The government of Hungary voted to cut income taxes Monday to pull itself out of recession, and America's media for the most part ignored it.
At the same time, German chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing for lower taxes to help her nation's economy, and our press have similarly been less than enthusiastic about sharing the news.
One of the exceptions in both cases is the Wall Street Journal which reported the following Tuesday:
Is Sen. Obama too protectionist for Europe? Maybe. If you were watching "CNN Newsroom" July 24 you may have caught Christiane Amanpour telling you why.
"[Europe] wants to see an [American] president committed to free trade," cautioned CNN Chief International Correspondent from Berlin, Germany, the site of a speech by presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama.
Amanpour pointed to Obama's wanting to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement as a problem for the Illinois senator. She explained why on the July 24 broadcast during Obama's visit to Europe.
"But let me tell you a word of caution. The European top trade official for instance has said, ‘Listen Barack Obama quit that crowd pleasing rhetoric and get serious for instance on the issue of trade.' You know Barack Obama as a candidate has talked about renegotiating NAFTA. Well, that does not go down well in Europe, which believes in internationalism and globalism, in globalization," said Amanpour on the morning broadcast.
During the weekend's coverage of President Bush's trip to the G-8 Summit in Japan, ABC correspondents Martha Raddatz and John Cochran both reminded viewers of faux pas by the President from past G-8 Summits. On World News Saturday, while downplaying expectations of any significant accomplishments at the summit, Raddatz relayed: "In fairness, the G-8 rarely has created any breakthrough announcements.
The Democrats and the mainstream media have long been pushing the meme that George W. Bush is a 'unilateral cowboy' who alienates our supposed allies. Funny thing about that, in the past six years, the governments who actively oppose American goals and who expressed their disdain for the current President have one by one been pushed out of office and replaced by governments who are much closer to the Bush Administration. This has happened so far in Germany (Angela Merkel), France (Nicolas Sarkozy), Canada (Stephen Harper) and now in one of Russia's closest allies, the Republic of Serbia. As reported by the Washington Post, Serbia's pro-Western president declared victory in Sunday's parliamentary elections _ a stunning upset over ultranationalists who tried to exploit anger over Kosovo's independence. But his rivals vowed to fight on, and it was unclear if he could stave off their challenge. "This is a great day for Serbia," Boris Tadic proclaimed after an independent monitoring group that carried out a parallel vote count nationwide said his bloc won 39 percent _ about 10 percent more than the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party. Of course the Post managed to miss the fact that this is one more supposed ally of Russia's neo-Communist and imperialist president Vladimir Putin that has instead chosen closer ties with the free states of Europe and the United States. Michelle Malkin pointed out the fact that the Post managed to completely miss, writing:
Paul Krugman clearly isn't lacking in chutzpah.
His January 11, 2008 New York Times column ("The Comeback Continent"; HT Tom Maguire via Instapundit) is yet another in a seemingly endless series of attempts by economic statists to convince people in the US that we need to be more like Europe -- specifically Western Europe -- and less like the growth-driven, market-based capitalists that we still largely are.
Here is part of what Krugman wrote in a remarkably fact-free column:
.... tales of a moribund Europe are greatly exaggerated.
..... I don’t want to exaggerate the good news. Europe continues to have many economic problems. But who doesn’t? The fact is that Europe’s economy looks a lot better now — both in absolute terms and compared with our economy — than it did a decade ago.