Via HA :though 115,000 jobs were added, total employment fell by 169,000, and 522,000 people left the workforce. As the man said, “the choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class and that gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids a chance to get ahead, and an economy that continues down the road we are on.”
Julia: “Under President Obama: Julia decides to have a child.” And: Who the hell is “Julia,” and why am I paying for her whole life?
The NYT discusses a new book on business:
most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value. The Google founder Sergey Brin might be very rich, but the world is far richer than he is because of Google. Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation -— like seed companies and fast-food restaurants -— have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value.
Success comes from fulfilling a market niche or being the low cost producer, as illustrated above. There is the other end of the spectrum too, which we looked at regarding the media a number of years ago. It has since gotten much worse.
Robert Tracinski has an interesting piece on “climate change deniers.” Consider the famous “hockey stick” graph above. The Medieval Warm Period is missing, as these charts show. Who are the real climate change deniers? To paraphrase Freud, despite our best efforts to conceal, confession oozes from every pore.
In the Medieval Warm Period the weather became so warm that the Vikings were able to sail to Newfoundland, about half a millennium before Columbus’s voyage. We can debate CO2 and the periodic warmings and coolings of the earth at our leisure. But making the well-documented Medieval Warm Period disappear from the chart is climate change denial of the first order.
Put it this way: if you used a methodology that produced results that were contrary to what everyone has known for centuries, would you continue to use that methodology or would you find one that squared with historical facts? Moreover, how much faith would you put in any predictions that this methodology produced?
Michael Greve of AEI went to a discussion of the Supreme Court’s review of the healthcare law:
It is impossible to convey the constitutional establishment’s near-clinical obsession with, and hysteria over, the possible invalidation of the ACA’s individual mandate. It would, they say, amount to an unconscionable act of aggression on the democratic process. A reversal of the New Deal and a resurrection of the ancien régime of the Second Republic. A judicial coup d’état. The Constitution in Exile. (Never mind that the plaintiffs’ briefs explicitly affirm that Wickard was rightly decided.)
Much handwringing arose over the elite media’s commitment to be fair to both sides even when, as here, there is no reasonable other side. The plaintiffs’ briefs are beneath contempt. Randy Barnett is a creature of The New York Times and its addiction to a false neutrality.
Here are some thoughts from the “unreasonable” other side. It’s very disturbing that, while we can understand the point of view of the other side, they can’t understand ours. We’d find phrases like the “false neutrality” of the New York Times (!!!!!) amusing if the subjects weren’t so serious. Hard to see how this ends well.
This election really is about just how stupid and gullible the American people are. If they want another four years of the current crew, America deserves the decline it will get. It’s frankly hard to watch the shocking ineptitude of these ad-men from Chicago, but still they keep on. One narrative after another has blown up in their faces. OWS, the WOW in its various incarnations, our dog-eat-dog world, the Zimmerman rabble-rousing, and now it’s warrior-god versus….what exactly? Dithering, pacifist Republicans (featuring CNN as one of the attack dogs)?
It’s not that the attack is so obviously ridiculous — forget Jimmy Carter, George McGovern would have taken out bin Laden. As an active Navy Seal just said, “the more he tries to take the credit for it, the more the ground operators are saying, ‘Come on, man!’ It really didn’t matter who was president.” Just so.
The worst aspect is that these silly narratives and their absurd ad campaigns are deliberately aimed at a very low level of intelligence and knowledge. This apparently is the administration’s electoral strategy. Gone are the days of “it’s the economy, stupid.” That’s been replaced by “it’s the stupid!” If there are enough such people to for this crew to get re-elected after such a stunning record of failure, the country is in bad shape indeed.
There are now about 45 million Americans receiving an average of $287 a month in food stamps, up from 26 million in 2007, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report. But the number in 2007, when the economy was healthy, was roughly 50 percent higher than in 2001. And programs for the poor pale beside middle-class transfers. The giants here are Social Security at $725 billion in 2011 and Medicare at $560 billion. Combine all this spending — programs for the poor, Social Security and Medicare — and the total is nearly $2.1 trillion. That was about 60 percent of 2011 non-interest federal spending of $3.4 trillion. You can debate whether all this spending is too much or too little. My point is different: These numbers speak volumes about our politics. One lesson is that Washington really hasn’t been taken over by monied groups. In a democracy, even the rich are entitled to promote their interests. It’s true that their lobbyists and lawyers sometimes win lucrative tax breaks, subsidies or regulatory preferences. But as the spending numbers show, their influence is exaggerated, especially considering their tax burden. The richest fifth of Americans pay nearly 70 percent of federal taxes (included in this group, the richest 10 percent pay 55 percent), estimates the CBO.
Too big, and impossible to cut. Tick, tick, tick…
A former general disses Keystone in Politico in words not perhaps entirely his own:
Those who support the pipeline cling to the idea that Keystone XL will reduce gas prices, while ignoring the national security concerns. But these claims have no basis in reality. Oil prices are set on the global market based on speculators and global economics -— and the president has little power to lower costs for U.S. consumers…As a political conservative and a longtime registered Republican, I rarely agree with President Barack Obama. But he made the right call in January when he postponed granting a permit to build the pipeline. It was a courageous decision that can help accelerate our commitment to clean energy development.
Here’s how the author’s job is described: “chief marketing officer of RELYANT, a service-disabled veteran-owned small business based in Knoxville, Tennessee.” That’s a suspiciously bland and imprecise description. Question: who are their customers and where is their business being done? Aha!
A piece in the WaPo by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein from Brookings and AEI, two men whose bios show no evidence that they ever spent any time in the private sector:
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years…The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
Gosh, in the real world the GOP has set electoral records of late, even with independents. The statement above by Mann and Ornsteain demonstrates that someone is indeed out of touch with the real world. Increasingly, our universities, think tanks, and the government itself have had no contact whatsoever with the workaday world of the private sector. It is not an overstatement to say that this has become very dangerous for the country. HT: PL
Final point: note that link in their article above to a piece of self-congratulatory balderdash in the Post that says the brains of liberals are superior to the brains of conservatives. Kind of says it all, eh?
The Royal Society wants governments to do a few things:
The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today. This will require focused efforts in key policy areas including economic development, education, family planning and health.
The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels through: dramatic improvements in resource use efficiency, including: reducing waste; investment in sustainable resources, technologies and infrastructures; and systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact.
Reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally. This is needed to continue the downward trajectory of fertility rates, especially in countries where the unmet need for contraception is high.
Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues. Demographic changes, and the influences on them, should be factored into economic and environmental debate and planning at international meetings, such as the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development and subsequent meetings.
BBC: “Malthus’ most well known work ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population‘ was published in 1798…He argued that increases in population would eventually diminish the ability of the world to feed itself…In 1819, Malthus was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.” Evidently the Royal Society hasn’t learned too much in the course of the last two centuries.
Via Nate Silver, an illuminating way to think about the election. What number of blue states will turn red this year? Eight? More? Less?
A politician spoke in Missouri:
You’ve got one member of Congress who compared these student loans – I’m not kidding here –- to a ‘stage-three cancer of socialism.’ Stage three cancer?…Come one. Just when you think you’ve heard it all in Washington, somebody comes up with a new way to go off the deep end
He’s right about that last point. Hello!!! some adult supervision please.
You know, this is actually a serious matter. We’ve put up with fudged economic data, complete gibberish on health care legislation, and volumes of fictitious American history. But now this guy sounds a teenager who’s been getting away with such flapdoodle for so long that he is beginning to sound unhinged. Not good.
A campaign website, not an exercise in projection. Via the WSJ:
A closer look at Romney’s donors reveals a group of wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them. Here’s a look at just a few of the people Romney has relied on: Donors who benefit from betting against America
Your EPA at work:
I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement. It’s kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean: they’d go into little Turkish towns somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they’d run into, and they’d crucify them and then, you know, that town was really easy to manage over the next few years
Not to mention the TSA. As Peggy Noonan asked: “Did you like the past four years? Good, you can get four more.” Four more, this time with “flexibility.”
EJ Dionne on Romney:
His best strategy is to cast President Obama as a failure because the economy has not come all the way back from the implosion of 2008. The most effective passages in his well-reviewed speech after his Tuesday primary victories were about the shortcomings of the status quo.
“Is it easier to make ends meet?” Romney asked. “Is it easier to sell your home or buy a new one? Have you saved what you needed for retirement? Are you making more at your job? Do you have a better chance to get a better job? Are you paying less at the pump?” And there was the line pundits were bound to love that played off James Carville’s memorable utterance from Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. “It’s still about the economy,” Romney said, clearly relishing the moment, “and we’re not stupid.”
But Romney, unlike Clinton, is not offering a program through which government would take specific steps to solve the problems he catalogs. Instead, he is calling on voters to share his faith that our difficulties would go away if the state simply got out of the way, allowed the market do its thing, and counted on the success of the successful to lift up everyone else.
Romney is right in saying he has “a very different vision” from Obama’s, and this is where the magic comes in. He envisions “an America driven by freedom, where free people, pursuing happiness in their own unique ways, create free enterprises that employ more and more Americans. And because there are so many enterprises that are succeeding, the competition for hardworking, educated, skilled employees is intense, so wages and salaries rise.”
Just like that, all would be well — as if we never needed the trust-busting of the Progressive Era, the social legislation of the New Deal, the health programs of the Great Society, and the coordinated action of the world’s governments in 2008 and 2009 to keep the Great Recession from becoming something far worse. This is Romney’s true radicalism. I suspect it is a principled radicalism. And exposing its implications will be Obama’s opening
Our old pal EJ is a professor at Georgetown, and he graduated at the top of his class at Harvard before becoming a Rhodes Scholar. He has never worked in the private sector, unless you think being a reporter at the NYT or WaPo is working in the private sector. (It might be if they forced reporters to do ad sales for a year or two.)
When we first met EJ in 1965, we recall him as a Goldwater Republican. Now he’s where he is, and we just laugh at the phrase “true radicalism.” That “radicalism” is mainstream private sector experience for anyone who’s spent his life there. For the most part, government just needs to get out of the way. But these are the divisions in America today, and the only question is which group is larger.
A candidate for president:
I think the general election will be as sharp a contrast between the two parties as we’ve seen in a generation. You have a Republican Party, and a presumptive Republican nominee, that believes in drastically rolling back environmental regulations, that believes in drastically rolling back collective-bargaining rights, that believes in an approach to deficit reduction in which taxes are cut further for the wealthiest Americans, and spending cuts are entirely borne by things like education or basic research or care for the vulnerable. All this will be presumably written into their platform and reflected in their convention. I don’t think that their nominee is going to be able to suddenly say, “Everything I’ve said for the last six months, I didn’t mean.” I’m assuming that he meant it. When you’re running for president, people are paying attention to what you’re saying…
My hope is that if the American people send a message to them that’s consistent with the fact that Congress is polling at 13 percent right now, and they suffer some losses in this next election, that there’s going to be some self-reflection going on – that it might break the fever. They might say to themselves, “You know what, we’ve lost our way here. We need to refocus on trying to get things done for the American people.” Frankly, I know that there are good, decent Republicans on Capitol Hill who, in a different environment, would welcome the capacity to work with me. But right now, in an atmosphere in which folks like Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist are defining what it means to be a true conservative, they are lying low. My hope is that after this next election, they’ll feel a little more liberated to go out and say, “Let’s redirect the Republican Party back to those traditions in which a Dwight Eisenhower can build an interstate highway system.”
You have to admit, he sounds confident that there’s going to be not only a victory for his team in November, but that it will represent a mandate to keep moving left. This is very odd. As we were just saying, independents flipped by 33 points in 2010, and there’s no reason to think they’ve flipped back; meanwhile regular GOP voters, and more than a few Reagan Democrats, can’t wait to run this crew out of town. Yet he still sounds genuinely confident. The known plans don’t appear to be working well, so what’s the secret plan?
Bret Stephens in the WSJ:
the mystery of France is how a nation can witness what happens to countries that live beyond their means and yet insist on living beyond its means. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio will rise to 90% this year from 59% a decade ago. It spends more of its GDP on welfare payments (28.4%) than any other state in the developed world. It has an employment rate of 62.8%, as compared to Germany’s 76.5% or Switzerland’s 82.9%…Americans should also take note that we aren’t so different from France, either: in our debt-to-GDP ratio, our employment rate, our credit rating. Above all, both in France and in America there’s a belief that, as exceptional nations, we are impervious to the forces that make other nations fall. It’s the conceit that, sooner or later, brings every great nation crashing to earth.
Still, France looks relatively sane compared to some of the things that are happening in the US.
Chris Cillizza wonders where the tea party went:
Is the tea party breaking up?…it appears that the tea party may well be a victim of its own success. In 2010, it proved its powers — beating establishment-backed candidates in Senate races in Delaware, Colorado, Florida, Utah and Alaska to name a few. The result? Candidates are far more wary of crossing the tea party this time around, moving to embrace it rather than stare it down. “The reason for the appearance of less tea party success is that the establishment candidates have moved markedly to the right this cycle,” said Jon Lerner, a Republican consultant. “As the establishment candidates have moved to the right, there is less of a gap for tea party candidates to exploit.” Hatch is a perfect example of that phenomenon. The six-term senator spent much of the past two years relentlessly courting the tea party wing of the Utah GOP and moving his voting record to the ideological right. (In 2008, Hatch was ranked as the 29th most conservative senator in National Journal’s vote ratings. By 2011, he was up to 15th.) Romney, too, moved to the right on fiscal issues in hopes of keeping any tea party revolt at bay. And if you needed an example of the influence the tea party’s no-compromise approach to fiscal austerity has had on the GOP, look no further than an August presidential debate in which all eight candidates said they would not accept a budget deal that included $10 in spending cuts to every $1 in revenue increases.
In a certain sense, just like the spoon, there is no tea party. The Tea Party is much more of a virtual phenomenon than some bricks-and-mortar organization or two. It’s similar to what used to be called the silent majority, though they’re not really silent any longer, since everyone is online. In the tea party election of 2010, the independents flipped by 33 points. We see no reason for that to change, and we are of the view that, generally speaking, conservatives would crawl over broken glass to vote this year — with the remaining Reagan Democrats not far behind.
At the peak in 2006, “Spain started nearly 800,000 homes — more than Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom combined,” noted a 2009 IMF report. Construction workers represented one in eight jobs (the U.S. figure at the height of the American real estate bubble was one in 18). Even after correcting for normal inflation, Spain’s home prices more than doubled from 1995 to 2006…Unemployment is almost 24 percent; among those under 25, it’s 50 percent. Tax revenues have dropped sharply. In 2011, the budget deficit was 8.5 percent of the economy…
Greece, Portugal and Ireland succumbed to similar predicaments. After interest rates soared on their bonds, they had to be rescued by loans from other European countries, the European Central Bank and the IMF. The trouble is that Spain’s economy is twice as big as Greece’s, Ireland’s and Portugal’s combined. And financially precarious Italy has an economy that’s 50 percent larger than Spain’s. Is there enough money to bail out these countries?
And in Greece until now, support for the two major political parties “has never fallen below 77 percent, and it often exceeded 85 percent. Recent polls for the coming contest give the two parties a joint percentage that lies between 33 and 40 percent.” The falcon cannot hear the falconer and so forth.
