Stimulus: A History of Folly

Before he was sworn in as President, Barack Obama began to lay out his plans for reviving an American economy that, it would later be discovered, had declined 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, its worst performance in 26 years. About the first part of his project, “stimulating” businesses to invest and consumers to consume through government spending and tax remittances, he was forthcoming and enthusiastic. About the second, stabilizing the financial system, he wished to reserve judgment.

He anointed the stimulus proposal with a convenient and vivid metaphor. “We’re going to have to jump start this economy with my economic recovery plan,” he said on January 3. According to the image, one can jolt a dormant economy into action just as one can hook up polarized cables to a car battery, clamp a defibrillator to the chest, or breathe into the ear of a reluctant lover. Suddenly, the object of our attention will be back in action, aroused.

Alas, the questions raised by a proposed stimulus—whether to apply it, what sort it should be, how much it should cost, and when it should begin and end—are far trickier to answer than problems involving dead batteries. And, remarkably enough, history and economic research offer no conclusive answers. The recession that began in 2008 could turn out to be the worst slowdown since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. For three-quarters of a century, economists have been studying it diligently. And even now they cannot come to a definitive conclusion about the cause of that depression, the reasons for its severity and duration, or what cured it. In an introduction to a book of essays on the Great Depression he compiled in 2000, Ben S. Bernanke, then a Princeton professor and now chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, wrote, “Finding an explanation for the worldwide economic collapse of the 1930’s remains a fascinating intellectual challenge.”

Today, of course, the challenge is more than intellectual.

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When he wrote in 1936 that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,” John Maynard Keynes surely did not have himself in mind. But, in times of trouble, Americans still cling to Keynes, or at least to the caricature of him as the economist who said you could spend your way out of a recession. His big idea was that, left to its own devices, an economy can fall into a slump and just stay there. Self-corrective mechanisms will not necessarily work on their own; they will need help.

Prosperity depends on investment, on businesses building new plants, buying new machines, and employing more workers. In a typical case, when an economy slows, businesses reduce their demand for credit. At the same time, worried consumers save their earnings in banks, and by doing so, add to the store of money available for lending. These two forces—as well as actions taken by the Federal Reserve Board—combine to push interest rates to levels so attractive that businesses start borrowing again, and the economy picks up. The Great Depression, however, was atypical. The economy slowed and interest rates fell, but businesses were so frightened about the future that they refused to invest; instead, they did the opposite, shutting plants and firing workers. As for consumers, while they may have wanted to save, they lacked the cash to put away. Because they were out of work, they depleted what savings they had.

Keynes argued that when businesses and people cannot or will not invest, then the government must take on the role of filling the gap. The key is speed. The means, Keynes wrote in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, really did not matter so much:

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled to the surface with town rubbish and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again, . . . there need be no more unemployment and with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it is.

Of course, Keynes favored large public-works projects over the burying of bottles. Building roads in the right places, for example, would both put people to work and provide the basis for more commerce. At first, Keynes emphasized government spending as stimulus, but when pressed in 1933, he advocated tax cuts as well—specifically in response to criticism that public-works projects do not put cash into the system quickly enough.

The dire situation for which Keynes prescribed a cure bears distressing similarities to our own. Interest rates set by the Fed stand effectively at zero percent, but banks are recalcitrant about lending and even businesses flush with cash are hesitant to invest. It appears that the current sickness occurred because the Fed, in an effort to keep the economy stimulated after the collapse of the tech-stock bubble and in the wake of September 11, cut interest rates far too much during 2001 (from 6.5 percent at the start of the year to 1.75 percent at the end) and waited too long to raise them, making credit so easy that businesses expanded beyond all reasonable bounds, and banks, flush with cash and trying to make higher returns, shoveled money at borrowers with poor credit; risk aversion disappeared, and loans, especially to home buyers, went bad. Booms do, after all, create their own busts.

In response, Congress last year voted funds for the Treasury to use to shore up financial institutions—the widely maligned Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP—and the Fed opened wide its lending window. Those actions forestalled mass failures, but banks, chastened by their past overindulgence and worried about depleting their capital, still do not want to lend. So while government action proved necessary (and remains necessary) to maintain public confidence in the banking system, it became clear those actions could not and would not mitigate the parlous effects of the recession that, we were told late in 2008, had begun at the end of 2007. So the question becomes: In a world in which monetary adjustments do not appear effective, can tax and spending policies pull us out of the slump?

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The track record is discouraging. Despite Franklin Roosevelt’s aggressive spending, unemployment reached 25 percent in 1933, fell only to 14 percent by 1937, and was back up to 19 percent in 1939.¹ In the end, the New Deal did little or nothing to resuscitate the economy. Certainly, inept monetary policies helped prolong the Great Depression, as did tax increases, constant interventions in the conduct of business, and the erection of global trade barriers, beginning with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930, more than two years before Roosevelt took office. There was a stretch of twelve years from the stock-market crash to Pearl Harbor, and, during that time, fiscal stimulus simply did not jump-start the economy (or, in Keynes’s own metaphor, “awaken Sleeping Beauty”). Now, some do attempt to make the case that Roosevelt did not increase government spending enough during the early and mid-1930’s and that it took World War II and the unprecedented infusion of government dollars into the economy to provide the stimulus that finally pulled America from the swamp.

But even if that were true—and considering the fact that federal spending tripled during the Great Depression, rising from 3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product to nearly 10 percent in 1939,² it does not seem the likeliest explanation—it still does not offer much in the way of guidance through our current thicket. Few economists today believe the United States could tolerate the kind of budget deficits that developed during World War II, which ran more than 50 percent of gross domestic product, or about $7 trillion annually in current terms. When the federal government ramped up its spending during the war, it had not yet grown into the entitlement cash machine it is now, spitting out trillions of dollars a year in retirement and health-care benefits.

Not only was the stimulative effect of Great Depression fiscal policy non-existent, but follow-on efforts during the ten subsequent recessions proved equally ineffective. As a result of that hard-won experience, the consensus until recently among economists was that attempts at stimulus through emergency fiscal policies—as opposed to monetary policies and the automatic effects of increases in unemployment assistance and decreases in tax payments—were useless at best. Typical was the statement of Martin Eichenbaum of Northwestern University in the American Economic Review in 1997: “There is now widespread agreement that countercyclical discretionary fiscal policy is neither desirable nor politically feasible.” Martin Feldstein, then president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, agreed. Fiscal stimulus, he said in 2002, “has not contributed to economic stability and may have actually been destabilizing.”

_____________

A good place to turn to understand the failure of the jump-start is the work of Frederic Bastiat, a French politician of the early 19th century. “In the economic sphere,” he wrote,

an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

To prove his point, Bastiat described what happens when a vandal breaks a shopkeeper’s window. The seen effect is that repairing the glass creates economic value in the payment to the glazier, who then has money to buy a new suit or hire a part-time employee. What is unseen is that the shopkeeper has to pay the glazier with money that he would otherwise have used to buy a suit or add an employee. “The broken-window fallacy, under a hundred disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics,” wrote the economic journalist Henry Hazlitt in 1946.

Like payments for broken windows, tax rebates and new roads (the seen) do not come free. The stimulus money that flows to taxpayers, government agencies, and businesses has to come from somewhere (the unseen). During a recession, it is usually borrowed, and the anticipation of taxpayers is that they will have to repay these loans, which means their taxes will rise in the future. This knowledge makes people anxious about spending the extra money, or even about investing it in the kind of ventures that help an economy grow.³

Lately, however, economists have become more sanguine about the power of fiscal stimulus, in large part because of the apparent success of the tax-rate reductions and rebates in 2001 and 2003 (although such a conclusion may ignore the monetary effects of the huge cut in interest rates). A summary of a conference held in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco stated that “the consensus” against stimulus “has unraveled and perhaps even begun to emerge on the opposite viewpoint.” Last year, Jason Furman and Douglas Elmendorf of the Brookings Institution wrote, “Fiscal policy implemented promptly can provide a larger near-term impetus to economic policy than monetary policy can.” And, in a paper delivered to the American Economic Association in January, Feldstein himself switched sides and said he now favored tax cuts and government spending.

The views of these economists are undoubtedly heartfelt, but it must be recognized that one of the great attractions of Keynes’s theories is that he gives you permission to do what you wanted to do anyway. Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan, proposes a stimulus policy that extends the Bush tax cuts currently scheduled to expire in 2011 and increases spending on defense and national intelligence. In their stimulus proposal, Furman, now deputy director of Obama’s National Economic Council, and Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office under the current Democratic majority, adamantly oppose extending the Bush cuts and instead want to extend unemployment and Food Stamp benefits and issue short-term tax credits, even to people who owe no taxes.

Also, in the new enthusiasm for stimulus, there is not a small degree of panic; monetary policy is not working, so fiscal policy must! To his credit, however, Feldstein writes toward the end of his January paper, “It is of course possible that the planned surge in government spending will fail. Two or three years from now we could be facing a level of unemployment that is higher than today and that shows no sign of coming down.”

The truth is that we have learned almost nothing about the use of fiscal stimulus since the Great Depression, and it is a fatal conceit to assume that we can hurriedly construct a fiscal policy that will produce the prescribed results today. Economists seem to admit this fact by advocating what they prefer anyway, for political or ideological reasons. I would feel better about stimulus if Elmendorf were clamoring for permanent tax cuts and Feldstein for food stamps.

_____________

On being presented the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, Friedrich von Hayek devoted his Stockholm lecture to acknowledging the severe limitations of his profession. “It seems to me,” he said, “that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences—an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error.” Government simply cannot know enough to direct an economy successfully, and when the President claims that his fiscal stimulus plan will create (or save) at least 3 million jobs, he is taking a wild, and dangerous, leap. Said Hayek:

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

What is that environment? First, it provides a confidence that, in a crisis, bank deposits are safe and insurance policies will be paid in full. Such confidence can be provided only by the government of the United States in its legitimate and essential role as the lender of last resort. Second, the environment supports, rather than denigrates or browbeats, productive members of society. The U.S. will not emerge from a serious recession unless businesses and investors lead it out. Third, it recognizes that Americans have undergone a financial calamity and that we need time to adjust; we cannot, like a car battery, be shocked back to life, and we aren’t in the mood to have someone blow in our ear.

In fact, stimulus may be precisely the wrong metaphor. Rather than getting jazzed up, we need to be calmed down and to take the time to learn from the Great Depression, a time when government did too much, not too little. Amity Shlaes makes the argument in The Forgotten Man, her book about the Great Depression, that the constant experimenting and meddling of the New Deal froze investors and business operators in fear: “Businesses decided to wait Roosevelt out, hold on to their cash, and invest in future years.”

Despite the warnings of Keynes, the experience of the past half-century indicates that today’s low interest rates will start having a positive effect, though it still will take many months. Meanwhile, left alone, what Hayek called “spontaneous order” will find its way forward. Using a different metaphor, James Grant, in his history of credit, Money of the Mind, wrote, “The cycle of decay and renewal is as much a part of capitalism as it is of the forest floor.” But in the 1930’s, “something in the normal regenerative process was missing. There was no decisive recovery from the business-cycle bottom. People had lost their speculative courage, and the more government legislated and taxed, the more that credit sulked.”

Stimulus—that is, fiscal intervention with the express purpose of speeding up the normal regenerative process that Grant describes—is unnecessary and almost certainly harmful, a policy based on hubris and anxiety, rather than on history and good sense. Under such circumstances, the proper way to analyze discrete proposals today for spending or taxing is on their own merits, not on their supposed ability to stimulate something else. There may, in fact, be a good reason for government to spend billions of dollars today on building highways, and it has nothing to do with stimulus. It is that long-term interest rates are at historic lows and that the right highways can boost the economy in the long term. There also may be a good reason, again far apart from stimulus, for revising the tax code and reforming Social Security and Medicare. It is that Americans now understand that the economic future is not so assured as they believed a couple of years ago, and it is time for decisions to be made—in a manner careful, sensible, and unstimulated.

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Footnotes

¹ For some perspective, the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 7.2 percent. ² The figures are from a paper by David Wheelock, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. ³ The notion that people make current consumption decisions based on their lifetime income, rather than their current income, was laid out brilliantly in 1957 by Milton Friedman in his “permanent income hypothesis,” which has never been seriously challenged.

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About the Author

James K. Glassman is the former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. He is president of the World Growth Institute, which promotes global economic development.

U2 Letterman Interview

U2's I'll Go Crazy on Letterman, Night #4

U2's I'll Go Crazy on Letterman, Night #5

Xfm Meets U2

The Edge popped in to see Ian Camfield at Xfm Towers. Thirty minutes of the guitar hero's time passed, many gems of wisdom were imparted.

The Edge visitied Xfm for a chat with Ian Camfield. Over the course of forty minutes, he revealed that some good came out of new album, 'No Line On The Horizon', being leaked, that he was wrong to dissaude Bono from cosying up to Bush and that Larry Mullen held the reigns of the band for approximately forty minutes.

You can hear the full interview right here,

When you’re at this stage and the album’s coming out, what are your thoughts on the day of release?
“Things like, ‘Did I put my Mum on the thank you list’…”
Listen To Part 1 Now

Did Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno and Steve Lillywhite get the most out of you because they know you very well?
“I think they do know us very well and they know when we hit something…”
Listen To Part 2 Now

Originally you planned on finishing the album in Summer. Was that you being confident or scared?
“It’s never nice to let people down…”
Listen To Part 3 Now

What do you want people to get from the new U2 album?
"First of all, that it is an album..."
Listen To Part 4 Now

Is Bono’s extra curricular activities easier because it takes the heat off the other three?
“That’s what he’s good at, and that’s why he’s the frontman…”
Listen To Part 5 Now

There was always the conception before that U2 was Larry’s band…
“The Larry Mullen Band existed for all of about 40 minutes..."
Listen To Part 6 Now

You’ve got bigger and better. How?
“From the very get-go it was always about being a great band..."
Listen To Part 7 Now

There is still a massive interest in what U2 do musically. How?
"We always create by finding something new…"
Listen To Part 7 Now

Depeche Mode - "Wrong"

Ask U2

U2 Talk About Fordham University Gig

On Friday (March 6), U2 rocked a crowd of college kids on the campus of New York's Fordham University — which is exactly the demographic that the iconic rockers want to expose to their new album, No Line on the Horizon.

The band tore through three songs from the album on the college's picturesque campus in the New York City borough of the Bronx.

"Every album is like our first album. And we want to do the thing we did with our first album and go out and play the colleges," Bono told MTV News on Friday after the show. "Play to the people who are living closest to the music."

Bono said that for the most part, young people can best appreciate new sounds. "They're often students," he said. "They're often not people in their 30s. Bob Dylan has this line, 'He not busy being born is busy dying' [from 'It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding']. I love that line. I often think it applies to music. People, as they get older, they stop listening to the music. We want to go to where people are still passionate for music."

"You can feel that out in Fordham today," he continued. "There's people probably watching MTV going, 'Who are those guys ... what are they doing here?' Well we're ready to make our case."

Bassist Adam Clayton said that despite being in the industry for over 30 years, playing new songs to a crowd of college kids felt right. "When we came out with our first record, Boy, we couldn't get played on commercial radio," he recalled. "And it was the colleges that kept that record alive, and we would go to every college and do interviews."

"It was very cool to have a real crowd there and to be playing the new songs," guitarist the Edge agreed. "Always, for us, you learn almost instantly what's right and what's wrong as soon as we play. That's where we grew up as a band: in front of a live audience. As you're hearing it through all of the people, you're playing to sense their reaction."

For drummer Larry Mullen Jr., those reactions make all the difference in the world for future performances. "When you play live you get to understand the nuances, the things that make a difference," he said. "When we were playing it today I felt like, 'I get this.' "

Earlier this week, the band had a street in New York named after them.

Exclusive: U2 To 'Kiss The Future' On Global Stadium Tour

U2 reveal "Kiss The Future" tour details.

March 06, 2009 09:00 AM ET

Ray Waddell, Nashville

Kiss The Future, U2's world tour in support of its new album "No Line on the Horizon," will play stadiums around the world, beginning June 30 in Barcelona, Billboard can exclusively reveal. Details of the tour will be announced March 9.

It’s a groundbreaking tour with production that includes a 360-degree audience configuration, ambitious staging and a cylindrical video screen. “We’re very excited about the idea to go on the road with this album,” the Edge says. “It’s an album that I think is going to translate so well to the live context. The songs we’ve tried in rehearsal are sounding fantastic, so that’s got everyone really fired up.”

U2 will be playing in a setting unique among all previous tours, by any artist. The tour will be global and lengthy. U2 will stay in Europe through Aug. 22, then hit American shores on Sept. 12 with a show at Soldier Field in Chicago. The band will play in North America until Oct. 28 and plans on working the globe until the fall of 2010. In addition to its production firsts, the tour is destined to become one of the highest-grossing tours ever; at $389 million, the band’s 2005-2007 Vertigo tour is second only to the Rolling Stones’ A Bigger Bang trek.

After playing arenas in North America and stadiums elsewhere on their last few tours, U2 will play stadiums everywhere this time out. “This is going to be completely different, and that’s what makes it exciting -- finding something new to bring to the touring culture,” says the Edge. “It’s hard to come up with something that’s fundamentally different, but we have, I think, on this tour. Where we’re taking our production will never have been seen before by anybody, and that’s an amazing thing to be able to say. For a band like U2 that really thrive on breaking new ground, it’s a real thrill.”

As they have for well over a decade, Live Nation global music chairman Arthur Fogel and his team will produce and promote U2 worldwide. Committing to a global stadium tour is “obviously a major undertaking on a bunch of different levels,” says Fogel. “On the last tour it basically broke down indoors in America and stadiums outside of America. Both shows were pretty different and they were both incredible, but I think the general feeling, and certainly mine, was the experience of U2 in a stadium is special and unique, and it would be great for North America to experience that the way the rest of the world did the last time around.”

Playing in a 360 configuration will increase the capacity by about 15%-20%, depending on the stadium. The configuration opens up myriad opportunities for scaling ticket prices, an important consideration for Fogel and the band. The top ticket price will be slightly higher than last time and the bottom price will be lower, with the floor seats -- the closest to the stage -- the lowest priced. In fact, playing larger capacity venues allows for more conservative pricing overall. Field level is going to be $55, and there will be 10,000 tickets a show, every show, at $30, Fogel says. The price points are $250, $90-$95, depending on the market; $55 and $30.

On-sales will begin in Europe in mid-March, and North American on-sales will start in late March/early April. U2 will also resurrect its random upgrade program first seen on the Elevation tour in 2001, where select fans purchasing GA tickets will be moved closest to the stage.

The basic layout of the tour is Europe in July and August, America in September and October with a total of 40-45 shows this year; more stadiums in America in June and July next year, then August and September in Europe. The trek then tentatively will hit South America in the fall of 2010, for potentially as many as 90-100 shows over the next two years.

This will be the first tour under U2’s 12-year multi-rights deal with Live Nation, though the band’s relationship with Fogel dates back to a show at the El Mocambo in Toronto in 1979. “Arthur and I are great friends and I’ve been very interested in the Live Nation project for years now, and we’ve been very supportive of it,” says U2 manager Paul McGuinness. “We obviously intend to go on performing for a long time to come and that’s what the deal reflects. U2 always had parallel careers as recording artists and a touring act and it was always fundamental to our way of thinking that the two should be complimentary.”

More thoughts on No LIne on the Horizon - Get on Your Beautiful Feet

The NLOTH Wordle

The web is spewing reactions to the album - faster than anyone can keep up with - lots of +ve and -ve stuff. The world is full of people who love to hate U2, and who love to love U2, with not a lot in between. Bono doesn’t help by being an arrogant idiot sometimes (bit lame to say his insults to Chris Martin were just a joke). But still, there’s so much to get your teeth into with this album, as ever.

So i’m keeping an eye on U2sermons - an ever-ready help in such circumstances. Also always interested in what Christian Scharen has to say on these things - but couldn’t help be stung a little by his charge to those who indulged in precisely what i’ve been doing as being akin to trainspotting. Well - i suppose it is a bit geeky. But then, I’ll do it anyway (and not care too much - i won’t notice the passers-by and they certainly won’t notice me). Digging around the lyrics has certainly helped me to understand what is going on - and to explain why they took many of the musical decisions they have.

But an ultra-geeky thing i’ve done is to see what happens you combine all the lyrics from the album onto one Wordle. So here it is. The outright winner is as you’d expect (for ‘love is our law’)- but it’s quite interesting to see what follows (far) behind it… (Click the image to get detail)

Isn’t wordle.net just a fab thing?

I Found Grace Inside the Sound: U2's No Line On The Horizon

Over the weekend Mockingbird blog received an anonymous, theological review of the new U2 record, which was just too good not to post. The record is out 3/3/09:

Good music is like a diamond; one can look at it from many different angles and see various facets of beauty. The new U2 album is like this, and I could have written a review about many other topics, such as its guitar riffs, its “moments of surrender”, or whether or not it is the “best ever” U2 album. Instead, I’m going to focus on the facet that played loudest to my ears: the repeated lyric, "let me in the sound."

If the title No Line on the Horizon refers to a yearning for the removal of the barrier between heaven and earth, then I assume it is evoked from Jesus’ prayer to his Father, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It is an idea displayed in visual form on the album’s cover, which is a photograph of a blurred line where the ocean meets the sky, and an “equals” sign over it (…on earth as it is in heaven). The theme certainly would fit within the larger context of Bono’s theology of eschatological tension (the “already / not yet” reality of Christ’s Kingdom), so poignantly painted in the scenes of Sunday Bloody Sunday and many other examples.

In that earlier U2 era, the tension was mostly focused on the brokenness of life on earth’s side of the horizon line (“broken bottles under children’s feet”). It sometimes alluded to the Kingdom on heaven’s side, showing us that it would include unity and hope (“tonight, we could be as one”). That unity was later analogized as radiant color, for example in the lyric “then [in heaven] all the colors will bleed into one” in I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.

So many times, Bono has pleaded with the Divine to come down through the barrier once again. He would wonder why the delay (“how long must we sing this song?”), especially in the face of such a mess here on earth. He even pleaded by mocking God’s absence in Wake Up Dead Man: “I know you’re lookin’ out for us, But maybe your hands aren’t free?”

But on this latest album he has started to paint a fuller picture of that “other place,” the Kingdom (not yet) come, on the other side of the horizon line.

Moving beyond the color analogy, Bono here describes heaven as full of sound.

In the new song Breathe he has us imagine “the roar that lies on the other side of silence” and in I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight, he sings “…the sweetest melody is the one we haven’t heard.” I think this sound--a roar!--must be the same vision of heaven described in Revelation 4 and 5, where all the living creatures in heaven and on earth say/sing without ceasing “Holy Holy Holy” to the lamb on the throne.

Pointing us toward that sound, Bono invokes a prophetic tone by asking God to be witness to the truth of the Kingdom (“let me in the sound!”) and then he declares that he’ll be communicating that truth on earth, singing to the hearer, “Listen for me, I’ll be shouting. But we’re gonna make it all the way to the light.” Like a prophet, he then gives a rally cry to his people: “Let’s shout into the darkness, squeeze out sparks of light.” This lyric is an obvious footnote to the Bruce Cockburn lyric that Bono quoted on Rattle and Hum, “gotta kick the darkness till it bleeds daylight.” But here, instead of kicking at evil, Bono asks us to sing into it. He asks us to listen for Jesus’ tune, then sing with him that not-yet-heard melody of the Kingdom.

Walk out into the street,
Sing your heart out.
The people we meet,
will not be drowned out.

The song concludes its last verse with this:

We are people born of sound,
The songs are in our eyes.
Born to wear them like a crown, oh.

Walk out into the sunburst street
Sing your heart out,
Sing my heart out.
I found grace inside the sound,
I found grace, it's all that I found.

Like a minister reminding his flock of their mission to be salt and light, Bono declares to us that we were created to sing of God’s grace. If we would yearn to hear, as he does, the song already being sung on the other side of the horizon, we might catch a note or two. We might “tune our hearts to sing God’s grace”, as the 18th century hymn Come Thou Fount also beckons. We might sing these notes in the darkness until we see sparks of light.

How long must we sing this song? Until that day when Christ returns and there is no line on the horizon.

U2’s NLOTH spiritual resonances (part 2)

Here are some more random thoughts.

Magnificent

In tone, this is the most explicitly biblical song on the album. It is a psalm, nothing less. Beth has a nice observation on how Bono sings this, contra those who are perceive it as really arrogant. But taken in its biblical context, it is clear that when Bono sings I was born to sing for you, he can’t be referring to the U2 fanclub. He is singing primarily for an audience of one: God. It’s a song of throbbing praise, driven mainly by an insistent rhythm section (Adam seems to be working really hard on this album!). But despite the stadium feel of the song (which was evident when they sang it on the BBC roof last week), it remains intensely personal. That’s not to say it is exclusive though: it draws those close by to join in the magnifying at the end (the ‘you’ in the final choruses seems to be different from the object of praise - it is a fellow worshipper being drawn in to join the praise of ‘the Magnificent’).

I was born to be with you;… to sing for you… this is the heart of existence and purpose. How can this be anything other than God? ≈ (amongst many) Psalm 139 (esp vv13-16); Psalm 61:8: I will sing praise to your name and fulfil my vows day after day.
in this space and time, after that and ever after I haven’t had a clue it’s about life in the here and now - and beyond. But there are limits to how much we know about that ≈ Ps 61:8 again; note that in John 17:2-3 eternal life starts now…
Only love can leave such a mark But only love can heal such a scar living a life of love for God IS costly - it leaves a heart black and blue (and looks & feels like foolishness at times) - but God’s love can heal that - which reminds me of one of my favourite books on ministry by our dear friend Marjorie Foyle: Honourably Wounded. ≈ Proverbs 10:12; 1 Peter 4:8.
i didn’t have a choice but to lift you up and sing whatever song youw anted me to - now that is clearly psalmic - ≈ Psalm 63:4 & Psalm 134:2. and then there’s the first bit - is that what it looks like? Surely not? Election perhaps?!
I give you back my voice - the archetypal response of the one who knows from where we have everything in the first place ≈ King David’s response to God in 1 Chronicles 29:14.
From the womb my first cry it was a joyful noise - it’s that birth theme again - Bono gets born a lot on this album. But the cry of a new life is wonderfully, one of joy! ≈ the King James version of Psalm 66:1; 98:4, 100:1 (etc).
Justified till we die, you and I will magnify oh, the magnificent - justification! it’s everywhere in Paul - but it’s also everywhere in Psalms (i.e. righteousness language) ≈ so how about Psalm 35:27 (in KJV); cf. Psalm 64:10, 97:12, 140:13 etc etc

There is something reminiscent of the good old days of October in this song - Gloria anyone?

FEZ - Being Born

This is a suggestive song but seems quite opaque and nebulous. Being in Fez, the ancient pre-colonial capital of Morocco, of course rebooted the album writing process. It seems that the band went there after Bono was invited to be involved in a world festival of sacred music that takes place there. That in itself is intriguing - and there is a sense of slightly (Sufi?) trancelike meandering as the song opens - which gets interrupted a couple of times by a couple of abrupt reboots. But somehow, these interruptions never allow the building pace to be derailed. (I couldn’t help be reminded of a faux-James Bond mission soundtrack in the introduction - a bit derivative perhaps - but that is wiped away once the song proper gets under way).

During the intro, we hear echoes of a north african market square, mixed in with the final refrain from Get on your boots (let me in the sound). If i’m right about this being a resonance of the sound of amazing, divine grace, then it is interesting to find that even in Fez.

Bono’s singing is drawn out and even - almost a trance in itself - each word getting equal weight, as he makes the journey home across the Straights of Gibraltar and the Atlantic until reaching Africa’s shores. As far as I can tell, this is the only Africa moment on the album. Is it about setting sail leaving cars and engines behind, reaching Africa which is the true home of the heart. Having lived in East Africa, i can relate to that a bit - there is something elemental about the continent.

But as you can tell, i’m groping in the dark on this one - but gripped by the song.

U2’s NLOTH spiritual resonances (pt 1)

Am prepping for an updated talk on U2 at the ELF in Hungary this year - so obviously paying close attention to the new album, No Line on the Horizon. Here are a few biblical & spiritual resonances that I’ve picked up. There are probably gazillion others. Various bods out there are saying that it is one of their most Christian albums to date - and various obsessives are doing this sort of thing. So for what it’s worth, here’s my stab at a contribution. If I’m onto something with even half of these references, it is pretty exciting. And I have a bit a of a theory to do with the hymn Amazing Grace…

Moment of Surrender

This song has got a lot of people’s attention - and it’s certainly grabbed mine. A powerful, slow burn - it starts with a muffled rhythm section before opening out into something a bit more straightforward, accompanied by the humming of a Hammond organ, giving it a gentle gospel sonic landscape (well i don’t normally talk like that, but because Brian Eno is involved, i feel justified). Like so many, it can be understood on various levels. It indulges in the trad. U2 blurring of human relationships with our relationship with Christ (just as Paul did in Ephesians 5 - and perhaps Song of Songs) - two souls too smart to be in the realm of certainty even on our wedding day. Weddings of course are about BOTH - but perhaps it’s a bit more edgy than a neat fit, because presumably after the wedding supper of the lamb there will be some degree of certainty…

On the human level: in an exclusive human relationship, one has no eyes for anyone else (I did not notice the passers-by and they did not notice me), one doesn’t have absolute certainty in the decision one is making (we’re too smart for that), but there is a passion and fire in love (we set ourselves on fire).

Then comes the magical lyrical turning point: It’s not if I believe in love But if love believes in me, Oh believe in me. Fabulous. This is the invasion of grace - or rather the yearning for it. There is a sense of wonder in a great human relationship that love has come - but surely it is even more applicable to Christ’s call (and he’s just cried Oh God in the previous line). There is a shrinking back, a doubt that love might not come cf. George Herbert’s LOVE BADE ME WELCOME.

But the key change comes at the moment of surrender, I folded to my knees. This is echoed earlier in the song by another role reversal - playing with the fire till the fire played with me. But that’s what happens when we start getting involved with God - he is so much bigger, so much greater. We put him in the dock only to find ourselves in the dock; we think we’re doing him a favour by loving him, but find that his is the greater favour. Such surrender could sound like a subjugation, a resignation. But the music lifts it up to a moment of joy - with the Edge’s backing vocal giving it a sense of shared joy.

And that is done without any concern about passers-by. Who cares what they think? [For that matter, who cares what music critics might think if they whinge or cringe at the spiritual dimensions of U2 songs, eh?!] What matters is what LOVE thinks… Hence the last 2 versions of the chorus: at the moment of surrender of vision over visibility I did not notice the passers-by. It is about having the courage to sing because the importance of what is happening eclipses everything else (cf. singing in Breathe below)

The clincher of course for arguing the Christian significance is the fact that I was speeding on the subway through the stations of the cross. What is that if not a clear meditation on the passion of Christ, the events of the last few hours of his life. Every eye is looking the other way - but he still surrenders. A little echo perhaps of Joseph & Nicodemus?? They were prepared to get involved in the passion, at great personal cost, when everyone else had turned their backs (John 19:38-42).

That is what makes his staring reflection in the ATM screen bearable - he had been in ‘every black hole at the altar of the dark star‘ and was reduced to beg … to be released from control - what is that if not a pleading for rescue? ≈ Romans 7:24-8:1 Who will rescue me from this body of death…? The only hope for the apostle Paul, and for the subject of this song, is the moment of surrender.

Unknown Caller

This opens with a weird sustained whining noise, and the echoes of birdsong - it feels like the long lonely hours of the early hours - lost between the midnight and the dawning in a place of no consequence or company. It actually gives sound to those times of lying awake and longing for the dawn (sunshine, sunshine) - a very Psalmic thing to be doing. (e.g. Psalm 63:6; Psalm 119:147). But what do you do with that time? Often you pray. This is a song about prayer - and about God speaking. For he is presumably the eponymous Unknown Caller. But when it gets going, it is anthemic - I can see it getting the stadiums going. Can’t wait.

3.33 when the numbers fell off the clock face ≈ It’s that number again! Jeremiah 33:3 is the almost the U2 motto verse - remember the airport gate sign on the cover of All you can’t leave behind? It is particularly appropriate for this song, for there God says, “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know“. And this is immediately followed by the chorus, sung (or rather, almost said) by both Bono & Edge together. This is GOD, in his triune plurality, talking:
Go, shout it out, rise up ≈ God calls on people to get out there with ’shouts of joy’ Psalm 105:43

Hear me, cease to speak, Shush now ≈ we have domesticated Psalm 46:10 with soppy christian choruses about being quiet and meditative. But actually, this Psalm is telling people to Shut Up! and stop their gabbling and mumbling - he is the exalted God! So shush now…
That I may speak ≈ he is a speaking God! And our gassing drowns out what he says.

Force quit and move to trash // restart and re-boot yourself ≈ you can tell Bono is a Mac user! And so, by the sound of things is God. It is about stopping in your tracks - going back to the scene of the accident; I sat there waiting for me. Repentance, in other words, isn’t it? Is this waiting for the new/real me/rebooted and therefore reborn me? Is this not an appeal to go back to the moments before the moment of surrender? But when you get to that point,
you’re free to go.. shout for joy if you get the chance, password, enter here, right now ≈ passwords have biblical precedence: e.g. shibboleth (Judges 12:6) But who is our Shibboleth if not Jesus himself. He is the one who gets us in and who makes us truly free. John 8:32-36; Rom 8:2
you know your name so punch it in ≈ is this the new name that Jesus has revealed to those who are his? Revelation 2:17 Or is it Jesus’ name again, the name that he has revealed (cf. Philippians 2:11)

White As Snow

Simply beautiful rearrangement of the melody from the old advent carol, O Come, O Come Emmanuel - which is itself all about living in, and longing for the end of, the Last days. The title imagery is explicit - Isaiah speaks of the sins that are scarlet becoming white as snow (Isaiah 1:18). But the song is not as simple as a declaration of the wonders of forgiveness. Is it more of a reflection of the reality of sin in the believer’s life? It is apparently a soldier’s tale, lying dying by a road (hence poppies and passing wolves), perhaps in Afghanistan or Iraq - under a crescent moon.

If only a heart could be as white as snow ≈ this is the central yearning of the song. It is both a yearning for his own heart to be white (he and his brother have faces that are as pale as the dirty snow), and a recognition that it is only possible with someone who is the lamb white as snow.

Now the wolves are passing by, every face we cannot know ≈ could this be religious charlatans (wolves in sheep’s clothing) - Matt 7:15

Breathe

This is one of my absolute winners. My first impression is that it’s a reflection on how in Christ we have the fullness of life, despite whatever the world has to offer us, even if that means there is suffering and cost. It takes courage, it takes a determination to serve sacrificially - but I’ve found grace and so i can breathe now… In other words, i can TRULY live. It is set in the real world of news reports (e.g. Chinese stocks and Avian flu). There is nothing more fundamental than breathing - nor pleasurable when you think about it: think of taking a deep and long breath on a cold crisp blue-skied winter’s morning in the countryside.

Invite a complete stranger into my home - would you ≈ Matt 25: 35, 38, 43 - would you invite Jesus in…? Even (in context here) someone who is selling things on the doorstep? But isn’t that what Jesus expects us to do with him - which is why, after he’s come, ‘these days are better than that‘
Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn ≈ Titus 3:5 (on rebirth and grace); but mainly 1 Cor 15:31 - Paul speaks of the way he pours out his life for the Corinthians at great personal cost, which is preciesly the point that seems to flow from the next line…
Courage to walk… with arms out ≈ Rom 12:1-2 - because of his mercy, offer yourselves…
Got a Love you can’t defeat ≈ Rom 8:35, 38-39 - NOTHING can separate us…

The key is in the choruses I think:

Nothing you have that i need, i can breath, breath now ≈ is this an echo of the temptation in the wilderness? The devil offers all kinds of things that will alleviate suffering - but Jesus refuses of course - for he has true life. Rom 5:17 - how much more abundant grace through one man…? cf. John 10:10 life in all its fullness…

walk out into the street, sing your heart out ≈ in some ways this is classic psalmic theology - praise and singing in the Psalms is nearly always has 2 axes: vertically, in praising God for all that he is and does; horizontally, in simply telling people how great he is. e.g. Ps 9:11, 18:49

I found grace inside a sound… all that i found… i can breathe now ≈ I still haven’t found what I’m looking for (heaven) but I HAVE found this - grace and so i can truly live and breathe in the meantime. Is the sound (cf. Get on your boots) therefore song of the gospel? So without being too reductionistic, at least one of the songs be that totemic hymn Amazing Grace [nb it's first line:] how sweet the sound (cf. Bono’s conversations with Steve Turner mentioned at the start of Steve’s history of the hymn)? - cf. John 1:16 fullness of grace…

Stop Helping God Over the Road

U2's new album is truly gospel - Bono and his band spreading the good news of God's love and grace

March 6, 2009

BY CATHLEEN FALSANI Religion Columnist

Without a line on the horizon, we may feel like there is no limit to how far we can go. But it also makes the seas difficult to navigate.

That is, in many ways, where we find ourselves today. It's as infinitely terrifying as it is exciting. Where do we go from here and how do we find our way?

U2's 12th studio album, "No Line on the Horizon," gives a few great answers, if you have the ears to hear and the eyes to see them. (I hope you do.)

More than 25 years ago, when I dropped the needle on a U2 album for the first time, I heard the words of a familiar liturgy -- "Gloria in te domine, Gloria exultate!" -- punctuated by the keening sound of The Edge's guitar and followed by Bono's gnarly tenor shout-singing, "O Lord, loosen my lips!"

My soul did a backflip and kept on tumbling. ...

Earlier this week, while listening to "No Line on the Horizon," I felt that familiar movement in my spirit over and over again. First with the sacred anthem, "Magnificent," which tossed me into the air and sent me soaring. Listen to the words:

I was born to sing for you

I didn't have a choice

But to lift you up

And sing whatever song you wanted me to

I give you back my voice

From the womb my first cry

It was a joyful noise ...

Justified until we die

You and I will magnify

Magnificent

Some misled critics have booed Bono for that song, misinterpreting "I was born to sing for you" as a boast to his audience, rather than the prayer to his Maker that it is. (Mind you, this is the same lyricist who later on the album seemingly refers to himself as a "Napoleon" and cautions, "be careful of small men with big ideas.")

There is plenty of rock 'n' roll levity and grandeur on "No Line on the Horizon," but it is eclipsed by the heart and soul of this album -- perhaps the most dynamic gospel music I've ever heard.

With The Edge, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton, Bono began the odyssey that became "No Line on the Horizon" at a rented riad in Fez, Morocco, in June 2007 during the international festival of sacred music.

"[Bono] thought that our job was to create contemporary gospel music ... that we are essentially soul musicians that look for soul in what we do," Daniel Lanois, one of several producers on the new album, told Rolling Stone magazine recently.

Fez is "a holy city for music and musicians," said Bono, and the band was on a pilgrimage -- to listen and to learn -- to go wherever the music (and the Spirit) took them.

As he has for years, but not as explicitly so since 1991's "Achtung Baby," Bono, the band's chief lyricist, has laced "No Line on the Horizon" with the language and images of his humble Christian faith.

The result, however, is a work of gospel music -- "gospel" in its literal sense as "good news" -- for people of all faiths and none. The ecstatic language and imagery Bono evokes throughout could have been penned by the Hebrew King David or Sufi Muslim poets Rumi or Hafez, as much as by a latter-day Christ-follower from Dublin.

One of the most eloquent examples is "Moment of Surrender," which says in part:

My body's now a begging bowl

That's begging to get back

Begging to get back to my heart

To the rhythm of my soul

To the rhythm of my unconsciousness

To the rhythm that yearns

To be released from control

Faced with a horizon-less journey, isn't that what so many of us want right now -- to have someone else steer the ship? To lose control and surrender?

The Spirit feels like the unnamed fifth member of the band on this album more than any other. Its presence is subtle, but powerful.

Whether it's as an unknown caller (or perhaps the one the unknown caller is dialing), a comforting father who frees us "from the dark dream" and hands us "candy floss" and "ice cream," to the one who challenges us to walk into the frightening world with open arms (and hearts), God's love and grace are present.

"God is love, and love is evolution's very best day," Bono sings in "Stand Up Comedy." "I've found grace inside a sound, I found grace, it's all that I found," he sings on "Breathe."

In a beautifully confessional song (with a tune based on the 16th century hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel"), Bono seems to say that even when it feels like we've lost sight of what matters, what's real and enduring, it's right there. "White as Snow," which Bono says was written about a dying soldier's last moments in Afghanistan, says:

Once I knew there was a love divine

Then came a time I thought it knew me not

Who can forgive forgiveness where forgiveness is not

Only the lamb as white as snow

U2 intends to release another album by year's end, one tentatively called, "Songs of Ascent." Bono has said it will be "a more meditative album on the theme of pilgrimage."

I'd guess it'll be for a place that has to be believed to be seen.

My bags are packed.

U2 on Good Morning America Part 2

U2 on Good Morning America,

Bob's Blog @ The Bobosphere - U2's NLOTH and Theology

• Start at The End
• Bono's Halftime Prayer
• Worship Comes to Late Night Television
• More Musings on MOS
• A Theological Perspective, cont'd
• A Theological Review of U2's No Line
• More on Unknown Caller

U2's I'll Go Crazy on Letterman, Night #3

Letterman's Top 10 Things U2 Has Learned Over the Years

U2 plan quick sequel to new album

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U2 just released its first album since 2004 this week, but the Irish rock band is already planning a quickie follow-up for next year.

The new disc will be called "Songs of Ascent," and it will be more mellow than the current album, "No Line on the Horizon," singer Bono says in a cover story in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

"We're making a kind of heartbreaker, a meditative, reflective piece of work, but not indulgent," the magazine quoted him as saying.

Bono likened the new project to jazz icon John Coltrane's 1964 tour de force "A Love Supreme" -- "which is to say, with that album, I almost take my shoes off to listen to it."

The first single will be called "Every Breaking Wave," a track pulled at the last minute from "No Line on the Horizon," U2's 12th album since 1980.

As with many of it previous recordings, "No Line" was a challenging project, with the quartet spending two years on scattered sessions in five countries with four producers.

"It is now easier and more affordable to record a song than at any other time in the history of recorded music," U2 bass player Adam Clayton told Rolling Stone. "Unless you're U2."

In proclaiming the importance of composing strong hit singles, Bono inadvertently took aim at a legendary rock 'n' roll forerunner by saying U2 has a meandering "Pink Floyd side" that "has to be balanced by fine songwriting."

Why U2 really are better than The Rolling Stones AND The Beatles

You may have noticed that U2 are about to release a new album. They seem to have taken over the BBC to announce the fact (they’ve even been on Radio Five Live, a station more used to 'Boro than Bono).

They’re unquestionably the biggest band in the world and yet they first tasted success in the Eighties, a decade derided these days for being responsible for ra-ra skirts and Johnny Hates Jazz. Indeed the continued success of U2 underlines a highly significant yet overlooked aspect of that most maligned of decades: that the Eighties were much better for music than the vastly overrated Sixties.

You might already be spluttering about The Beatles this and The Rolling Stones that and wondering what Boy George ever did for music. But I can prove empirically that bands from the Sixties were creative for a shorter period of time than their Eighties counterparts.

Biggest and the best: Adam Clayton, Bono, Edge and Larry Mullen in New York today where West 53rd Street was temporarily renamed U2 Way

For instance, let's take a look at the Rolling Stones' recorded output. They released their first album, The Rolling Stones, in 1964. When did they make their last half decent album? 1978's Some Girls?

At a push, 1980's Emotional Rescue. That gives them a creativity span (CS) rating of 16 years at the most.

How about The Beatles? Even including the mostly dreadful solo outpourings of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr, that leaves their last acceptable effort as Wings' 1978 album, London Town, which came a decade and a half after The Beatles' 1963 debut, Please Please Me, a CS rating of 15.

OK, so we've dealt with the creative lightweights of the Sixties; let's move on to the Eighties and U2.

Overrated: The Beatles and The Rolling Stones

Their first album was 1980's Boy. Their last album, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, sold in excess of 10 million, and saw them on tour playing to more people than ever before.

U2 are still critically adored and commercially vast. The release of No Line On The Horizon gives them a CS rating of 29, not far short of double of that of The Beatles.

Now take Depeche Mode (CS rating 28), whose imminent new album Sounds Of The Universe is being acclaimed as a career high.

There are others too who easily creatively outpunch the Sixties icons, including The Cure (CS rating 25), New Order (CS rating 21) and Red Hot Chili Peppers (CS rating 18).

So why have Eighties bands so clearly outlasted their more lauded Sixties counterparts?

Simple. They were all born out of the embers of punk and new wave and they've retained that restless, adventurous, questing spirit.

Punk may have become a debased cultural currency now (and it was responsible for some terrible bands at the time) but its enduring ideals have been responsible for some of the finest music of the last 30 years.

Bands from the most ridiculed of decades are still pushing on, unafraid of change and trying something new, making some of the best music of their creative lives. The Rolling who?

A blueprint for a 'remaking'

By Jonah Goldberg

The economy is in the Slough of Despond, according to President Obama. If we don't do what he says, we invite a catastrophe from which we may never recover. Indeed, in his address to Congress last week — in a passage intended to be hopeful and uplifting — Obama compared our plight to that of America in the darkest days of the Civil War, Great Depression, World War II and the Industrial Revolution.

(The fine print: President Obama’s first budget is titled, “A New Era of Responsibility.”/ Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP)

But there's good news! According to his budget — which he assures us is an "honest accounting" of our predicament — the economy will shrink by only a measly 1.2% this year (it fell by a 6.2% annual rate in the final quarter of 2008) and then take off next year with 3.2% growth and soar for years to come.

So which is it? Are we facing the biblical doom described in Ghostbusters where fire and brimstone come down from the skies, rivers and seas boil, the dead rise from their graves, and dogs and cats live together? Or, are we in a steep-but-conventional recession that will run its course by the end of the year and be replaced by higher than normal growth?

Well, it depends on which Barack Obama you happen to be listening to. It's tempting to say the man is two-faced, but that seems like a woeful undercount. The man has more facets than a disco ball, more angles than a rhombic triacontahedron.

He cites — and incites — fear over the financial crisis, the recession and the housing mess to justify his enormous expansion of government, but most of his priorities have little to do with any of these things. Candidate Obama promised a net budget cut. But President Obama wants to increase discretionary spending by 12%. He proposes increasing taxes by $1.3 trillion and entitlement spending by at least $700 billion, but insists that he doesn't believe in "bigger government."

Fiscal schizophrenia

He loves to point out that he inherited a large deficit from the Republicans — which he did. But for reasons that are hard to grasp, he then suggests that this means Republicans have no right to complain when the deficit quadruples in one year or when he seeks to spend trillions of dollars on programs that have nothing whatsoever to do with ending the recession. Democrats flayed President Bush for deficits in the $300 billion to $400 billion range, when the country was at war and recovering from 9/11. Obama boasts that the deficit will be down to $500 billion to $600 billion during "peace and prosperity" — and that's only if his absurdly rosy scenario comes to pass. And we are supposed to applaud his fiscal seriousness to boot.

But the schizophrenia runs even deeper. The White House and congressional Democrats simultaneously caterwaul about the deficit they inherited from Republicans while they also tsk-tsk the GOP's woeful failure to spend on "underfunded" domestic priorities. During the Bush years, spending — whoops, sorry, "investment" — in most of these burning domestic priorities soared: education (58%), Social Security (17%), Medicare (51%), health research and regulation (55%), highways and mass transit (22%) and veterans' benefits (59%). But, according to Democrats, if they had been in charge we would have spent a lot more on these pressing needs and we wouldn't have this terrible Republican-fueled deficit. How does that work?

The White House says withholding $13 less each week from most workers' paychecks is a major tax cut. But it doesn't see raising the cost of gas, electricity and heating oil as a tax hike. Some even say that raising taxes on energy, and therefore manufacturing, not to mention investing and small business, isn't a great idea in a recession.

Fortunately, Obama says this will all work out, and his words trump any form of earthly logic. For example, the president claims that he's actually cutting the budget by not spending money on the Iraq war. The problem is he's counting enormous spending on Iraq — $170 billion a year — that not even President Bush ever envisioned, all the way through 2019 (Bush planned on a 2012 withdrawal). In other words, he's "cutting" hundreds of billions from money no one ever planned to spend, in years when he won't even be president, and touting that as savings. Why not simply count the trillions in savings we would reap from forgoing a long and brutal war with the Klingon empire?

Have I got a deal for you

No, seriously, try this with your boss sometime. First, go buy a Mercedes on the company credit card. Then tell him that you saved money because you were planning on buying a Lear Jet — two years after your mandatory retirement age. Then ask him for an attaboy, or even a raise. See what he says. I dare you.

Meanwhile, not a penny of the actual money raised under the Obama budget ever goes to reducing the deficit. It all goes to new or increased spending. Obama says that he and his team went "line by line" through the budget and found "$2 trillion in savings." But along with the fictional Iraq war savings, the bulk of the rest — a trillion dollars — comes from increased taxes.

And that's the translation key to both Obama's rhetoric and his numbers. Raising taxes is, in Obama's eyes, a form of "savings" because whatever money you earn belongs first and foremost to the government. As he told Congress, Bush's tax cuts amounted to a "transfer (of) wealth to the wealthy." In pre-Obama America, keeping more of the money you earned wasn't considered a government transfer payment. But, as he promised in his inaugural address, his goal is the "remaking of America." With little more than a month in office, he's off to a good start.

Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

U2's Magnificent on Letterman, Night #2

U2's Breathe on Letterman, Night #1

Theologian Calls New U2 Album 'Most Thoroughly Christian' Project to Date

No Line On The Horizon, the latest album from Irish rock band U2, has finally hit music stores in North America after its worldwide debut Friday in Ireland.

And according to a theologian in Alabama, it’s “the most thoroughly Christian thing they’ve done yet.”

“Like the last two albums, No Line is much more overt in its Christian rendering of the world, what with lyrics like ‘Justified until we die/You and I will magnify/Oh, the Magnificent’ from the album's second track,” commented Steven R. Harmon, an associate professor of divinity at Samford University's Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Ala.

“Yet what qualifies this album as thoroughly Christian is not so much its pervasive biblical/theological images as its overarching eschatological vision,” he wrote Friday in a music review featured by the Associated Baptist Press.

The Christian themes in U2's music have been widely recognized since their 1981 album, October, which was ranked as No. 41 on CCM Magazine's 2001 list of the greatest Christian music albums of all time. Also included in the list was the group’s 1987 album, The Joshua Tree.

“The youthful October (1981) set the scene for what was to follow,” writes the Rt. Rev. Nick Baines, bishop of Croydon in South London, in his recent book Finding Faith: Stories of Music and Life.

“Songs of spiritual recognition and searching (‘Gloria,’ or ‘Tomorrow,’ for example) mingle with the exploration of love and lust,” he adds.

Of course, not all the songs included in U2’s albums have a Christian worldview, and some are arguably far from Christian, leading many conservatives to question the group’s beliefs. Those that are, however, have gone as far as to make their way into churches across the country and around the world, where they used as hymns, particularly in Episcopal churches.

"U2 is good at the art, using language like a poet would, like the classic hymn language,” the Rev. Christian Scharen, director of the Faith as a Way of Life Project at Yale Divinity School, told USA Today in 2006, two years after the release of U2’s last album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

“Listen to their lesser-known song ‘Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car,’ which is about grace,” the Lutheran minister added. “We mess up, but God is merciful. That's playful."

Regarding their latest album, Professor Harmon in Alabama says seven of the album's 11 songs invoke its central eschatological metaphor, which he says is the “sound of the divine song, heard only by those who have the ears to hear it, yet unconsciously sought by everyone, for all people were created to hear and sing this song.”

Within this framework, No Line calls people’s attention to the discordant dimensions of our world, Harmon adds, noting that the album’s basic message is that earth is not yet heaven.

“[T]he album summons us to ‘Get On Your Boots’ and work toward the day when things will fully be on earth as they are in heaven – when heaven and earth will be indistinguishable, and there will at last be no line on the horizon,” he wrote in his review.

Written and recorded in various locations, No Line On The Horizon is U2's 12th studio album and is their first release since the nine million selling album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb released in late 2004.

Rolling Stone magazine has already awarded No Line on The Horizon five stars, calling the album U2's "best, in its textural exploration and tenacious melodic grip, since 1991's Achtung Baby."

Christianity Today, meanwhile, said the album offers some of the most thoughtful and introspective lyrics put out by U2 frontman Bono, who the magazine noted as being “in love with Jesus and himself in equal measure.”

“There are the usual ‘is it Jesus or a girlfriend?’ teases, but those looking for more depth will find much to savor,” the evangelical publication added.

Manhattan street has a name: U2 Way

Singer of the rock group U2, Bono (R) sits in a cafe with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg after a portion of West 53rd Street was renamed U2 Way in New York March 3, 2009. U2's new album No Line On The Horizon was released today.

NEW YORK (AP) — This street does have a name — U2 Way.

To celebrate U2's weeklong gig on CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman," a block-long stretch of West 53rd Street was temporarily renamed after the veteran Irish rockers on Tuesday.

"Somewhere south of Duke Ellington Way and north of Joey Ramone Place we find ourselves," said lead singer Bono. "And we're the band where the streets have no name."

The four band members joined Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn in unveiling the "U2 Way" street sign on Broadway across West 53rd Street from the Ed Sullivan Theater, where Letterman's show is taped.

Scores of fans cheered from behind police barricades as Bloomberg presented each U2 member with his own copy of the sign.

"Edge just said this is the first time he's been seen with a street sign and not been arrested," quipped Bono, referring to guitarist The Edge.

U2 is on "Letterman" all week to promote their new album, "No Line on the Horizon."

"The boys are in town for a weeklong stint with the king of late night, David Letterman," Bloomberg said. "And it's a historic event for late-night television right here in the capital of late-night television."

U2 has sold tens of millions of records, and Bono has become a leading crusader against poverty and disease in the developing world. Tuesday's event at least temporarily adds the band to a musical map that includes Duke Ellington Boulevard in Morningside Heights and Joey Ramone Place in the East Village.

Bloomberg thanked all the band members for their humanitarian work and added, "No wonder everyone in the city including me considers these four Dubliners honorary New Yorkers."

Bono, wearing his trademark wraparound glasses, was equal parts raffish rock star and policy wonk. He praised Bloomberg's substantial philanthropic efforts to improve public health.

"The Anopheles mosquito kills about 3,000 children every day, of malaria, and his work in Johns Hopkins down there is really important work in ridding the world of the Anopheles mosquito," the singer said.

Bloomberg has given tens of millions of dollars for medical research at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, his alma mater.

Band members posed for photos in the frigid sunshine and said they considered New York their second home.

"I was hoping for Larry Mullen Circle," said drummer Larry Mullen Jr. "But I'll do with U2 Way."

WSJ: U2's Latest Experiment in Sound

By JIM FUSILLI

As its new album, "No Line on the Horizon" (Universal), demonstrates, U2 is the only rock band of its stature and authority that is so willing to toy with its formula for success.

By the standards of today's iPod shuffle mentality, "No Line" is a great album, though it has no consistent flow and no musical arc. Rather than presenting a cohesive statement, it's a collection of songs held together by an effective and slightly experimental sound. It tops the band's most recent recordings, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" (2004) and "All That You Can't Leave Behind" (2000). But, like them, it features memorable performances alongside others that fall a bit short.

"No Line" also fits in the continuum of U2's recorded work, which now stretches back almost three decades. The band has always experimented -- sometimes tweaking its approach to pop music, other times just about discarding it altogether.

The album "The Unforgettable Fire" (1984), best remembered for the stirring "Pride (In the Name of Love)," is characterized by a brooding underpinning. Opening with three monster rock hits, "The Joshua Tree" (1987) also contains songs that seem to borrow from South African mbaqanga and the music of the American West. U2 adds dance beats to fatten the groove on "Achtung Baby" (1991), home to the masterpiece "One," a simmering down-tempo ballad. It marries rock and electronica on "Zooropa" (1993) and "Pop" (1997), and with "Rattle and Hum" (1988) takes on the Beatles, Bob Dylan, gospel and the blues.

All this is accomplished with one of rock's most inventive rhythm sections: bassist Adam Clayton, drummer Larry Mullen Jr., and the guitarist known as the Edge -- a distinctive musician capable of playing exactly what the performance requires. Bono's soaring voice and tenacious personality give the band its operatic qualities and superstar status.

Working again with longtime collaborators Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois -- and with Steve Lilywhite contributing to three songs -- U2 on "No Line" has a new sound that is dense, almost cluttered at times with the bottom bleeding into the mid-range, yet thoroughly appealing. The band's customary chiming brightness appears infrequently, most notably on "I'll Go Crazy if I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" and "Unknown Caller." In some songs, the most prominent lines are played on synthesizers rather than on the Edge's guitar or Mr. Clayton's bass, and at times Bono seems like he's fighting the tumult rather than gliding through a cleared, shining path. It's controlled chaos, and when all the pieces fit -- as in the extraordinary "Magnificent" -- it's exhilarating.

The title track, which opens the album, is a charging piece of rock that explodes rather than develops, and "Get On Your Boots" and "Stand Up Comedy" place the band in context: During the verses of the former, the melody mimics Mr. Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up" until it slides into a slinky chant-along; on the latter, the Edge seems to draw inspiration from the Beatles' late-period guitar sound. A powerhouse rocker, "Breathe," kicks off with heavy percussion and metal-like guitars; Mr. Clayton, who excels throughout the disc, gives it a formidable spine.

Ballads provide the CD's high points. In "Moment of Surrender," a cello yields to a bubbling synth riff and a choir formed by Bono's voice and the Edge's sustained guitar. "Unknown Caller" develops patiently to a big chorus, as Bono sings over raw, echoing guitars and a syncopated percussion pattern. "Cedars of Lebanon" is whispered and spoken by Bono over snappy drumming by Mr. Mullen and whistling strings.

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Universal Music Group

It's easy to comb the lyrics of "No Line" for allusions to Bono's globetrotting political adventures. They're there in small doses and as often as not are self-deprecating. When the subject of "No Line" isn't love, lust and assorted other good times -- still the meat of the rock 'n' roll vocabulary -- it's not geopolitics. It's spiritual exploration, even if the song's subject is derived from a geopolitical event, as in "Cedars of Lebanon" and "White as Snow." Throughout the band's career, U2's songs have referenced a spiritual journey inspired by its members' Christianity.

Here, the exploration continues. In "White as Snow," based on a hymn inspired by Isaiah 1:18 and with new lyrics by Bono, Mr. Eno and Mr. Lanois, Bono sings: "Once I knew there was a love divine/Then came a time I thought it knew me not/Who can forgive forgiveness where forgiveness is not/Only the lamb as white as snow." Said to be the thoughts of a dying soldier in Afghanistan, the song concludes with "If only a heart could be as white as snow." In "Breathe," he writes: "Sing your heart out, sing my heart out/I've found grace inside a sound."

Even when the reference isn't explicit, the words can be interpreted as spiritually minded. In "I'll Go Crazy," whose lyrics open as a standard slice of rock rebellion, Bono asks, "Is it true that perfect love drives out all fear?" "Moment of Surrender" may be about romantic love, or about man's eternal link to God, or a tribute by Bono to his late father, who was a singer: "I was born to sing for you/I didn't have a choice but to lift you up/And sing whatever song you wanted me to/I give you back my voice/From the womb's first cry, it was a joyful noise." Is the "3:33" mentioned in "Unknown Caller" a reference to a Bible verse or merely the time on a clock?

A dozen albums into its career, U2 shows no signs of complacency. With an abiding commitment to substance and an admirable taste for adventure, the band provides a new work that offers much to enjoy and deliberate over.

Mr. Fusilli is the Journal's rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com.

U2 on Absolute Radio

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You can download the full audio podcast of the interview on this page. Plus, you can win a signed copy of 'No Line On The Horizon' and find out more about the album here.

We also asked our listeners to vote for their favourite U2 tracks, so come and see where your favourite track came in our Top 10, along with a selection of some of our listener's comments.

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