we layer on new ones?

So there is a strong suspicion that the Democratic agenda has always been a class-warfare, anti-business attack on private-sector doctors, hospitals, insurance firms, and drug companies. In the name of cost cutting, what's really going on is a major knockdown of profits. Liberals have always railed against the "excess profits" of insurance firms, drug companies, and physicians.

Knocking down profits and telling people what to do because government planners know best, right? Wrong. Absolutely wrong.

Lawrence Kudlow is host of CNBC's The Kudlow Report and co-host of The Call. He is also a former Reagan economic advisor and a syndicated columnist. Visit his blog, Kudlow's Money Politics.

Why We Need a Public Health-Care Plan

Without the government as competition, the private sector has little incentive to improve.

ROBERT B. REICH

Why has health-care reform stalled in Congress? Democrats, after all, control both Houses, and President Obama, whose popularity remains high, has made universal health care his No. 1 priority. What's more, an overwhelming majority of the public wants it. In the most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 76% of respondents said it was important that Americans have a choice between a public and private health-insurance plan. In last week's New York Times/CBSNews poll, 85% said they wanted major health-care reforms.

So why the stall? Mainly because Congress can't decide how to pay for it. The hardest blow came last week when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the trial-balloon bill emerging from the Senate Health Committee would cost a whopping $1 trillion over 10 years and would cover only a fraction of Americans currently without health care. According to the CBO, another tentative bill, this one coming out of the Senate Finance Committee, would cost even more -- $1.6 trillion.

That spells political trouble. Republicans who never batted an eye over George W. Bush's wild spending habits have become born-again fiscal hawks. Blue Dog Democrats are nervous about mounting deficits. Even the president admits that the flow of red ink in future budgets keeps him up at night.

Corbis

No one wants to raise taxes or even be accused of thinking about the subject. But honest politicians have to admit that universal health care will require additional revenues. The likeliest sources are limits on certain tax deductions and a cap on tax-free employer-provided health care. Would the public go along? The most intriguing finding in last week's New York Times/CBS poll was that most respondents said they would be willing to pay higher taxes to ensure everyone had health insurance.

But before we even get to this point, it's important to recognize that those terrifying CBO cost projections significantly overstate the costs. They did not include potential cost savings from the lynchpin of health-care cost containment: a so-called public option that would give people who don't get health care from their employer the choice of a public insurance plan. Why? For the simple reason that the Senate committees hadn't yet agreed on a public option. Yet without a public option, the other parties that comprise America's non-system of health care -- private insurers, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and medical suppliers -- have little or no incentive to supply high-quality care at a lower cost than they do now.

Which is precisely why the public option has become such a lightening rod. The American Medical Association is dead-set against it, Big Pharma rejects it out of hand, and the biggest insurance companies won't consider it. No other issue in the current health-care debate is as fiercely opposed by the medical establishment and their lobbies now swarming over Capitol Hill. Of course, they don't want it. A public option would squeeze their profits and force them to undertake major reforms. That's the whole point.

Critics say the public option is really a Trojan horse for a government takeover of all of health insurance. But nothing could be further from the truth. It's an option. No one has to choose it. Individuals and families will merely be invited to compare costs and outcomes. Presumably they will choose the public plan only if it offers them and their families the best deal -- more and better health care for less.

Private insurers say a public option would have an unfair advantage in achieving this goal. Being the one public plan, it will have large economies of scale that will enable it to negotiate more favorable terms with pharmaceutical companies and other providers. But why, exactly, is this unfair? Isn't the whole point of cost containment to provide the public with health care on more favorable terms? If the public plan negotiates better terms -- thereby demonstrating that drug companies and other providers can meet them -- private plans could seek similar deals.

But, say the critics, the public plan starts off with an unfair advantage because it's likely to have lower administrative costs. That may be true -- Medicare's administrative costs per enrollee are a small fraction of typical private insurance costs -- but here again, why exactly is this unfair? Isn't one of the goals of health-care cost containment to lower administrative costs? If the public option pushes private plans to trim their bureaucracies and become more efficient, that's fine.

Critics complain that a public plan has an inherent advantage over private plans because the public won't have to show profits. But plenty of private plans are already not-for-profit. And if nonprofit plans can offer high-quality health care more cheaply than for-profit plans, why should for-profit plans be coddled? The public plan would merely force profit-making private plans to take whatever steps were necessary to become more competitive. Once again, that's a plus.

Critics charge that the public plan will be subsidized by the government. Here they have their facts wrong. Under every plan that's being discussed on Capitol Hill, subsidies go to individuals and families who need them in order to afford health care, not to a public plan. Individuals and families use the subsidies to shop for the best care they can find. They're free to choose the public plan, but that's only one option. They could take their subsidy and buy a private plan just as easily. Legislation should also make crystal clear that the public plan, for its part, may not dip into general revenues to cover its costs. It must pay for itself. And any government entity that oversees the health-insurance pool or acts as referee in setting ground rules for all plans must not favor the public plan.

Finally, critics say that because of its breadth and national reach, the public plan will be able to collect and analyze patient information on a large scale to discover the best ways to improve care. The public plan might even allow clinicians who form accountable-care organizations to keep a portion of the savings they generate. Those opposed to a public option ask how private plans can ever compete with all this. The answer is they can and should. It's the only way we have a prayer of taming health-care costs. But here's some good news for the private plans. The information gleaned by the public plan about best practices will be made available to the private plans as they try to achieve the same or better outputs.

As a practical matter, the choice people make between private plans and a public one is likely to function as a check on both. Such competition will encourage private plans to do better -- offering more value at less cost. At the same time, it will encourage the public plan to be as flexible as possible. In this way, private and public plans will offer one other benchmarks of what's possible and desirable.

Mr. Obama says he wants a public plan. But the strength of the opposition to it, along with his own commitment to making the emerging bill "bipartisan," is leading toward some oddball compromises. One would substitute nonprofit health insurance cooperatives for a public plan. But such cooperatives would lack the scale and authority to negotiate lower rates with drug companies and other providers, collect wide data on outcomes, or effect major change in the system.

Another emerging compromise is to hold off on a public option altogether unless or until private insurers fail to meet some targets for expanding coverage and lowering health-care costs years from now. But without a public option from the start, private insurers won't have the incentives or system-wide model they need to reach these targets. And in politics, years from now usually means never.

To get health care moving again in Congress, the president will have to be clear about how to deal with its costs and whether and how a public plan is to be included as an option. The two are intimately related. Enough talk. He should come out swinging for the public option.

Mr. Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, is the author of "Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Barack Obama's Phoney Public Suggestion Box