Blue Cat Blog

Posting on Google+ for a while

2011-07-28T14:09:00.000-07:00

I'm experimenting with posting on Google+. That means posts here will be minimal. If you want a Google+ invitation, let me know. (You can leave a comment below.)

Bush vs.Obama as spenders

2011-07-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

From Teresa Tritch of the New York Times.

Can the Democrats make use of the Republican's irresponsibility?

2011-07-24T22:46:00.000-07:00

They don't seem to be trying. Why don't I hear Democrats talking endlessly about how irresponsible it is of the Republican's to hold the country hostage by politicizing about the debt limit? To do so would require a bit of explanation. The Republicans have apparently convinced the public that not raising the debt limit is a good idea. And the Democrats are too politically incompetent to dispute that.

People are swayed by demagoguery, but they are also at least somewhat open to intelligent views. The Democrats should at least try it. They will never out demagogue the Republicans, so why not establish themselves as the party of clear thinking adults. There must be some sort of constituency for that.

The US is a low-tax country

2011-07-24T11:50:00.000-07:00

From the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Congress Continues Debate Over Whether Or Not Nation Should Be Economically Ruined

2011-07-20T17:10:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON—Members of the U.S. Congress reported Wednesday they were continuing to carefully debate the issue of whether or not they should allow the country to descend into a roiling economic meltdown of historically dire proportions. "It is a question that, I think, is worthy of serious consideration: Should we take steps to avoid a crippling, decades-long depression that would lead to disastrous consequences on a worldwide scale? Or should we not do that?" asked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), adding that arguments could be made for both sides, and that the debate over ensuring America’s financial solvency versus allowing the nation to default on its debt—which would torpedo stock markets, cause mortgage and interests rates to skyrocket, and decimate the value of the U.S. dollar—is “certainly a conversation worth having.” "Obviously, we don't want to rush to consensus on whether it is or isn't a good idea to save the American economy and all our respective livelihoods from certain peril until we've examined this thorny dilemma from every angle. And if we’re still discussing this matter on Aug. 2, well, then, so be it.” At press time, President Obama said he personally believed the country should not be economically ruined.

From (who else) The Onion

Government spending is for health care

2011-07-20T14:40:00.000-07:00

The conservative American Enterprise Institute notes that

Between 1966 and 2007, the entire increase in the size of government relative to the economy resulted from growth in tax-financed health spending.

Median weekly earnings

2011-07-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

Ouch!

According to Jared Bernstein, the median weekly earnings for full-time workers has fallen from $775+ to $755+ since 2009.

An unbalanced recovery

2011-07-19T08:03:00.001-07:00

Meat Eaters Guide to Climate Change + Health

2011-07-19T07:54:00.000-07:00

From Environmental Working Group. What not to eat: lamb and beef especially. More generally, most animal protein.

Volleyball without hands!

2011-07-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

Incredible Shrinking Workers’ Income

2011-07-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

David Frum notes that workers' share national income has collapsed and continues to do so.

It started with the recession at the start of the 80s. Reagan's presidency allowed it to stagnate at the recession level. During Bush I and Clinton I things got worse. Clinton's second term saw a partial comeback. But it's been pretty much downhill since then.

(Note that the Y-axis numbers are relative. 2005 is assigned a value of 100. Everything else is made relative to that.)

Yes, Virginia, Our Housing Stock Is Now Way, Way Below Trend...

2011-07-17T11:54:00.000-07:00

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Brad DeLong notes.

That should be good news for home-builders. It hasn't happened yet, though. XHB, the Homebuiding ETF, has pretty much tracked the S&P 500 for the past year, except that it's a bit more volatile.

Our Broken Escalator

2011-07-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

From Nick Kristof's column in the NYT.

The United States supports schools in Afghanistan because we know that education is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to build a country.

Alas, we’ve forgotten that lesson at home. All across America, school budgets are being cut, teachers laid off and education programs dismantled. …

The Center on Education Policy reports that 70 percent of school districts nationwide endured budget cuts in the school year that just ended, and 84 percent anticipate cuts this year.

In higher education, the same drama is unfolding. California’s superb public university system is being undermined by the biggest budget cuts in the state’s history. Tuition is set to rise about 20 percent this year, on top of a 26 percent increase last year, which means that college will become unaffordable for some. …

Granted, budget shortfalls are real, and schools need reforms as well as dollars. Pouring money into a broken system isn’t a solution, and we need more accountability. But it’s also true that blindly slashing budgets is making the problems worse. As Derek Bok, the former Harvard president, once observed, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

Still, we nation-build in Afghanistan and scrimp at home. How is it that we can afford to double our military budget since 9/11, can afford the carried-interest tax loophole for billionaires, can afford billions of dollars in givebacks to oil and gas companies, yet can’t afford to invest in our kids’ futures?

The Clash of Generations

2011-07-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

From Tom Friedman's column in the NYT.

The generation that came of age in the last 50 years, my generation, will be remembered most for the incredible bounty and freedom it received from its parents and the incredible debt burden and constraints it left on its kids.

Lawmakers, Armed and Dangerous - NYTimes.com

2011-07-17T09:23:00.000-07:00

From Frank Bruni's column in the NYT. Speaking of an Arizona legislator, State Senator Lori Klein, who pointed her gun at a reporter (perhaps accidentally)

Her Ruger is pink, like a Barbie convertible. Showing it to Ruelas [the reporter], she reportedly said, “Oh, it’s so cute.”

No, Senator Klein, it’s not. It’s a potentially deadly weapon. When are you and the rest of the country going to wake up to that?

Apparently the only state that still forbids concealed weapons is Illinois!

Help repeal the death penalty in California

2011-07-08T19:17:00.000-07:00

Fill in the petition here.

And he gets away with it!

2011-07-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

John Boehner had this to say in response to the poor June jobs report.

Today’s report is more evidence that the misguided ‘stimulus’ spending binge, excessive regulations, and an overwhelming national debt continue to hold back private-sector job creation in our country. … Republicans are focused on jobs, and are ready to stop Washington from spending money it doesn’t have and make serious changes to the way we spend taxpayer dollars.

The Republican seem to have been so successful in convining people that black is white that Boehner says this sort of thing with no worries that anyone will call him on it. As Felix Salmon commented, Does John Boehner know what paychecks are made of? Salmon's answer, or course, is that paychecks are made of money which goes to people when it is spent(!) by those doing the hiring. No matter what you think about the long term deficit, cutting spending does not create jobs.

And Paul Krugman makes the point that government has been cutting spending for the past year. Look at the results!

Christian family values

2011-07-08T12:12:00.000-07:00

Greg Carey, a Professor of New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary (PA), has a useful Huffington Post article about this subject.

Christian weddings rarely feature [biblical] passages that directly relate to marriage. Only one passage, Genesis 2:24, seems especially relevant, while other passages require us to bend their content to our desire to hear a good word about marriage. Things are so bad that the worship books for many denominations turn to John 2:11, where Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding feast, to claim that Jesus blessed marriage. …

So we know Jesus blessed marriage because he attended a wedding? That's the best we can do? No wonder it's common for couples to struggle over the choice of Scripture for their wedding ceremonies. The Bible just doesn't have much to say on the topic.

…

Unfortunately, many Christians use the Bible to support their own prejudices and bigotry. They talk about "biblical family values" as if the Bible had a clear message on marriage and sexuality. Let's be clear: There's no such thing as "biblical family values" because the Bible does not speak to the topic clearly and consistently.

It's high time people came clean about how we use the Bible. When Christians try to resolve difficult ethical and theological matters, they typically appeal to the Gospels and Paul's letters as keys to the question. But what about marriage? Not only did Jesus choose not to marry, he encouraged his disciples to abandon household and domestic concerns in order to follow him (Matthew 19:29; Mark 10:28-30; Luke 9:57-62). He even refers to those "who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:10-13). Whatever that means, it's certainly not an endorsement of marriage. Paul likewise encourages male believers: "Do not seek a wife" (1 Corinthians 7:27, my translation) -- advice Paul took for himself. If neither Jesus nor Paul preferred marriage for their followers, why do some Christians maintain that the Bible enshrines 19th-century Victorian family values?

Let's not even go into some of the Bible's most chilling teachings regarding marriage, such as how a man's obligation to keep a new wife who displeases him on the wedding night (Deuteronomy 22:13-21), his obligation to marry a woman he has raped (Deuteronomy 22:28-30) or the unquestioned right of heroes like Abraham to exploit their slaves sexually. I wonder: Have the "biblical family values advocates" actually read their Bibles?

America Needs a Grand Bargain

2011-07-08T11:52:00.000-07:00

Mohamed A. El-Erian of PIMCO writes that America Needs a Grand Bargain, But All It’s Getting Is a Mini Deal. A grand bargain would, in my view, establish what we as a nation want the role of government to be and how we expect to pay for it. Of course that's a lot to agree to, and it's not likely that Obama will find a perspective that today's politicians will buy.

One reason he will have a hard time is that the Republicans don't want a grand bargain. If Obama were to succeed in building a grand bargain, the Republicans could no long argue that he is a socialist—or whatever they are accusing him of being these days.

So don't get your hopes up for a grand bargain. Republican politics won't let it happen. But wouldn't it be nice if it did.

One thing Obama might try to do is to enunciate what he thinks such a grand bargain might look like and then let the Republicans reject it. At least he would be showing some leadership, which he has failed to do.

Sex, Violence and the Supreme Court majority

2011-07-08T00:47:00.000-07:00

Timothy Egan writes about the Supreme Court case that found unconstitutional a California ban on selling violent video games to minors while keeping in place laws that prevent the sale of nudity to minors. Justice Stephen Breyer asked,

What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively but virtually binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her? …

What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only if the woman — bound, gagged, tortured and killed — is also topless?

It's Scilia who is really sick.

So what if children’s active minds are engaged in decisions in which people are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire and chopped into little pieces.

Apparently it's ok as long as certain parts of their bodies are covered.

I tend not to favor restricting speech, but if it is to be restricted it makes no sense, as Egan put it, that "children should be free to slice a clothed Godiva to bits — on screen — but should be shielded from seeing her as she was when she rode through the streets of Coventry."

Altruistic grading?

2011-07-07T09:51:00.000-07:00

Freakonomics published these two graphs of scores on language tests given nationwide in Poland to high school students. The tests are scored anonymously by multiple scorers, suggesting that favoritism is probably not involved.

The first graph shows scores for a test that requires 21 to pass. Failure means either taking the test again or perhaps losing the chance to go on to college.

The spike at 21 and the drop-off immediately below that suggests that perhaps graders were reluctant to fail students (whom they didn't know) who came close to passing.

The second graph is of a similar test that has no serious consequences for students. The spike and drop-off are missing.

Health care expenditures

2011-07-05T14:05:00.001-07:00

Our government healthcare expenditures is as large as all but a few developed countries. Our private healthcare expenditures is larger than our public healthcare expenditures.

Here is life expectancy to the left paired with expenditures.

It sure doesn't look like we're getting our money's worth.

Popcorn exploding

2011-07-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

Nathan Myhrvold recently published a multi-volume book about cooking. He gave a TED talk during which he showed this video of popcorn exploding. The end of the video has links to other very slow motion videos.

Obama must explain why the debt ceiling must be raised

2011-07-01T22:10:00.000-07:00

I left a comment along these lines on a post at Capital Gains and Games.

President Obama should make it clear to the American people that if we don't raise the debt limit, we are risking severe repercussions. If he doesn't do that he isn't doing his job. Obama is the one person in the nation who is in a position to explain the meaning (and non-meaning) of the debt ceiling. The most important thing he can do is to explain to the American people why the debt ceiling must be raised. All other budget issues, while important, are not connected to the debt ceiling. He must take seriously his role as educator-in-chief and explain that to the American people.

Once he's done that he must then make it clear that it's up to Congress to act. As president he can't raise the debt ceiling. Congress must do it. He must get the American electorate to tell their representatives that the debt ceiling should be raised. Once he does that, it will happen.

So the real question is why isn't he doing this? I'm beginning to agree with the Republicans who keep saying that he isn't doing his job.

We have a Congress problem, not a deficit problem, in one graph

2011-07-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

As Ezra Klein has pointed out in the past, if congress does nothing the deficit problem is fixed! So the real question is whether Congress will act responsibly and not make the problem worse.

What you’re seeing here is the differences between doing nothing and doing what we expect Congress to do. The blue slope at the base of the graph is what our deficit picture looks like if Congress goes on permanent recess tomorrow. Every colored chunk above that is a deficit-increasing policy that the CBO thinks Congress might pass. Here’s [Mark] Goldwein’s rundown of those policies. [Goldwein is the policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.]

Doc Fixes: Under current law, Medicare physician payments are scheduled to be cut by 30% as part of something called the Sustainable Growth Rate. The AFS (and CRFB’s Realistic Baseline) assumes politicians freeze physician payments instead.

AMT Patches: The Alternative Minimum Tax is a secondary tax meant to capture high earners with low tax burdens. However, for a number of reasons, it now technically impacts middle-income families and so politicians pass annual “patches” to avoid this from occurring. Under current law, patches will stop while under the AFS (and CRFB’s Realistic Baseline) they continue.
Tax Cuts: Under current law, the 2001/2003/2010 tax cuts expire at the end of 2012, as do a number of temporary “extenders”. The AFS assumes that policymakers make both permanent (while CRFB’s Realistic Baseline only assumes the 2001/2003/2010 tax cuts continue).

PPACA Cost Controls: The health reform law included a number of cost controls for Medicare and the exchange subsidies which are now part of current law but may prove unsustainable over the long-run. The AFS assumes that they are effective through 2021 but are overridden thereafter (CRFB’s Realistic Baseline assumes they are partially overridden).

Discretionary Spending Growth: By budget convention, the current law baseline assumes discretionary spending grows with inflation through 2021 (as does CRFB’s Realistic Baseline). The Alternative Fiscal Scenario instead assumes it grows with GDP.

Revenue Freeze: Were all the tax cuts (and AMT patches) to be renewed, revenue would still grow as a share of GDP due mainly to something called “real bracket creep” -- as well as due to the effect of the health care excise tax. However, the Alternative Fiscal Scenario holds revenue constant at 18.4 percent of GDP after 2021, essentially assuming that policy makers will enact future additional tax cuts.

War Drawdown: By convention, CBO’s current law baseline assumes all discretionary spending — including for the wars — will grow with inflation. However, the Alternative Fiscal Scenario (as well as CRFB’s Realistic Baseline) assumes that troops will gradually be drawn down.
As you can see on the graph, the Bush tax cuts and the patch to the alternative-minimum tax are the biggest contributors to our future deficits. Ignoring the proposed freeze in domestic discretionary spending comes next. Then there’s the doc fix, and a future cap on revenue that holds taxes to 18.4 percent of GDP.

I want to be very clear: The do-nothing scenario is not the best way to solve our deficit problems. It raises taxes too high, and does too little to reduce health-care costs in a sustainable way. The Medicare cuts are completely unmanageable. But if every time Congress votes to change one of those policies, it offsets the cost, our problems are solved. That means we don’t necessarily need grand bargains or debt-ceiling brinksmanship. We just need Congress to abide by PAYGO.

All of which goes to a point I’ve made before: We don’t really have a deficit problem. We have a Congress problem. Congress pretends otherwise, because they don’t want to take the blame for the deficit-effects of the legislation they plan to vote for, but that’s the truth of it.

Obama Health Care Law Gets Support in First Appellate Review

2011-06-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

In its story on the first appellate of the Health Care mandate the NYT wrote (in the story's last sentence)

cost-shifting was inevitable as long as the federal government required hospitals to treat those who show up with life-threatening conditions.

That seems to me to be a decisive argument. If the Federal Government requires hospitals to treat those who show up with life-threatening conditions, and if that requirement is constitutional, then it is reasonable to ask where the money to pay for that treatment will come from. The individual mandate seems like a reasonable answer to that question, and on those grounds should be constitutional.

A modest goal

2011-06-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

In this review of Scott F. Aikin's Epistemology and the Regress Problem (207 pp) Kelly Becker quotes Aiken as saying that "the baseline objective in this book is to work out a way for epistemic infinitism to appear better than obviously wrong." Becker notes that this is a modest goal.

High Frequency Trading and the news

2011-06-24T10:39:00.000-07:00

David Fry of Dave's Daily says:

This is “the short-term memory market” and may be a suitable alternative headline. But, HFTs (High Frequency Traders) have programmed their HAL 9000s to search for terms like “Greece” and “approved” to launch buy programs.

Awareness

2011-06-24T08:40:00.000-07:00

Buddhists encourage awareness. A nice practical example of awareness occurs when one savors food. Did you ever take small bites of a dessert as a way to make it last longer? Each bite filled your mouth with flavor and pleasure. A Black Forest cake, for example, mixes the tartness of cherries, the richness and lightness of whipped cream with the unique taste of chocolate—all built on a foundation of sweetness. Awareness is doing that about everything.

Well, some things are not as enjoyable as dessert. Who wants to savor boredom, pain, or anxiety? For those times think about it this way. You are going to die. The older you get the closer the day—and the more real the understanding of that fact—becomes. Savor the moments because, like a dessert, there will be a time when you've consumed it all.

One reason TED talks are good

2011-06-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

Each is a talk backed up by visuals rather than visuals backed up by talk.

Warren Buffet's Import Certificates

2011-06-22T14:50:00.000-07:00

Bill Gross's July Investment Outlook argues (a) that a liberal arts education is not worth it, (b) that the governments should be the employer of last resort, and (c) that we have to get our act together as an economy. In discussing our deficit he referred to what Warren Buffet called Import Certificates. (Gross mistakenly called them Import Credits.) Buffet's idea was that to import anything the importer would have to have an Import Certificate for the cost of the import. Where would she get it? Exporters would be given Import Certificates (ICs) matching the cost of everything they export. If adhered to rigidly this would balance imports and exports.

As Buffet pointed out there would be a very liquid market in Import Certificates. Their market price would depend on how grossly unbalanced our trade would be otherwise. The more naturally balanced our trade, the less valuable the certificates since there would be enough to go around. But if we were to import more than we export, there would be fewer certificates available, thus raising their prices. In fact, the price of the certificates would rise to the point that trade would be balanced.

Who would ultimately pay for those certificates? Foreign suppliers would probably pay some of the cost as a way to gain access to the US market. Another part of the cost would be paid by consumers in the form of higher prices on imported goods.

In addition, exporters could use the income derived from selling the ICs they earn to lower their prices, thus making them a bit more competitive.

This seems like a very interesting idea since it does not favor any products, companies, or countries. It simply balances imports and exports. The market would decide how the ICs would be paid for and which products would be penalized the most.

Of course ICs put a barrier of sorts in the way of free trade. Nonetheless it may be a good way to balance our trade without distorting the market too much.

To avoid an initial shock we could start by having the government issue more ICs than are justified by our exports. The number of extra ICs would be reduced year by year until only export-paired ICs would exist.

Soros on "The Enlightment Fallacy"

2011-06-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

George Soros wrote a lengthy introduction to a new book on his Philanthropy. An excerpt was published in the June 23 issue of The New York Review of Books. Soros also sent a copy of it to a large mailing list.

Soros has long championed what he called reflexivity in financial markets, the idea that the action of the market participants themselves affect the market. In this introduction he extends that idea to world of politics. Just as the efficient market hypothesis has been shown not to be a good model for markets, the traditional enlightenment assumption that we will use our rationality to seek the truth is not a good model for the political world. (It has recently been argued that much of our ability to think abstractly grew out of our desire to win arguments rather than to seek the truth or understand nature.) Here's how Soros puts it, along with what he sees as the consequences. Unfortunately, he doesn't propose any real solutions.

[Karl] Popper had argued that free speech and critical thinking would lead to better laws and a better understanding of reality than any dogma. I came to realize that there was an unspoken assumption embedded in his argument, namely that the purpose of democratic discourse is to gain a better understanding of reality. It dawned on me that my own concept of reflexivity brings Popper’s hidden assumption into question. If thinking has a manipulative function as well as a cognitive one, then it may not be necessary to gain a better understanding of reality in order to obtain the laws one wants. There is a shortcut: “spinning” arguments and manipulating public opinion to get the desired results. Today our political discourse is primarily concerned with getting elected and staying in power. Popper’s hidden assumption that freedom of speech and thought will produce a better understanding of reality is valid only for the study of natural phenomena. Extending it to human affairs is part of what I have called the “Enlightenment fallacy.”

As it happened, the political operatives of the Bush administration became aware of the Enlightenment fallacy long before I did. People like me, misguided by that fallacy, believed that the propaganda methods described in George Orwell’s 1984 could prevail only in a dictatorship. They knew better. Frank Luntz, the well-known right-wing political consultant, proudly acknowledged that he used 1984 as his textbook in designing his catchy slogans. And Karl Rove reportedly claimed that he didn’t have to study reality; he could create it. The adoption of Orwellian techniques gave the Republican propaganda machine a competitive advantage in electoral politics. The other side has tried to catch up with them but has been hampered by a lingering attachment to the pursuit of truth.

Deliberately misleading propaganda techniques can destroy an open society. Nazi propaganda methods were powerful enough to destroy the Weimar Republic. Different but in some ways similar methods have been used in the United States and further refined. Although democracy has much deeper roots in America than in Germany, it is not immune to deliberate deception, as the Bush administration demonstrated. You cannot wage war against an abstraction; yet the war on terror remains a widely accepted metaphor even today. …

The election of President Obama in 2008 sent a powerful message to the world that the US is capable of radically changing course when it recognizes that it is on the wrong track. But the change was temporary: his election and inauguration were the high points of his presidency. Already the reelection of President Bush had convinced me that the malaise in American society went deeper than incompetent leadership. The American public was unwilling to face harsh reality and was positively asking to be deceived by demanding easy answers to difficult problems.

The fate of the Obama presidency reinforced that conviction. Obama assumed the presidency in the midst of a financial crisis whose magnitude few people appreciated, and he was not among those few. But he did recognize that the American public was averse to facing harsh realities and he had great belief in his own charismatic powers. He also wanted to rise above party politics and become—as he put it in his campaign speeches—the president of the United States of America. Consequently, he was reluctant to forthrightly blame the outgoing administration and went out of his way to avoid criticism and conflict. He resorted to what George Akerlof and Robert Shiller called the “confidence multiplier” in their influential book Animal Spirits. Accordingly, in the hope of moderating the recession, he painted a rosier picture of the economic situation than was justified.

The tactic worked in making the recession shorter and shallower than would have been the case otherwise, but it had disastrous political consequences. The confidence multiplier is, in effect, one half of a reflexive feedback loop: a positive influence on people’s perceptions can have a positive feedback in its effects on the underlying economic reality. But if reality, for example the unemployment rate, fails to live up to expectations, confidence turns to disappointment and anger; that is the other half of the reflexive feedback loop, and that is what came to pass.

The electorate showed little appreciation of Obama for moderating the recession because it was hardly aware of what he had done. By avoiding conflict Obama handed the initiative to the opposition, and the opposition had no incentive to cooperate. The Republican propaganda machine was able to convince people that the financial crisis was due to government failure, not market failure. According to the Republican narrative, the government cannot be trusted and its role in the economy—both regulation and taxation—should be reduced to a minimum.

The Republicans had good reason to take this line: it is a half-truth that advanced their political agenda. What is surprising is the extent of their success. The explanation lies partly in the power of Orwell’s Newspeak and partly in the aversion of the public to facing harsh realities.

On the one hand, Newspeak is extremely difficult to contradict because it incorporates and thereby preempts its own contradiction, as when Fox News calls itself fair and balanced. Another trick is to accuse your opponent of the behavior of which you are guilty, like Fox News accusing me of being the puppet master of a media empire. Skillful practitioners always attack the strongest point of their opponent, like the Swiftboat ads attacking John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. Facts do not provide any protection, and rejecting an accusation may serve to have it repeated; but ignoring it can be very costly, as John Kerry discovered in the 2004 election.

On the other hand, the pursuit of truth has lost much of its appeal. When reality is unpleasant, illusions offer an attractive escape route. In difficult times unscrupulous manipulators enjoy a competitive advantage over those who seek to confront reality. Nazi propaganda prevailed in the Weimar Republic because the public had been humiliated by military defeat and disoriented by runaway inflation. In its own quite different way, the American public has been subjected to somewhat comparable experiences, first by the terrorist attacks of September 11, and then by the financial crisis, which not only caused material hardship but also seemed to seal the decline of the United States as the dominant power in the world. With the rise of China occurring concurrently, the shift in power and influence has been dramatic.

The two trends taken together—the reluctance to face harsh reality coupled with the refinement in the techniques of deception—explain why America is failing to meet the requirements of an open society. Apparently, a society needs to be successful in order to remain open.

What can we do to preserve and reinvigorate open society in America? First, I should like to see efforts to help the public develop an immunity to Newspeak. Those who have been exposed to it from Nazi or Communist times have an allergic reaction to it; but the broad public is highly susceptible.

Second, I should like to convince the American public of the merits of facing harsh reality. As I earlier wrote, I have from my childhood been drawn to contending with what may seem insurmountable challenges. Those in charge of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, have done well in identifying me as their adversary. They have done less well in the methods they have used to attack me: their lies shall not stand and their techniques shall not endure.

But improving the quality of political discourse is not enough. We must also find the right policies to deal with the very real problems confronting the country: high unemployment and chronic budget and trade deficits. The financing of state and local governments is heading for a breakdown. The Republicans have gained control of the agenda, and they are promoting a misleading narrative: everything is the government’s fault. The Democrats are forced into fighting a rearguard battle, defending the opposite position.

To cure the deficit, do nothing

2011-06-22T11:26:00.000-07:00

The Congressional Budget Office points out (again) that if we do nothing at all, the budget deficit will cure itself. Here's how Ezra Klein puts it.

If Congress lets the Bush tax cuts expire or offsets their extension, implements the Affordable Care Act as scheduled and makes or offset the Medicare cuts prescribed by the 1997 Balanced Budget Act — which CBO calls the “extended baseline scenario” — the national debt will be totally manageable.

If Congress passes laws extending the Bush tax cuts without offsetting the cost, repealing the Affordable Care Act and its cost controls and protecting doctors from Medicare cuts without making up the savings elsewhere — the “alternative fiscal scenario” — the national debt will be totally out of control:

Brad DeLong adds a comment.

Indeed.

If Obama were to pledge--and get everybody running for his seat to pledge--not to sign any bill that breaks PAYGO, we don't have a long-run deficit problem. If the majority and minority leaders of the Senate and their successors pledge not to let anything move through the Senate that breaks PAYGO, we don't have a long-run deficit problem. If the Speaker of the House and his successors pledge not to let anything move through the House that breaks PAYGO, we don't have a long-run deficit problem.

It boggles my mind why Barack Obama did not, on January 21, 2009, promise to veto everything that broke ten-year PAYGO. I am morally certain that this is what Peter Orszag told him to do. I am morally certain that this is what Jack Lew is telling him to do.

What a disappointment …

PAYGO is pay as you go, the policy adopted a couple of decades ago to tame the deficit. It worked then, and it could work now.

Changes in life expectancy for women in the US

2011-06-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

From the LA Times.

Consider the correlation between changes in life expectancy and political party.

Tax rates and economic growth in one graph

2011-06-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

Ezra Kleinquotes John Boehner

“We’ve seen over the last 30 years that lower marginal tax rates have led to a growing economy, more employment and more people paying taxes.”

But it’s very hard to find evidence for that view in the economy itself. Michael Linden at the Center for American progress graphed the economy’s average real GDP growth rate at different top marginal tax rates. Apologies to Speaker Boehner, but what we’ve seen over the past 30 years is that lower marginal tax rates have not led to particularly impressive economic growth, labor markets or revenues. Growth was actually more impressive back when marginal tax rates were higher.

I want to be very clear here: I am not saying, and no one should think, that high marginal tax rates drive growth. All else being equal, lower marginal tax rates are probably better for growth, though that can flip if they begin driving large deficits or starving important government functions. But what this graph suggests is that marginal tax rates don’t determine growth in either direction. As Linden concludes, “These numbers do not mean that higher rates necessarily lead to higher growth. But the central tenet of modern conservative economics is that a lower top marginal tax rate will result in more growth, and these numbers do show conclusively that history has not been kind to that theory.”

Too good to pass up

2011-06-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

This post (Texas Prayed and God Answered) is by Larry Moran.

Back in April, Governor Rick Perry of Texas proclaimed a weekend of prayer (Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011). Texans were supposed to pray for God to relieve the terrible dought [Pray for Texas].

Bill Maher reminded me that it's been several months since Texans prayed so it's time to analyze the results.

On the site US Drought Monitor there are maps of the USA showing region of drought.

The top map below shows the regions with severe drought (dark brown) for April 26, 2011, right after all the praying.

The second map shows regions of drought on June 14, 2011.

It looks like God hates Texas and/or Rick Perry.

I'm told that Governor Perry is thinking of running for President of the United States. Is this a good idea?

It's Still the Economy, Stupid

2011-06-19T23:34:00.000-07:00

Bill Clinton has 14 great ideas to help the economy.

Fourteen million Americans remain out of work, a waste of our greatest resource. The 42nd president has more than a dozen ideas on how to attack the jobs crisis.

We miss him as president.

Drew Westen: The Three Wings of the Republican Party

2011-06-19T20:42:00.000-07:00

Drew Westen should be put in charge of framing the Democrats' message. He would make the following a statement in a public opinion poll. People would be asked whether they agree or disagree.

The best way to reduce the deficit is to put Americans back to work. There are 14 million Americans who've lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and they'd be happy to be paying taxes again instead of drawing unemployment insurance.

Peggy Noonan on Anthony Weiner: posting sexually suggestive pictures is worse than bribery and real (illicit) sex

2011-06-19T13:02:00.000-07:00

Here's how she put it in the Wall Street Journal.

Sometimes all of Washington has to put up its hand up like a traffic cop and say no. It has to say: That doesn't go here, it's not acceptable, it's not among the normal human transgressions of back stairs, love affairs and the congressman on the take. This is decadence. It is pornography. We can't let the world, and the young, know it's "politically survivable." Because that will hurt us, not him, and define us, not him. So: enough.

Think about that. Noonan says that sending off-color pictures—apparently not even pornographic—is less acceptable than "the normal human transgressions of back stairs, love affairs and the congressman on the take." Why is that? I'd much rather have a Congress full of Anthony Weiners than one full of "congressman on the take." Why is what Weiner did so much more uncomfortable for people than "the normal human transgressions of back stairs [and] love affairs"?

I think the answer is that what Weiner did revealed an inner yearning on his part that these other activities no longer do. When we hear of a congressman (or governor or other public figure) who has had a culturally illicit sexual encounter, we no longer think about the person's internal state. We have grown so accustomed to such affairs that we are able to put them into the "illicit sex" box and don't allow ourselves to think about the inner desires that brought them on. In Weiner's case, we don't have such a convenient box in which to put his actions. We are forced to think about what he must have been feeling when he sent those pictures. And we are not comfortable with thinking about people experiencing desire.

A couple of years about Daniel Bergner published The Other Side of Desire. In it he explores the lives of four people with what we would consider fetishes, perhaps perversions. A Salon.com story about him begins like this.

In a series of four stories, Bergner grants us entree into dark worlds of extreme lust and longing: there is the foot fetishist wracked by shame, the dominatrix so turned on by inflicting pain on others that she once roasted a man on a spit, and the stepfather capsized by lust for his 12-year-old stepdaughter. There is even a love story involving amputee fetish. But what's remarkable about Bergner's book is not the way these tales shock or confound or titillate (though they do those things sometimes), but how sympathetic their plights and hungers become. Bergner … is a keen storyteller but above all a humane one, and in his hands, these characters do not seem like freaks so much as shadows of ourselves.

We all have internal desires, and many of us are afraid to talk about them, even to acknowledge that they exist. When someone has his inner desires made public, to avoid acknowledging our own (often hidden) desires we resort to calling the person a pervert, as if no one by a freak could feel the way he apparently does.

This sort of reaction seems to be particularly Republican. Peggy Noonan's piece is a good example. Sending sexually suggestive picture over the internet as worse than bribery or actual affairs? Noonan, like so many of her conservative colleagues seems unable to look at the broad range of human desire and emotion and acknowledge that it exists.

Interview with Paul Krugman.

2011-06-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

(Click the image for the full interview.)

… Then I read Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, this wonderful, humane book saying that nobody has all the answers. What we know is what we have evidence for. We do the best we can, but anybody who claims to be able to deduce or have revelation about The Truth – with both Ts capitalised – is wrong. It doesn’t work that way. The only reasonable way to approach life is with an attitude of humane scepticism. I felt that a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders when I read that book. …

[If] you ask a liberal or a saltwater economist, “What would somebody on the other side of this divide say here? What would their version of it be?” A liberal can do that. A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don’t think it’s right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can’t do it. They can’t get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, “What do liberals want?” You get this bizarre stuff – for example, that liberals want everybody to ride trains, because it makes people more susceptible to collectivism. You just have to look at the realities of the way each side talks and what they know. One side of the picture is open-minded and sceptical. We have views that are different, but they’re arrived at through paying attention. The other side has dogmatic views. …

Politically [James] Tobin was very much a free-market, welfare-state Keynesian [emphasis added], as I am. We appreciate markets, we understand them, we don’t hate rich people, but we want a social safety net and you do need government intervention to avoid what we are going through right now.

Jared Diamond: Thoughts on Managing Change

2011-06-19T08:31:00.000-07:00

“There are so many societies in which the elite made decisions that were good for themselves in the short run and ruined themselves and societies in the long run. For example, the most advanced society in the New World before Columbus was the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala and Honduras. They ended up collapsing …. because of a combination of climate change, drought, water management problems, soil erosion, deforestation….So the Mayan kings had strong power.

Why didn’t the Mayan kings just look out the windows of the Palaces and see the forests getting chopped down, soil being eroded down at the valley bottom. Why didn’t the kings say `stop it’? Well the kings had managed to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions – in the short run. Even while the forests were being chopped down, they were still being fed well by the commoners, they were in their wonderful palaces. And the kings didn’t recognize that they were making a mess until it was too late, when the commoners rose in revolt.

Similarly, in the United States at present, the policies being pursued by too many wealthy people and decision makers are ones that — as in the case of the Mayan kings — preserve their interests in the short run but are disastrous in the long run.”

Boeing and the NLRB

2011-06-18T11:07:00.001-07:00

Andrew Sammick is an intelligent and respected economist. Yet he wrote in his blog that the Boing machinist union

filed a complaint in April alleging that Boeing decided to locate a new assembly line to build 787 Dreamliner jets in South Carolina because it was trying to punish union workers in Washington state for their past strikes. Boeing says the charge is groundless and has said it will fight the case to the Supreme Court.
I think the claim that failing to expand in a given area because it is cheaper to expand in another area is a violation of any law that is worth being upheld is going to be a tough one to make. It is further complicated, in this particular case, by the fact that there is no evidence that any specific workers have lost jobs in Washington, Boeing's home and the location of the existing assembly lines for the 787.

Ellin Dannin explains what's really going on.

The Boeing case began when the Machinists Union in the State of Washington filed a charge with the NLRB alleging that Boeing had retaliated against its Washington employees for past strikes by moving work to South Carolina. The right to strike is protected by law, and an employer’s retaliating against employees for exercising their legal rights violates the NLRA, the law the NLRB enforces.

After the charge was filed, the NLRB’s regional office in Washington investigated the case. That investigation involved taking sworn affidavits from witnesses and collecting other relevant evidence. Boeing had the right to present its evidence during the investigation. The evidence included public statements by Boeing officials – and reported in the Seattle Post Intelligencer Aerospace News and the Seattle Times – that they were angry that Boeing employees in Washington had gone on strike in the past. Boeing officials also said that they would, therefore, move work that was originally going to be done in Washington to a plant in South Carolina. This evidence, if credited by the judge at trial, supports a finding that Boeing violated § 8(a)(1) and (3) of the NLRA.
There is nothing in the case about one state being a right to work state or not.
That red herring was created by Boeing in its aggressive campaign against the NLRB. So far Boeing’s cynical strategy appears to be working. It has gotten congressional representatives to repeat the unsupported claims made by Boeing and to hold hearings and draft legislation that would hamstring the NLRB in doing its job.

Liar, liar pants on fire

2011-06-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein quotes Mitt Romney as saying, “We have seen the most anti-investment, antigrowth, antijob strategy in America since Jimmy Carter. The result has been it’s harder and harder for people to find work.”

Klein makes it clear that Romney is using the standard Republican strategy: lie.

By any measure, this is absurd. Taxes are at a 50-year low. The Dow has staged a roaring recovery. Business profits are near record levels. And the economy has gone from losing 780,000 jobs a month to gaining about 160,000 jobs a month. That is to say, it’s getting easier and easier for people to find work, even if it’s not nearly easy enough.

The tragedy of it is that the Republicans tend to get away with it. When will the American people recognize lies and punish the liars for what they are?

Xefer Wikipedia Radial Graph

2011-06-12T16:21:00.000-07:00

Continuously following the first link of any Wikipedia article will eventually lead to “Philosophy.” Try it here

That's neat, but I wonder what would happen if one used some other term as the stopping term. For example, what if one followed first links until one got to, for example, English? That wouldn't work because starting with philosophy one just gets back to philosophy. For example: philosophy, rational argument, reason, rationality, philosophy.

What this is really saying is that Philosophy is a basin of attraction for first word links. So the question becomes what are the other basins of attraction?

Bush tax cuts 10th anniversary: They've been a failure in every conceivable way

2011-06-09T22:35:00.000-07:00

By Annie Lowrey in Slate Magazine

The massive Bush tax cuts mark their 10th birthday this week. Sadly, despite my best efforts to find something redeeming about them—honest!—there is little to celebrate. By nearly all of the metrics set out by President Bush himself, the cuts were a colossal failure.

In 2001, the Bush administration inherited a few years' worth of budget surpluses, so it decided to cut income tax rates, double the child-care credit, and sharply reduce the levies on investment income. The economy then slowed, even entering a brief recession. As a form of stimulus, the administration doubled down, expanding and hastening the 2001 changes. Bush promised that the tax cuts would do a whole lot more than put money in people's pockets—which, in fact, they did. He said they would 'starve the beast,' forcing Congress to reduce the size and scope of government. He promised they would increase the prosperity of all Americans. He also vowed: 'Tax relief will create new jobs. Tax relief will generate new wealth. And tax relief will open new opportunities.' …

[Besides that,] the benefits mostly accrued to the rich, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The think tank reports that between 2001 and 2008, the bottom 80 percent of filers received about 35 percent of the cuts. The top 20 percent received about 65 percent—and the top 1 percent alone claimed 38 percent.

The argument for, and against, euthanasia

2011-06-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein has a very thoughtful post on euthanasia.

You could even argue that the option of physician-assisted suicide might reduce suicides: The promise of a painless and safe death, one with no chance of failure and no grisly spectacle for loved ones, might be enough to persuade people who want to swallow a bottle of pills now to wait and begin working with a doctor instead. That creates time between the intention and the act, and that’s time in which the individual might reconsider, and time in which a professional caregiver is going to attempt to help them find treatments to ease their pain. …

But Klein goes on to quote from a paper by Ezekiel Emanuel in which he worries that

the option of euthanasia will lead to worse care for the dying, and perhaps even subtle coercion on the part of loved ones and medical professionals who can no longer bear to see a patient suffer, or, more worryingly, can no longer afford to treat their suffering. “Broad legalization of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia would have the paradoxical effect of making patients seem to be responsible for their own suffering,” he writes. “Rather than being seen primarily as the victims of pain and suffering caused by disease, patients would be seen as having the power to end their suffering by agreeing to an injection or taking some pills; refusing would mean that living through the pain was the patient’s decision, the patient’s responsibility.”

Stan Collendar on the debt limit

2011-06-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

From Roll Call, reprinted on his blog.

The best indication of all that the market has already started reacting negatively is the current trading of credit default swaps on U.S. debt. As of late May, the number of CDS contracts — essentially insurance policies on the possibility of a default — had risen by 82 percent. Equally as important, the cost of a CDS — the best indication of how much riskier U.S. debt has become — rose by more than 35 percent from April to May. Last week I spoke to a number of people who calculate such things for a living, and they said this change means that the interest rate the U.S. government has to pay has already increased by as much as 40 basis points compared with what it otherwise would be. This means higher federal borrowing costs and deficits, and overall higher interest rates on everything from car loans to mortgages to credit cards.

What should S&P and Moody's do? Should they take seriously the possibility that the US will default? Everyone "knows" that this is all political gaming and it will never come to a real default. But then, that's always the case before something unexpected happens: no one believes it could possibly happen. If it does happen and S&P and Moody's hadn't taken the possibility seriously, they would be criticized for missing something that was obvious—in the same way they missed the mortgage meltdown. So they should take it serious—just as if it were happening in some other country that is immature enough that it may allow something like this to happen. And perhaps it will really happen.

Except when something unexpected occurs, the initial changes in market psychology and behavior start with just a few investors who act either because they are more or less risk averse, have better information, or are smarter. That means there are usually small signs of change before a market tsunami hits. In this case, there is now clear evidence that the uncertainty over the federal debt ceiling is already having the negative impact on financial markets that the Republican leadership has said will not occur. Just because it may not yet be obvious to everyone doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Not only that, I'm sure I'm not the only person who has thought these thoughts. As the deadline approaches, more and more people are likely to become more and more uncomfortable and will look for a safe place to put their money. Where is that? I don't know. Not the usual place, U.S. Treasury notes. So where? Cash? That has to be stored somewhere. Money market funds won't do since they depend on Treasuries. Even bank deposits may seem unsafe since who knows what will happen to the banking system. Something solid like commodities or precious metals? Or perhaps companies that for one reason or another are likely to be needed after the crisis and are not likely to fall apart.

After all, the world will go on. We must all eat. It's not the case that everything will grind to a halt. And in the worst case, the Republicans will see how much damage they are doing and retreat—one hopes. But I'm sure quite a few people are right now attempting to imagine possible scenarios and looking for ways both to protect themselves and perhaps even to make money.

Peter Diamond's withdrawal from consideration

2011-06-07T12:01:00.000-07:00

for membership on the Board of Governors of the Fed. Andrew Samwick sees of it as representative of our decline and fall.

When historians look back at our era and write about how a nation so blessed was able to squander those blessings so dramatically, they won't have to look much further than the U.S. Senate. Words, polite ones anyway, cannot really express how how absurd it is that the nomination of Peter Diamond for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has come down to this. Even without the Nobel Prize, his qualifications for the position were beyond question -- at least by anyone who could be persuaded by the answers. I continue to wonder whether our society is resilient enough to withstand many more years of this institutionalized immaturity on important policy matters.

With Austan Goolsbee's resignation as CEA Chairman, most speculation will turn to his successor and this summer's Senate confirmation process. And, no, I don't think President Obama will nominate Peter Diamond to be the CEA Chairman, though he is, once again, more than qualified for the position. The next CEA Chairman will have to be someone not currently associated with the Obama Administration, so that the confirmation hearings can be less of a retrospective on Obama's policies to date and more of a forward-looking discussion of what could and should be done. And I don't envy Goolsbee's successor, for two reasons. First, outsiders have a terrible time trying to be heard by those who have been around since the campaign and have developed trust and established ways of working together. Second, by the time this person takes office, the entire economic agenda will be driven by the 2012 election campaign and not the more thoughtful possibilities for crafting policy.

Rand Paul, Supposed Defender Of Civil Liberties, Calls For Jailing People Who Attend ‘Radical Political Speeches’

2011-06-01T10:13:00.000-07:00

From ThinkProgress. Rand Paul "libertarian":

[If] someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.

Really?!

Fantastic post about health care

2011-06-01T09:47:00.001-07:00

Ezra Klein has a number of guest posters substituting for him while he is on vacation. Here is Karl Smith, assistant professor of economics and government at the University of North Carolina School of Government.

We spend a lot of time talking and, indeed, yelling at each other, over how we are going to pay for health care and who is going to buy what. What gets scant attention is the far more important question: [How] are we going to create and who is going to sell it?

Imagine for a moment that the price of health care suddenly dropped by 90 percent. Care that cost $1,000 could be had for $100. Not only that, but the cost curve began to bend the other way. The next year the care was $95. The year after that it was $90.

In that world, would it matter whether we had RyanCare or ObamaCare? Would it matter if most people had health insurance at all?

Such a world could only be achieved by changes on the supply side. Health care would have to become cheaper to produce. Indeed, health care stands in stark contrast to a portion of our economy that displays that property: information and communication technology.

This is striking, because health care essentially is information and communication technology. To get a glimpse of this, imagine the Universal Health App (UnHA) that comes with your next-, next-generation Android or iPhone. You point your phone at yourself and UnHA immediately tells you what diseases you have. If medication is available, she orders it. If a surgical procedure is needed, she schedules it. She knows your calendar perfectly and can interface seamlessly with the local hospital’s scheduling computer and the surgeon’s calendar.

When the drugs come, UnHA checks to make sure you have the right ones, reminds you when to take them, lets you know what to do if you miss a dose and monitors you for side effects. When you come home from your surgery, UnHA likewise monitors your recovery, making sure that everything is proceeding according to plan.

UnHA is personalized and travels with you everywhere you go. She carries all of your medical records and calculates your risk factors for every imaginable condition on a continuous basis. UnHA will even remind you of the expected increase in your individualized life expectancy from staying on the elliptical for 20 more minutes.

Perhaps most important is UnHA’s back end. UnHA’s server strips away all identifying information and runs constant statistical analysis on incoming data from a billion patients worldwide. When a news story generates a spike in blood pressures, UnHA’s server side can see the wave of tension traveling across the globe.

When more heart attacks come in within the next two hours, UnHA can trace them back to the exogenous event and calculate the effect stressors on the probability of a heart attack. In this way UnHA not only monitors patients but conducts continual scientific analysis. She picks up drug interactions and other effects that would have otherwise been too slight to notice.

Now, this isn’t meant to suggest that UnHA is coming soon to a phone near you. It’s to point out that health care is fundamentally an information and communication industry, yet it isn’t following the trend of collapsing costs.

The key question is why?

My baseline answer is that the current health-care system is riddled with regulation, litigation and occupational and pharmaceutical licensing. We have levels heaped upon levels of protection against bad drugs, bad doctors and bad health-care consumers. While all of these rules provide us with a sense of security, they most likely undermine the evolution of health care and make what care we do have outrageously expensive.

We’ve come to accept rising health-care costs as a fact of life. The CBO projects them going out to 2080. Yet, health care is an information and communication technology industry. It could be enjoying collapsing costs, if only we would set it free.

Why agent-based modeling is important

2011-06-01T09:25:00.001-07:00

Here's a good example of the sort of thing that agent-based modeling can do that other approaches can't. This blog post from Capital Gains and Games talks about why

Mitch McConnell (R-KY) … announced—proudly—that he would not allow an increase in the debt ceiling without significant cuts in Medicare?

At first blush this may not seem like that big of a deal given the continuing demands from the GOP leadership in the House for substantial spending cuts before it will allow a debt ceiling increase. But it is. This is not a call for reductions in general; it's insisting on cuts in an exceedingly popular specific program. And it's not just any specific program: It's Medicare, the currently most politically sensitive program of all and the one that, because of the Republican plan to make substantial reductions, cost the GOP a House seat in upstate New York just barely a week ago.…

So why did he do it? According to the Stan Collender, the post author and a perceptive political observer,

McConnell likely can't stay as minority leader without unequivocal support from the GOP's tea party-like base and, in the wake of the widespread criticism of Newt Gingrich for abandoning the House GOP Medicare reduction plan (Newt was against it before he was for it), he used this statement and extreme position to shore up his own bona fides with that wing of the party.
McConnell wants to be majority leader if the GOP takes over the Senate and needs the base to do that.
McConnell is from the state that also elected Rand Paul to the Senate and he runs the chance of looking like a liberal Democrat in comparison to his junior senator if he doesn't make statements like this.
[Perhaps] McConnell has decided that the GOP winning the White House in 2012 isn't as important to him as the GOP getting the majority in the Senate and that requires continually energizing the base rather than trying to win over independents and Democrats.

If Obama wins and the GOP takes over the Senate, McConnell will be the most important and powerful Republican in the United States…Roger Ailes aside. That won't be true if there's a Republican president, of course. But if all of the best known GOP candidates lose the Republican nomination in 2012 and the 2012 nominee then loses in the general election, the next tranche of potential Republican presidential candidates will be at least two years away.

Only an agent-based model in which McConnell is modeled individually could account for that sort of action. No general model of relative political power could do anything like it.

Custom background image themes in Gmail doesn't work

2011-05-31T23:17:00.000-07:00

Custom background image themes - Official Gmail Blog. This feature doesn't seem to work. When I try to select a Picasa-web image the select never terminates. I have to kill the entire transaction.

Are Taxes in the U.S. High or Low?

2011-05-31T14:32:00.000-07:00

From Bruce Bartlett in the NYTimes.com.

Federal taxes are at their lowest level in more than 60 years. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that federal taxes would consume just 14.8 percent of G.D.P. this year. The last year in which revenues were lower was 1950, according to the Office of Management and Budget. …

The G.O.P. says global competitiveness requires the United States to reduce its corporate tax rate. But the United States actually has the lowest corporate tax burden of any of the member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Bartlett goes on to point out that our tax rates are not necessarily lower than those of other countries. It's just that the various allowances and deductions yield the lowest tax receipts than all other OECD countries.

More on the debt ceiling

2011-05-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

In a previous post (and on Jared Bernstein's blog) I suggested that the Fed fund the Federal government if the Republicans block an increase in the debt ceiling. Here are a few more thoughts.

The Fed has a balance sheet of $2.76 trillion. If it prints that much money (as the government needs it) while simultaneously selling items from its balance sheet that would keep the government in business without affecting the money supply for quite a long time. In addition, even in the unlikely chance that the Fed exhausts it balance sheet before the debt ceiling issue is settled, the President could assure the world that once the debt ceiling is raised, the Treasury would borrow back the excess money and return it to the Fed. I think such a promise could be made believable. Then the Republicans would be in a position of either forcing the Fed to continue printing money—exactly what they complain about now with respect to "debasing the currency"—or finally realize that the debt ceiling is the wrong way to deal with spending issues.

I’m not clear whether it can be said that the government “owns” the Fed’s balance sheet. If so, or if a reasonably good case could be made along those lines, then selling items on the balance sheet would be comparable to selling any other Federal property. That’s exactly what the Republicans are suggesting. So let’s do it!

The Fed regularly returns to the Treasury most of the interest payments it receives on US Govt bonds that it owns. Thus there is a real precedent for having the Fed give money to the Treasury. It can refer to that precedent when it sells assets and gives that money to the Treasury.

An easy petition to sign.

2011-05-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

From CREDO Action.

Earlier this month, 44 Republican Senators pledged to filibuster the nomination of anyone to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless the agency itself is significantly weakened.

This threat makes it much more likely that President Obama will have to use his constitutional authority to make a recess appointment to fill the top slot at the agency.

A number of great progressive groups and leading academics have signed a letter to President Obama supporting a recess appointment. And now I've signed it too.

I hope you join me in co-signing the letter. You can read it and add your name to it here.

Encourage the Republican crazies

2011-05-28T10:37:00.001-07:00

Perhaps if enough Republicans go over the edge, the entire party will disappear. One way to encourage them is to support their petition drives. Here's one. They ask for money, but you can decline and still sign the petition. That's what I did.

"Where Have All The Mensches Gone?"

2011-05-24T19:44:00.000-07:00

Republican in Wonderland

2011-05-24T19:42:00.001-07:00

From a blog post by Paul Krugman.

We’re in a strange state now where people who actually take textbook economics and simple arithmetic seriously are seen as dangerously radical and irresponsible, while people who believe in invisible bond vigilantes and confidence fairies, who claim to know what the market will want even though there’s no sign of that desire in current asset prices, are viewed as Very Serious.

Why do libertarians support school vouchers?

2011-05-22T12:59:00.000-07:00

Gary Johnson is running for the Republican nomination for president. Johnson was the governor of New Mexico for 8 years around the turn of the century. He is considered one of the purest libertarian politicians. He favor the legalization of drugs, for example. One of his "signature" issues is school vouchers. He worked hard for them in New Mexico when he was governor. The way school vouchers work is that the government gives kids (or their families) vouchers with which to pay tuition at the private school of their choice. It's understandable that a libertarian would favor private schools over public schools. What I don't understand is how libertarians justify having the government pay for those private schools. Why isn't the libertarian position that if someone wants education—for himself or his children—it is up to that person to find a way to get it. That seems more consistent with libertarian principles.

I left a note on Johnson's web site asking that question. So far, no reply.

The larger question is what libertarians think the role of government should be. Should the government run a fire department? If not, must we have private fire departments that protect us. What if a house whose owner does not buy protection from a private fire department catches fire—and endangers the houses near it. Do the neighbors have the right to ask their private fire departments to spray water on the burning house? Doesn't that violate the property rights of the person who owns the burning house? What if he wants it to burn? Presumably he would be liable for damage the fire caused to the neighbors' houses. But what if he doesn't have the money to pay for those damages? Must we then buy insurance to protect ourselves from "uninsured homeowners?" I can just imagine the legal battles that will generate. We will need 10 times as many lawyers as we have now. And we will all be far worse off.

So what should the role of the government be according to libertarians?

More about microbes

2011-05-21T23:24:00.000-07:00

From J. Craig Venter on Edge.

We live on a microbial planet. There are one million microbial cells per cubic centimeter of water in our oceans, lakes and rivers; deep within the Earth's crust and throughout our atmosphere. We have more than 100 trillion microbes on and in each of us. The Earth's diversity of life would have seemed like science fiction to our ancestors. We have microbes that can withstand millions of Rads of ionizing radiation; such strong acid or base that it would dissolve our skin; microbes that grow in ice and microbes that grow and thrive at temperatures exceeding 100 degrees C. We have life that lives on carbon dioxide, on methane, on sulfur, or on sugar. We have sent trillions of bacteria into space over the last few billion years and we have exchanged material with Mars on a constant basis, so it would be very surprising if we do not find evidence of microbial life in our solar system, particularly on Mars.

Life’s deliberate typos

2011-05-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

From Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine. Transcription from DNA to RNA is not only not precise, the errors—or at least some of them—are consistent and frequently not consistently edited out. Presumably these produce protein results that we depend on for our survival. Life is even more complex than the complexity we imagined. No matter where one looks, more is going on that we imagine.

This reminds me of Carl Zimmer's disappointingly short (less than 100 pages) new book on viruses, which says that there are trillions of viruses in the ocean and that they kill (cause to decompose) half of the billions of bacteria every day. But of course the bacteria reproduce so fast that they replenish the supply.

There used to be a time when people thought the oceans are pretty much virus-free. But now we realize that there might be, say, maybe a billion viruses in every teaspoon of water. And they're attacking the bacteria. There's lots of bacteria in the ocean. And so they will just do a slaughter of these bacteria every day. Of course, the bacteria grow back pretty fast, but still it's a tremendous thing because all those bacteria contain carbon and lots of nutrients. And so they're constantly cycling all this to the ocean and into the atmosphere.

Think about how much is going on that we hadn't even imagined—and how dependent we are on it happening!

HuffPost now has gold stars!

2011-05-19T11:35:00.000-07:00

See HuffPost badges. Very clever. Will probably motivate people to be more involved.

No debt ceiling increase? Print the money.

2011-05-19T11:24:00.001-07:00

I just left this comment on a post by Jared Bernstein.

Let's assume Congress doesn't raise the debt ceiling. As you said, the Fed could just print the money. What would be the consequences of that? It seems to me there would be no negative consequences and a number of positive consequences.

The most significant potential negative consequence is that the world would lose faith in the Dollar as a stable currency and would treat it as one likely to face run-away inflation. But the administration could combat that threat by stating that once the debt limit is raised, we would sop up the extra money by borrowing it back. I think the administration and the Fed (although not the Congress) have the credibility to make a promise of that sort.

The positive consequence would be additional stimulus. We would be injecting lots of money into the economy without having to borrow it. That would increase the supply of money,which would lead to increased demand, increased asset values, and even lower (long term) interest rates.

So why shouldn't Obama say that if Congress doesn't raise the debt ceiling, the administration will simply print the necessary money until Congress acts?

Of course this whole issue is silly. As you said, there is probably no other country in the world with a debt ceiling. But as long as we're being silly, why not go all the way!

Here's a follow-up I posted.

In effect, the government would be (implicitly) borrowing money from the Fed, which it would pay back when the debt ceiling is raised. To reduce the inflationary effect, the Fed could, in turn, sell items on its balance sheet into the market. By selling the same amount that it "lent" to the government, it would, in effect, be providing a way for the government to borrow without actually issuing new debt, i.e., it would be providing a debt laundering service for the government. This could go on until the Fed ran down its balance sheet—which would take quite a while.

Hayek on Regulation

2011-05-18T15:44:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein quotes Friedrich Hayek on regulation. That led me to this Wikipedia section on Hayek.

''The Road To Serfdom'' is often cited today for the proposition that government should not intervene at all in free markets. …

Although Hayek believed that government intervention in markets would lead to a loss of freedom, he recognized a limited role for government to perform tasks of which free markets were not capable:
The successful use of competition as the principle of social organization precludes certain types of coercive interference with economic life, but it admits of others which sometimes may very considerably assist its work and even requires certain kinds of government action.
While Hayek is opposed to regulations which restrict the freedom to enter a trade, or to buy and sell at any price, or to control quantities, he acknowledges the utility of regulations which restrict allowed methods of production, so long as these are applied equally to everyone and not used as an indirect way of controlling prices or quantities:
To prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances, or to require special precautions in their use, to limit working hours or to require certain sanitary arrangements, is fully compatible with the preservation of competition.
He notes that there are certain areas, such as the environment, which cannot effectively be regulated solely by the marketplace:
Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of the property in question, or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation.
The government also has a role in preventing fraud:
Even the most essential prerequisite of its the market's proper functioning, the prevention of fraud and deception (including exploitation of ignorance), provides a great and by no means fully accomplished object of legislative activity.
He concludes:
In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing.

The extracts are all from

Hayek, Friedrich August (1994). The road to serfdom. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226320618.

Private property

2011-05-15T20:39:00.000-07:00

In a recent post Brad DeLong discussed Ron Paul's position on private property, namely that we don't need the government; everything will come out fine if we just let private property have its way.

I commented that without a state there would be no such legally defined thing as private property—since there would be no laws. So the notion of private property depends crucially on the existence of a state and of laws that define what private property means and what legal rights and obligations go along with it.

I went on to look up the issue in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. David Hume, as usual, got to the heart of it.

There is nothing natural about private property, wrote Hume. The ‘contrariety’ of our passions and the ‘looseness and easy transition [of material objects] from one person to another’ mean that any situation in which I hold or use a resource is always vulnerable to disruption (Hume 1978 [1739], p. 488). Until possession is stabilized by social rules, there is no secure relation between person and thing. We may think that there ought to be: we may think, for example, that a person has a moral right to something that he has made and that society has an obligation to give legal backing to this moral right. But according to Hume, we have to ask what it is in general for society to set up and enforce rules of this kind, before we can reach any conclusions about the normative significance of the relation between any particular person and any particular thing.

Our property is nothing but those goods, whose constant possession is established by the laws of society; that is, by the laws of justice. Those, therefore, who make use of the words property, or right, or obligation, before they have explained the origin of justice, or even make use of them in that explication, are guilty of a very gross fallacy, and can never reason upon any solid foundation. A man's property is some object related to him. This relation is not natural, but moral, and founded on justice. It is very preposterous, therefore, to imagine, that we can have any idea of property, without fully comprehending the nature of justice, and shewing its origin in the artifice and contrivance of man. The origin of justice explains that of property. The same artifice gives rise to both.

Do the rich pay more than their fair share of taxes?

2011-05-08T15:25:00.000-07:00

From Paul Krugman

As the CBO has documented, what we’ve seen over the past 30 years is a dramatic shift of income toward the top, with the richest Americans sharply increasing their share of pre-tax income. It’s highly likely that government policies, from financial deregulation to union-busting, have played an important role in that growing income concentration.

At the same time, tax rates on top income have fallen, and by more than tax rates on lower incomes. But the rise in the top share has been so great that high-income Americans pay a larger share of total taxes than they used to despite tax policy that favors their interests.

And the new cry from the hired hands of the rich is that it’s unfair that the wealthy should pay such a large share of taxes.

In other words, think of it this way. If the top 1% of earners earned 99% of all the money people earned, they would be paying at least 99% of all the taxes people pay. Does that mean they are paying too much and the rest of us are paying too little? That's what the Republicans claim. But then as Brad DeLong always says, Republicans lie—all the time—about everything.

Fear or politics?

2011-05-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

From Paul Krugman.

What does Washington currently fear? Topping the list is fear that budget deficits will cause a fiscal crisis any day now. In fact, a number of people — like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairmen of President Obama’s debt commission — have settled on a specific time frame: terrible things will happen within two years unless we make drastic spending cuts.

I have no idea where that two-year deadline comes from. After all, what we do in the next couple of years hardly matters at all for U.S. solvency, which mainly depends on what we’ll do in the long run about Medicare and taxes. And, for what it’s worth, actual investors — people putting real money on the line — are notably unworried about any near-term fiscal crisis: the Treasury Department continues to have no trouble selling debt and remains able to borrow very cheaply, indicating high confidence on the part of investors that debts will be repaid in full.

Do the scare-mongers even believe their own stories? Maybe not. As Jonathan Chait of The New Republic notes, the politicians most given to apocalyptic rhetoric about the deficit are also utterly opposed to any tax increase; they argue that debt is destroying America, but they’d rather let that happen than accept even a dime of higher taxes. Yet the inconsistency and probable insincerity of their fear-mongering hasn’t stopped it from having a huge effect on policy debate.

Build while it's cheap

2011-05-05T12:35:00.000-07:00

Andrew Samwick, Dartmouth economist, writes:

with aggregate demand lower by hundreds of billions of dollars a year, there are unemployed and underemployed workers and underutilized capital whose services could be purchased on the cheap. If we have projects that add long-term value, this is the right time to be undertaking them. Plenty of those projects are to repair and maintain our seriously degraded infrastructure. Others are to make the upgrades necessary to plan for a future with different forms of energy transmission and communication. Instead of fighting about which multiplier is the biggest and clingng to the misguided notion that all measures be "timely, targeted, and temporary," we should be building while it's cheap.

We should have started this years ago. Given the continued worry about the fragile state of the recovery, we should start it now.

Why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?

2011-05-04T13:19:00.000-07:00

From the introduction to an Edge 342 discussion with Hugo Mercier, one opf the authors of the "argumentative theory" of reasoning.

'Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning.' So, as they put it, 'The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.'

On semen

2011-04-29T06:28:00.000-07:00

From The Huffington Post

Lazar Greenfield, M.D. is no ordinary surgeon. Until last week, he was the president-elect of the American College of Surgeons. The man is the inventor of the Greenfield Filter, a device that has saved countless lives as a means of preventing blood clots during surgery. He's a professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan. He has written more than 360 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, 128 book chapters and two textbooks. He has served on the Editorial Board of 15 scientific journals and was also the lead editor of the Surgery News, the trade publication in which his writing initiated Semengate.

In the February issue, he penned some thoughts on Valentine's Day under the heading of "Gut Feelings." ("But Valentine's Day is about love, and if you remember a romantic gut feeling when you met your significant other, it might have a physiological basis.") Greenfield proceeded to then discuss the mating habits of fruit flies ("It has long been known that Drosophila raised on starch media are more likely to mate with other starch-raised flies"), the mating habits of the rotifer ("Biologists say that it's more advantageous for a rotifer to remain asexual and pass 100 percent of its genetic information to the next generation."). In each case, Dr. Greenfield made sure to reference to the scientific literature. Then he turned his attention to humans.

Dr. Greenfield noted the therapeutic effects of semen, citing research from the Archives of Sexual Behavior which found that female college students practicing unprotected sex were less likely to suffer from depression than those whose partners used condoms (as well as those who remained abstinent).

Presumably it was the closing line that caused the controversy: "So there's a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there's a better gift for that day than chocolates."

The attempt at Jackie Mason-humor apparently didn't sit well in certain quarters. Dr. Greenfield resigned as editor of the Surgery News and gave up his stewardship of ACS after learning that his article had spurred threats of protests from outside women's groups.

In an interview with the Detroit Free Press last Wednesday, Dr. Greenfield explained:
The editorial was a review of what I thought was some fascinating new findings related to semen, and the way in which nature is trying to promote a stronger bond between men and women. It impressed me. It seemed as though it was a gift from nature. And so that was the reason for my lighthearted comments.
The story has been big in the scientific community, but in all that has been printed, there is one take I thought missing and noteworthy -- that of the three psychologists who authored the peer-reviewed article cited by Dr. Greenfield. So I tracked down Steven M. Platek, Rebecca L. Burch, and Gordon G. Gallup, Jr.

Speaking for the group, Dr. Steven M. Platek, Ph.D, the editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience and a co-editor of Evolutionary Psychology, offered this analysis:
Frankly, we think people are over reacting to the comments made by Dr. Lazar Greenfield. There is growing evidence that human semen has the potential to produce profound effects on women. We have replicated the effects showing female college students having sex without condoms are less depressed as measured by objective scores on the Beck Depression Inventory. We've also examined the data as a function of whether the students were using hormonal contraceptives, whether they were in committed relationships, and how long these relationships have lasted. The anti-depressant properties of semen exposure do not vary as function of any of these conditions. It is not a question of whether females are sexually active, since students having sex with condoms show the same level of depression as those who are not having sex at all. We have also received numerous semen testimonials from other women who attest to the anti-depressant effects of semen exposure and these accounts often include the use of control trials (i.e., comparisons generated by switching from condoms to unprotected sex, or vice a versa).
Only 5 percent of the ejaculate is sperm. What's left is seminal plasma, which is a rich concoction of chemicals, including many that have the potential to produce mood-altering effects derived from hormones, neurotransmitters, and endorphins. There are even female sex hormones in male semen. Within a hour or two after insemination, you can detect heightened levels of many of these seminal chemicals in a woman's bloodstream.

But it is also important to acknowledge that there is a dark side to semen chemistry. The vagina is a very hostile environment for sperm. During human evolutionary history women couldn't afford to conceive as a consequence of being inseminated by just any man, and the presence of semen in the female reproductive tract often triggers an immune reaction that treats the sperm as a pathogen. Not surprisingly, semen chemistry has evolved to neutralize vaginal acidity and suppress the woman's immune system. There is even reason to believe that because of the immunosuppressant properties of semen, frequent insemination may compromise the female immune system. Because there are female as well as male sex hormones in human semen, there are other reasons to believe that additional features of semen evolved to promote the reproductive best interests of the donor. The presence of follicle stimulating hormone and leutenizing hormone in semen, implies that semen exposure has the potential to promote induced ovulation.

How can someone be asked to resign for citing a peer-reviewed paper? Dr. Greenfield was forced to resign based on politics, not evidence. His resignation is more a reflection of the feminist and anti-scientific attitudes of some self-righteous and indignant members of the American College of Surgeons. Science is based on evidence, not politics. In science knowing is always preferable to not knowing.

Steven M. Platek
Rebecca L. Burch
Gordon G. Gallup, Jr.

Health care expenditures

2011-04-28T15:03:00.001-07:00

From the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The US government spends more on health care as a percent of GDP (7.4%) than Switzerland, Canada, Italy, Spain, U.K., Norway, Australia, and Japan.

Besides that, except for Switzerland and France we spend at least 50% more in total on health care (again as a percent of GDP) than any other country in the world. (We spend 42% more than Switzerland and 46% more than France.)

(H/T Ezra Klein)

My Anniversary Gift to Lisa

2011-04-28T14:44:00.000-07:00

IQ scores reflect motivation as well as ‘intelligence’

2011-04-26T11:30:00.000-07:00

From Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

[Angela Lee Duckworth from the University of Pennsylvania] looked at the scores of 508 young boys who had taken an IQ test in 1987. The boys were part of the Pittsburgh Youth Study, and researchers kept in touch with them into adulthood, for at least 12 years after the original test. As usual, their scores predicted their eventual academic performance, the number of years they spent in education, their odds of being employed as adults, and their number of criminal convictions.

But there was more. The original tests were all delivered verbally and the sessions were filmed. Duckworth recruited three independent researchers to review the footage for signs of low motivation, such as refusing to take part, or wanting the session to end. The team found that boys with lower IQ scores were also less motivated when they took the test, and their degree of motivation also predicted the course of their lives. Accounting for motivation weakened the link between IQ and life-success, especially for employment and criminal convictions. …

If you think it’s obvious that motivation would confound the results of IQ tests, then Robert Stenberg, who studies intelligence at Oklahoma State University, agrees with you. “D’uh!”, he says. Sternberg thinks that Duckworth has produced a “great research study” but adds, “To almost anyone except some subset of psychologists who study IQ testing, it will come as little surprise that motivation is an extremely powerful determinant of performance in school and in life. Most employers, for example, are at least as eager to know about job applicants’ motivation as they are to know about their cognitive skills. Teachers also know that ability without high motivation typically results in little success in a challenging curriculum.”

How to (spot a) lie with statistics

2011-04-25T15:40:00.001-07:00

Paul Krugman finds the hole in the claim that government spending has increased from 19.6 percent of GDP in fiscal 2007 to 23.6 percent in fiscal 2010. There are two causes. (a) GDP itself has grown much more slowly since 2007 as previously, and (b) recession-related government spending (such as unemployment insurance) has grown significantly. These are both what we expect. During a recession the government should both continue its normal operation and increase spending to support people in trouble. Other than these two areas, there are no major increases in government spending.

The gap between sales of new home and existing home

2011-04-25T13:29:00.001-07:00

From the always sensible Calculated Risk.

This graph starts in 1994, but the relationship has been fairly steady back to the '60s. Then along came the housing bubble and bust, and the "distressing gap" appeared (due mostly to distressed sales).

The gap is due mostly to the flood of distressed sales. This has kept existing home sales elevated, and depressed new home sales since builders can't compete with the low prices of all the foreclosed properties.

Mitt Romney Haunted By Past Of Trying To Help Uninsured Sick People

2011-04-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

From The Onion (naturally).

BELMONT, MA—Though Mitt Romney is considered to be a frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the national spotlight has forced him to repeatedly confront a major skeleton in his political closet: that as governor of Massachusetts he once tried to help poor, uninsured sick people.

Romney, who signed the state's 2006 health care reform act, has said he "deeply regrets" giving people in poor physical and mental health the opportunity to seek medical attention, admitting that helping very sick people get better remains a dark cloud hovering over his political career, and his biggest obstacle to becoming president of the United States of America.

"Every day I am haunted by the fact that I gave impoverished Massachusetts citizens a chance to receive health care," Romney told reporters Wednesday, adding that he feels ashamed whenever he looks back at how he forged bipartisan support to help uninsured Americans afford medicine to cure their illnesses. "I'm only human, and I've made mistakes. None bigger, of course, than helping cancer patients receive chemotherapy treatments and making sure that those suffering from pediatric AIDS could obtain medications, but that's my cross to bear."

"My hope is that Republican voters will one day forgive me for making it easier for sick people—especially low-income sick people—to go to the hospital and see a doctor," Romney added. "It was wrong, and I'm sorry."

According to Romney, if he could do things over again, he would do everything he could to make certain that uninsured individuals got sicker and sicker until they died. Promising his days of trying to provide medical coverage to the gravely ill are behind him, Romney said that if elected president, he would never even think about increasing anyone's quality of life or trying to lower the infant mortality rate.

In addition, Romney repeatedly apologized for wanting to help people suffering from diabetes, Crohn's disease, and anemia.

"I don't know what got into me back then," Romney said. "Wanting to make sure people were able to have health insurance if they left their job. Providing a federally funded website so individuals could compare the costs of insurance providers. Making certain that somebody who earns less than 150 percent of the poverty level can receive the same health care coverage as me or any government official. All I can say is that I was young and immature, and I am not that person anymore."

"The only solace I can take is in the hope that some of the folks I helped were terminally ill patients who eventually withered away and died," Romney added.

Though Romney has apologized profusely, Beltway insiders said he would need to distance himself from his I-tried-to-help-sickpeople image. Sources noted that Romney's current promise to take away health care from anyone who can't afford it is a step in the right direction, but might not be enough.

"The major strike against Mitt Romney is that he not only tried to help people get medical care, he actually did help people get medical care," conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg said. "No other Republican in the field has that type of baggage. And in the end, in order to defeat President Obama, the GOP needs someone who has a track record of never wanting to help sick people."

Thus far, Romney is polling strongly in early primary states like New Hampshire and Iowa, but Republican strategists and voters agree that even in a general election, his sordid past would continue to dog him.

"I don't think I can vote for someone like that," Pennsylvania Republican Eric Tolbert said. "He says he's sorry, but how do I know that's the real Mitt Romney? What happens if he gets elected and tries to help sick people again?"

"I like Michele Bachmann now," Tolbert added. "Because what this country needs is a president who doesn't give a fuck about helping people."

Astro (and planetary) biology

2011-04-19T18:17:00.000-07:00

Caleb Scharf is the director of Columbia University's multidisciplinary Astrobiology Center. He also writes an ongoing blog. He is a wonderful writer. His posts are full of intelligent wonder at the nature of life and the universe in which it finds itself. Here's today's post in full—although I don't get the image he included.

The Earth is still forming. Every year our planet accumulates another 40 million kilograms of material, mostly in the form of microscopic interplanetary dust. More sporadically the planet is also hit by larger bodies. Hundred meter diameter asteroids or cometary lumps arrive on average every thousand years, kilometer-sized civilization manglers arrive roughly every million years. This had been going on since the Earth coagulated from the material of the proto-planetary disk around a baby Sun 4.54 billion years ago.

As we turn back the cosmic clock the rate of accumulation of material increases. The pockmarked lunar surface has served as a proxy for reconstructing the history of asteroidal and cometary impact on the Earth. Without an atmosphere or significant geophysical activity the Moon has an excellent memory of impacts, while the Earth had eroded and resurfaced itself in continual reinvention. This record has indicated that during a period between about 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago the Earth must have been subject to a particularly brutal pummeling. A substantial fraction of the outer shell of our planet could have been laid down during what has become known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.
It's a fascinating time in the history of our world. The first indications that microbial life might have been at work come not so very long after this quite cataclysmic episode ended.

The reason for this infall of material seems likely to be connected to a period of dynamical evolution in the outer planets. Models suggest that both Neptune and Uranus could have migrated outwards and dug into a rich belt of outer, Kuiper or trans-Neptunian objects. Many of those distant small bodies would have been pushed into orbital paths that would eventually lead to passage through the inner solar system and collision with the Earth. At the same time, Jupiter and Saturn would have migrated inwards and could have scattered material from the asteroid belt onto inbound trajectories. Once the dynamical reorganization of the giant planets was finished the Late Heavy Bombardment would have tailed off. A settling planet Earth then gave rise to the tentative steps of biochemistry and single-celled organisms.

Or so we thought. New evidence is emerging from the terrestrial rock record that the Earth actually continued to be pounded by very significant impacts from 3.8 billion years ago all the way up to around 2.5 billion years ago. "Life Killer" type asteroid impacts seem to have happened roughly every 40 million years during this timespan, rather than every 500 million years as had previously been thought.

So what gives? Where did these chunks of material come from? W. Bottke and colleagues have studied the gravitational dynamics of the teenage solar system and suggest that a now-depleted inner belt of material between Mars and Jupiter could have been scattered onto an inclined set of orbits - out of the plane of the planets. This population would then slowly "leak" into Earth-crossing paths, thereby greatly extending the tail of the Late Heavy Bombardment over another billion years or so. The leftovers of these bodies are still there, known as the Hungaria asteroids.

It all looks to fit rather well. The dynamics are believable, and provide a mechanism for the impacts that littered the planet with the molten globs of rock that geologists find in layers of ancient strata. There's just one teensy question. What are the implications for the evolution of life on Earth? While evidence of microbe-built structures like stromatolites from 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago remain a little controversial, the presence of a diverse planet-wide biosphere is pretty incontrovertible in the 3 to 2.5 billion year ago span. Apparently microbial life not only dealt with continual destructive asteroid impacts but really did rather well for itself.

This raises another intriguing issue. As W. Bottke and colleagues point out, this prolonged period of heavy impacts does effectively stop around 2.5 billion years ago. That is suspiciously coincident with the first signs of a rising oxygen content in the Earth's atmosphere (the "Great Oxidation Event"), and the eventual emergence of multi-cellular life somewhere around 1.6 to 2 billion years ago. Is there a connection? Could the continual accumulation of planetary material have held back the full-on evolutionary party of early life? It's highly speculative, but one is tempted to think that this might be further evidence for the incredible resilience of life and its near-relentless nature once it becomes entrenched on a planet.

2011-04-19T11:28:00.000-07:00

As Brad DeLong says

Republicans. They lie all the time. About everything. We as a country would be much better off if they simply vanished today, and we had a different opposition party to the Democrats.

See these too.

From cow to steak

2011-04-19T11:14:00.001-07:00

I couldn't bring myself to watch this. Do you want to? It starts with a live cow, and ends like this.

A Proud Meat Cutter Shares His Processing Floor from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Taxes as the cost of living here

2011-04-17T15:37:00.000-07:00

Republicans love to complain about taxes. But they also worship the free market.

What do you suppose the market price of US citizenship is. Let's put it on the market. What could we get for it?

The price would be expressed in terms of the amount of yearly income one would be willing to pay for being a US citizen. Do you suppose the price would be less than we now pay in taxes? I doubt it. If it were, a lot of people would be trying to move somewhere else.

But I don't see that happening. On the contrary, even with all our problems and all our taxes, there are far more people who want to live here than who want to leave.

If the Republicans think they can create a better society with lower taxes, I challenge them to point to one that they prefer.

Toys “R” Us sells the iPad2

2011-04-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

Seems about right.

"Insincerely yours"

2011-04-15T16:34:00.000-07:00

Krugman on how serious the Republicans are about the deficit.

Republicans are deeply, sincerely concerned about the budget deficit. That’s why, in unveiling their plan last week, they declared themselves willing to give ground on their traditional priorities, signaling a willingness to accept higher taxes on the wealthy and reduced defense spending as part of a deficit-reduction deal.

Oh, wait. You mean they didn’t do anything like that? You mean that even while warning about an imminent fiscal crisis, they actually tried to cut taxes on the rich to their lowest level since 1931?

Why, you might actually think that they’re not sincerely concerned about the deficit. But that can’t be true, since they keep saying that they are.

And

Clearly, we need to cut taxes even further so as to balance the budget.

More charts from the CBPP.

History

2011-04-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

From Obama's speech about the deficit yesterday.

Our leaders came together three times during the 1990s to reduce our nation's deficit. They forged historic agreements that required tough decisions made by the first President Bush and President Clinton; by Democratic Congresses and a Republican Congress. All three agreements asked for shared responsibility and shared sacrifice, but they largely protected the middle class, our commitments to seniors, and key investments in our future.

As a result of these bipartisan efforts, America's finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus. America was actually on track to becoming completely debt-free, and we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.

But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program but we didn't pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our national checkbook, consider this: in the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.

The budget is already balanced!

2011-04-11T16:12:00.000-07:00

From The Incidental Economist.

See Ezra Klein's comment.

Actually it's not really balanced. The graph excludes interest on the national debt. But it's close!

Restoring American Democracy

2011-04-10T09:17:00.000-07:00

From Jeffrey Sachs

In poll after poll, the actual views of the public about the budget are clear: cut military spending, raise taxes on the rich, and cut health care costs by taking on private health insurers. These are the policies put forward last week in the "People's Budget" (which I recently wrote about) proposed by the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Even though we don't know the still secret details of the $38.5 billion in the cuts, we can be sure that not one of these sensible mainstream ideas is even remotely represented in the new "historic" agreement. The President and the Congressional leadership of both parties are pursuing the opposite strategy: cut taxes for the rich; sustain record-high military spending and indeed a growing number of wars; turn over even more of health care to price-gouging private health insurers; and cut urgently needed help for the poor, the public schools, higher education, and the unemployed.

In the end, we have gotten from President Obama what we feared from Senator McCain: an expanded war in Afghanistan, an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts, sharp cuts in spending for communities and programs for the poor, a continuation of Guantanamo and military tribunals, unchecked bankers' pay and bonuses, and enough loopholes to reduce corporate taxes to less than 2 percent of GDP this year, despite a boom in corporate profits.

Bertrand Russell says

2011-04-06T12:33:00.000-07:00

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

From BrainyQuotes.

Why haven't existing medical plans held down the cost of insurance?

2011-04-06T12:27:00.001-07:00

Paul Ryan's proposed plan to have individuals buy their own medical insurance claims to take advantage of the ability of buyers to drive better bargains when they have an interest in the negotiation. When individuals buy their own insurance, the claim goes, they will force providers to offer better medical coverage for less money.

If that's so why hasn't it already happened? Most medical plans contract with providers for the actual medical coverage. Why haven't insurance companies been able to force providers to provide more medicine for less money? Surely insurance companies have more leverage over providers than individual policy holders. If giant insurance companies can't keep the cost of medical insurance down, how can we expect individuals to do so?

The impossible assumption at the heart of Ryan’s budget

2011-04-06T10:49:00.000-07:00

From Ezra Klein - The Washington Post.

There’s difference between cutting costs and shifting them. As the Congressional Budget Office noted, a lot of what Ryan’s budget does is shift costs from the federal budget to someone else’s budget: Medicaid’s costs moves to the states, and then when the states cut it, to the people who need it, or to their families. Medicare’s costs move to seniors, or to the families of seniors. The budget doesn’t have a clear theory for how to spend less on health care. It has a clear theory for how the federal budget can spend less, and other people can spend more. But that’s not good enough.

Fair Elections Now

2011-04-06T10:28:00.000-07:00

Support the Fair Elections Now Act.

The Fair Elections Now Act (S. 752 and H.R. 1826) was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) and in the House of Representatives by Reps. John Larson (D-Conn.), Walter Jones, Jr. (R-N.C.), and Chellie Pingree (D-Maine). The bill would allow federal candidates to choose to run for office without relying on large contributions, big money bundlers, or donations from lobbyists, and would be freed from the constant fundraising in order to focus on what people in their communities want.

Participating candidates seek support from their communities, not Washington, D.C.
Candidates would raise a large number of small contributions from their communities in order to qualify for Fair Elections funding. Contributions are limited to $100.
To qualify, a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives would have to collect 1,500 contributions from people in their state and raise a total of $50,000.
Since states vary widely in population, a U.S. Senate candidate would have to raise a set amount of small contributions amounting a total of 10% of the primary Fair Elections funding. The number of qualifying contributions is equal to 2,000 plus 500 times the number of congressional districts in their state.

See the Fair Elections Now website for more details.

Got to give Christopher Hitchens credit for writing well

2011-04-04T14:16:00.000-07:00

I'm normally not a Christopher Hitchens fan, but here's a paragraph from a piece about the reaction in Afghanistan to the burning of a Quran in Florida.

How dispiriting to see, once again, the footage of theocratic rage in Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif. The same old dreary formula: self-righteous frenzy married to a neurotic need to take offense; the easy resort to indiscriminate violence and cruelty; the promulgation of makeshift fatwas by mullahs on the make; those writhing mustaches framing crude slogans of piety and hatred, and yelling for death as if on first-name terms with the Almighty. The spilling of blood and the spoliation of property—all for nothing, and ostensibly 'provoked' by the corny, brainless antics of a devout American nonentity, notice of whose mere existence is beneath the dignity of any thinking person.

Very nicely put.

The Dependence Economy: whatever can't go on forever won't

2011-04-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

Catherine Rampell has a post on the trends in where our personal income is coming from. The long term trend is that more of it is coming from transfer payments and less from earnings. The steep blue rise and red decline at the end reflect the recent great recessions, but the trend has been established for far longer. As she notes,

These underlying trends are partly because of demographic changes; an aging populace means that an ever-smaller share of Americans are working, and so a larger share are receiving Social Security benefits. Policy changes, more Americans’ going on disability and growing inequality, which in some cases may be leaving more Americans on the dole, are also likely contributing to the growing Dependence Economy.

Whatever the causes, these trends are not infinitely sustainable. The money for transfer payments has to be transferred from somewhere, after all — and if not from other people’s wages, then from China and other foreign creditors. But foreign creditors won’t foot the bill forever without an exit strategy.

The Transmission Mechanism for Quantitative Easing

2011-04-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman wonders why (through what mechanism) has quantitative easing (QE2) worked—to the extent that hit has. Previously the Fed affected the economy through its effect on housing. But that can't be the case this time. So what is it? He suspects that QE2 has had its effect through encouraging high-end consumption. That is, people with money in the stock market, primarily people who have money, have made lots of money recently and have therefore been more willing to spend it. So instead of encouraging housing the Fed has encouraged consumption by giving people with money more money.

The other major contributor to the economy has been an increase in the balance of exports over imports. That's been the result—at least in part—of a weaker dollar, possibly also a consequence of QE2. Krugman's two supporting charts are to the right.

The bottom chart tracks ETFs over the past 6 months for consumer discretionary spending (XLY), consumer staples spending (XLP), and the S&P 500 (SPY).

Speaking of complex systems

2011-04-04T10:02:00.000-07:00

Caleb Scharf discusses possibilities for earth's climate 4 billion years ago.

Understanding the climate and overall environment of the very young Earth continues to be an extremely tricky business. Previous posts on several issues (I, II) surrounding the so-called Faint Young Sun paradox have discussed some of the sticking points. In a nutshell; 4 billion years ago the Sun was about 30% fainter than it is today, a direct consequence of the fundamentals of stellar evolution. So the puzzle is that as far as we can tell the surface environment harbored liquid water, yet today's atmospheric composition would have resulted in a vastly colder climate. Boosts to greenhouse gases might solve the problem, but it remains at the hairy edge of plausibility.

Now a new study by Court and Sephton casts an even murkier pall over the problem, literally. We have high confidence (from the record of lunar cratering, as well as the orbital evolution of the outer planets) that some 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago the Earth was subjected to period of sustained impact over about 100 million years by asteroidal-type material. The so-called Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) was quite a pounding. It likely provided the major constituents of the juvenile Earth's outer layers. Court and Sephton have studied the effect of the sand-grain sized components of material that may have poured into the Earth's atmosphere as micrometeorites during this era. Atmospheric friction as these tiny particles raced into the upper atmosphere produces high temperatures and the grains ablate, releasing sulfur dioxide - among other gases.

Sulfur dioxide is great for making particulates in a planetary atmosphere. This increases reflectivity, and can dramatically lower the solar radiation reaching the surface. Net result; planet cools. During the LHB roughly 20 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide a year may have been dumped into the atmosphere by this flux of tiny meteorites. That's equivalent to having a massive volcano erupt into the stratosphere every year for a hundred million years. The problem of keeping the Earth warm is greatly exacerbated. Court and Sephton also point out that Mars would have received a significant flux of these sulfur-bearing micrometeorites, seemingly creating an even bigger problem for an early temperate martian climate.

There are still a lot of questions. Was the sulfur content of these particles really as high as claimed? Do we really know the rate at which such tiny grains hit the Earth? Could the atmospheric chemistry of the young Earth have mitigated the production of sulfate aerosols?

Understanding what happened on the young Earth is a major issue. It seems for every solution to keeping the planetary surface warm there is an opposing mechanism that will plunge it into deep freeze. Yet the evidence remains for the presence of substantial liquid surface water during at least the tail end of the LHB and likely much earlier. Clearly somewhere we're missing a piece of the equation, or perhaps several pieces. Being able to study the deep geological history of Mars could help enormously, since it would allow us to separate out some of the planet-specific mechanisms at play. It may also be time to think a little more radically. Putting aside the mineralogical evidence for an early aqueous environment then perhaps a deep-frozen young Earth offers some advantage for the subsequently rapid emergence of life?

Why Your Taste Cells Love Sugar So Much

2011-04-03T23:36:00.000-07:00

From the Monell Chemical Senses Center.

PHILADELPHIA (March 7, 2011) – A new research study dramatically increases knowledge of how taste cells detect sugars, a key step in developing strategies to limit overconsumption. Scientists from the Monell Center and collaborators have discovered that taste cells have several additional sugar detectors other than the previously known sweet receptor.

“Detecting the sweetness of nutritive sugars is one of the most important tasks of our taste cells,” said senior author Robert F. Margolskee, M.D., Ph.D., a molecular neurobiologist at Monell. “Many of us eat too much sugar and to help limit overconsumption, we need to better understand how a sweet taste cell ‘knows’ something is sweet.”

Scientists have known for some time that the T1r2+T1r3 receptor is the primary mechanism that allows taste cells to detect many sweet compounds, including sugars such as glucose and sucrose and also artificial sweeteners, including saccharin and aspartame.

However, some aspects of sweet taste could not be explained by the T1r2+T1r3 receptor. For example, although the receptor contains two subunits that must join together for it to work properly, Margolskee’s team had previously found that mice engineered to be missing the T1r3 subunit were still able to taste glucose and other sugars normally.

Knowing that sugar sensors in the intestine are important to how dietary sugars are detected and absorbed, and that metabolic sensors in the pancreas are key to regulating blood levels of glucose, the Monell scientists used advanced molecular and cellular techniques to see if these same sensors are also found in taste cells.

The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, indicate that several sugar sensors from intestine and pancreas also are present in exactly those same sweet-sensing taste cells that have the T1r2+T1r3 sweet receptor.

“The taste system continues to amaze me at how smart it is and how it serves to integrate taste sensation with digestive processes,” said Margolskee.

This story was also featured on NPR's Science Friday. In the Science Friday interview with Margolskee, Joe Palca asked

Okay, and so this chemical interaction or biochemical interaction between the protein that makes the receptor on the surface of the taste bud, that's a chemical event. But something happens in the brain that makes this turn into a perception of an event or a sweetness event.

But he never got an answer.

Correct. So you can think of the sweet receptor protein and the sugar or sweetener as kind of a lock and key, and when they encounter each other, it opens the lock. The door opens up. It excites the sweet taste cell, and that sends a signal to the brain, to particular centers of the central nervous system that respond to sweet.

That's as far as it went. Palca raised the question of the mystery of consciousness, and Markolskee ignored it.

Tasting sweetness is a very good example of what we mean by qualia. And our lack of knowledge about how it works is evident. We know a great deal about the chemical interactions that occur when sugar meets the body. But if you look at those interactions, you won't find anything there that tastes sweet. One would never know just by looking at chemicals that the result is the experience of sweetness. The gap between the chemistry and the experience is enormous, and we have no idea how to bridge it. It seems that no amount of chemistry will do the job.

Suppose we knew every last chemical reaction that occurs when we taste sweet. Would anyone know by looking at the chemistry that the result is sweet? No. How could they. The experience of sweet is not part of the language of chemistry. Worse, we don't know where that language does originate. How does the experience of sweetness appear in the world? We don't know. I wish I could say more, but that's the state of our knowledge about consciousness.

Sign petition to end the California super-majority requirement

2011-03-30T15:31:00.000-07:00

Sign petition here.

US financial profits

2011-03-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

From Felix Salmon

Kathleen Madigan had an important post on Friday, showing financial profits roaring back to more than 30% of all domestic US profits. As she says, “that’s an amazing share given that the sector accounts for less than 10% of the value added in the economy” — and makes it “hard for banks to cry poverty” when it comes to things like debit-card interchange legislation.

Madigan gave us the percentage chart, which shows the finance industry taking an even greater share of total corporate profits than it did during most of the boom year of 2006.

But I wondered: how much of this is a function of generally lower profitability overall — a question more of a low denominator than a high numerator? So I went along to the BEA website and put together this chart:

The blue line is total domestic profits. The green bars are the massive profits made by the Federal Reserve — an incredible $233 billion in 2010 alone. But as you can see, those Fed profits are dwarfed by the red bars, which are private-sector financial profits. Those dipped into negative territory just once, in the fourth quarter of 2008, and in the fourth quarter of 2010 reached $379 billion — bringing the total for the year to more than $1.3 trillion.

What this chart says to me is that nothing has changed, and nothing is going to change. Banks are still extracting enormous rents from the economy, and profits which should be flowing to productive industries are instead being captured by financial intermediaries. We’re back near boom-era levels of profitability now, and no one seems to worry that the flipside of higher returns is higher risk. Any dreams of seeing a smaller financial sector have now officially been dashed. And the big rebound in corporate profits since the crisis turns out to be largely a function of the one sector which we didn’t want to recover to its former size.

Chrome misses some images. Not.

2011-03-29T21:42:00.000-07:00

This image shows the web page of the College of Engineering, Computer Scienc, and Technology of Cal State, LA as displayed in four browsers. From left to right: IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Note that in all but Chrome there are 7 icons (which are also links) at the left of the page. In Chrome two of them are missing.

The images are all JPGs:

Even in this list, the second and ninth don't show up in Chrome, but they do show up in the other browsers.

I just figured out what it is. It isn't Chrome; it's my AdBlock software. The two missing images are in "ads" directories. The others aren't. The only differences in the paths are that the missing images are in the

http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/ecst/ads/images/

directory. The others are in the

http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/ecst/images/

directory. When I turn off the AdBlock filter, the two missing images show up in Chrome.

How to cut the deficit in half by 2021: do nothing

2011-03-28T20:32:00.000-07:00

According to Ezra Klein, letting the Bush tax cuts expire as they are scheduled to do will cut the deficit in half by 2021.

Gingrich really is going crazy.

2011-03-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

From Politico.com.

SAN ANTONIO — Newt Gingrich stood before thousands of evangelical churchgoers Sunday night to deliver a dire warning that nation's Christian roots are under attack.

"I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9," Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."

More frightening than his craziness is the fact that saying these sorts of things will make him more appealing to a significant number of people. He's right that if we don't change the nature of American we will be in trouble. We already are in trouble, and if we don't change it will get much worse.

The employment-to-population ratio and the unemployment rate

2011-03-26T13:45:00.001-07:00

Brad DeLong zooms in on the last year and a half and quotes Greg Ip asking where the recovery is.