Cities and counties in Florida are getting more money in their coffers. Want to know how? I’ll tell you; they are shortening yellow light intervals so that more drivers are made to run red lights, and fined as a consequence.
If this doesn’t offend you, then I don’t know what to say.
Crook has taken their measure:
Brad DeLong has commented on my beef with Paul Krugman. I’m reluctant to engage, to be honest, because his post exemplifies the intemperance I’m addressing. Once an admirer, I gave up on his commentary a long time ago. You get a sense of the problem from his post about me. He illustrates it with a picture of a clown. He also wants me fired. “Bloomberg has some house-cleaning to do,” he says — charming, and from a tenured academic, to boot.
DeLong’s fine under the supervision of a competent adult, as here (an excellent paper, which I praised at the time). But as an unattended blogger he regresses to intellectual adolescence, light on thinking and exhaustingly heavy on peevish belligerence. Not just uncivil, he actually disapproves of civility — today, as you see, I’m trying to meet him halfway.
The substance of DeLong’s complaint about my column and post appears to be that they lack supporting documentation. I asserted (thinking it self-evident) that many Republicans are thoughtful and public-spirited. DeLong is incredulous and finds it revealing that I failed to give examples. I also accused Krugman of letting partisan politics taint his analysis and said he cared as much about undoing the Bush tax cuts as about expanding and extending the fiscal stimulus. At this, DeLong is aghast. He demands to see my evidence.
Will this do? From Krugman’s column, Let’s Not Make a Deal, in December 2010.
Back in 2001, former President George W. Bush pulled a fast one. He wanted to enact an irresponsible tax cut, largely for the benefit of the wealthiest Americans. But there were Senate rules in place designed to prevent that kind of irresponsibility. So Mr. Bush evaded the rules by making the tax cut temporary, with the whole thing scheduled to expire on the last day of 2010.
The plan, of course, was to come back later and make the thing permanent, never mind the impact on the deficit. But that never happened. And so here we are, with 2010 almost over and nothing resolved.
Democrats have tried to push a compromise: let tax cuts for the wealthy expire, but extend tax cuts for the middle class. Republicans, however, are having none of it. They have been filibustering Democratic attempts to separate tax cuts that mainly benefit a tiny group of wealthy Americans from those that mainly help the middle class. It’s all or nothing, they say: all the Bush tax cuts must be extended. What should Democrats do?
The answer is that they should just say no. If GOP intransigence means that taxes rise at the end of this month, so be it.Krugman proposed raising taxes on all Americans while the recovery was still very weak. He recognized this as a fiscal tightening that would put people out of work. He advocated it because the alternative of retaining the Bush tax cuts would have handed the Republicans a victory, and because — get this — he was worried about the long-term deficit implications. There you have it: Krugman the apolitical Keynesian.
I suppose that it would be churlish of me not to note that DeLong has (uncharacteristically) said some nice things about me recently. I wish that I could return the favor, but for the moment, anyway, I can’t.
I am late to this, but this past Friday, we had yet another jobs report. Yet again, we were told by various pundits that we ought to be happy with the details of the report. Yet again, I am forced to join James Pethokoukis in begging to differ:
US job growth in April beat economist expectations as nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000, and the jobless rate fell to a four-year low of 7.5%. But the report contained worrisome signs that President Obama’s health care reform law is hurting full-time, high-wage employment.
While the American economy added 293,000 jobs last month, according to the separate household survey, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons — “involuntary part-time workers” as the Labor Department calls them – increased by almost as much, by 278,000 to 7.9 million. These folks were working part time because a) their hours had been cut back or b) they were unable to find a full-time job. At the same time, the U-6 unemployment rate — a broader measure of joblessness that includes discouraged workers and part-timers who want a full-time gig – rose from 13.8% to 13.9%.
What’s more, there wasa 0.2 hour decline in the length of the average workweek. This led to 0.4 percentage point drop in the index of average weekly hours, “equaling the largest declines since the recovery began,” notes economist Dean Baker of Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Let’s see, more part timers and fewer hours worked. Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin says what we’re all thinking: “This is not good news as it reflects the reliance on part-time work. … the decline in hours and rise of part-time work is troubling in light of anecdotal reports of the impact of the Affordable Care Act.”
Anecdotal reports like this one from the Los Angeles Times: “Consider the city of Long Beach. It is limiting most of its 1,600 part-time employees to fewer than 27 hours a week, on average. City officials say that without cutting payroll hours, new health benefits would cost up to $2 million more next year, and that extra expense would trigger layoffs and cutbacks in city services.”
Regardless of whether one thinks that Obamacare is weakening the labor market—and there is evidence for that proposition—168,000 jobs created just barely helps keep up with population growth. We really need to be creating 100,000 jobs more per month in order to have any hope of reaching full employment anytime soon. And we just aren’t doing it.
Harvard professor and famous historian Niall Ferguson reportedly made some bizarre and offensive remarks about economist John Maynard Keynes at an investment conference yesterday.
According to financial writer Tom Kostigen, the editor at large of Private Wealth and Financial Advisor magazines, Ferguson made two startling suggestions about Keynes at the Tenth Annual Altegris Conference in Carlsbad, California:
- Keynes’ economic philosophy, Ferguson reportedly suggested, was the result of Keynes not caring about future generations.
- Keynes didn’t care about future generations, Ferguson reportedly suggested, because Keynes was gay and did not have children.
To his credit, Ferguson has now apologized. Good for him, but why make the comments in the first place? It is incumbent on those who criticize the application of Keynesianism—and I include myself in that group—to make sure that we understand what Keynesian arguments are, lest responsible criticisms get drowned out by the backlash against irresponsible criticisms. And as a general matter, it helps not to cite Keynes’s sexual orientation when criticizing his economic philosophy. There is no tie whatsoever between the two, and frankly, even before he sought to make the connection, Ferguson should have wondered whether the presence of heterosexual Keynesians might undermine his argument.
But as I write, at least Ferguson has apologized. Dick Harpootlian, by contrast, doesn’t seem to have the good grace or intelligence to follow Ferguson’s example:
Conservatives are outraged after a Democrat in South Carolina allegedly insulted Republican Gov. Nikki Haley’s Indian heritage at a party gathering in Columbia on Friday.
The state’s Democratic Party Chairman, Dick Harpootlian, is believed to have said the party will take on the Conservative in the next gubernatorial race and send ‘Nikki Haley back to wherever the hell she came from.’
Gov. Haley was born in the U.S. but her parents are from India.
Yahoo political reporter Chris Moody tweeted on Friday that Mr Harpootlian made the comment, in support of Democrat challenger Vince Sheheen, who has declared he will run for governor.
There were no details on the venue or context for the comment but Harpootlian is at the helm the 2013 Dem Weekend in Columbia, South Carolina.
One can easily imagine what the popular media reaction would be if a Republican state party chair made similar comments. Note that Harpootlian was an early and fervent supporter of Barack Obama in 2008, and bundled nearly $400,000 for Barack Obama’s re-election. The responsible thing for any enterprising journalist to do is to ask the president whether he stands by Harpootlian’s disgusting comments, or whether he is willing to condemn them. Thus far, of course, we have heard crickets from the administration, from the media in general, and naturally, from the port side of the blogosphere.
Venezuela’s new supposed president has decided to go to Cuba in order to “ratify a strategic, historic alliance that transcends time, that is more a brotherhood than an alliance.” The language Maduro employs is, of course, ridiculously over-the-top, so readers can feel free to point and mock. But what really makes this story newsworthy is the fact that Maduro has demonstrated the same propensity to back a loser that marked the political career of Hugo Chavez:
On weekend nights in Havana, young hipsters fill the sidewalks at a busy intersection near the seafront and spill into the park below, passing rum bottles between them, smoking cigarettes and playing guitars.
Black t-shirts, low-slung jeans, oddball haircuts and tattoos are in vogue at this spot, a favorite hangout for Cuban youth with a counter-cultural, slightly rebellious feel to it.
On one corner, police question a few overzealous partiers, but generally leave people alone compared to years past, when, according to one regular, Ernesto Ramis, they made everyone move along.
Ramis, 25, says you can get drugs here - uppers, downers, maybe some ecstasy - but there is no overt evidence of illegality this night, only a sense that being young in Cuba today is different, that conformity to the old ways has faded.
“The main difference,” says Ramis, pointing toward the Straits of Florida, barely visible in the darkness, “is that everyone wants to leave.”
One can readily understand why—assuming, of course, that one is not the supposed president of Venezuela. Young Cubans yearn to vote with their feet and leave their homeland. Nicolas Maduro seems to think that everything in Cuba is hunky-dory. One can readily forgive the people of Venezuela for being appalled by the fact that their supposed president has no grasp whatsoever on reality.
A few weeks ago I was talking to a very nice, very liberal wonk type who had tried to start a small business and come away with a changed vision of regulation. The most dispiriting thing, he told me, was that it wasn’t even possible to know whether he was in compliance. He’s a very smart guy with top-notch research skills, but if he’d spent all his time researching the rules, and none running his business, he still couldn’t have been sure that he was legal. (This was a tame office sort of business, not a hazmat disposal firm.) Instead, he had to pay professionals and blindly rely on what they said. This was both expensive and demoralizing.
Megan McArdle. Anyone who thinks that the economy is not being held back by excess regulation should perhaps think again.
A very good essay by Bryan Caplan. I hope that it gets more free-market economists involved in the discussion on how to alleviate unemployment—especially the long-term variety. No excerpts; just read the whole thing.
Margaret Thatcher was of the leaders of the side that won the Cold War. A number of the Thatcher-haters were on the other side. I am betting that is one of the reasons why they hate her so much.
The above may read like hyperbole. But if the jackboot fits …
Newly discovered documents showed substantial sums of money in hard currency were secretly transferred to the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) during the major industrial action.
They also stated that the former German Democratic Republic offered free holidays to the country for striking miners and their families in 1984 and 1985.
Food parcels and clothing were also shipped to those taking part in the strike, which ended in a historic defeat for the miners.
Professor Stefan Berger, from the University of Manchester, and Dr Norman LaPorte, from the University of Glamorgan, detail the documents in their new book, Friendly Enemies: Britain And The GDR 1949 to 1990.
Prof Berger, who is based at Manchester’s School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, said: ”My research finds that the NUM and the East European communists wanted to keep the affair secret and had some consequential problems getting the money to the NUM.
”The documents talk about the possibility of using a ‘go-between’ from the French communist union CGT who would deliver the money straight from Eastern Europe to representatives of the NUM.
”They also allege that the East German FDGB union (Free German Trade Union Federation) helped the miners by providing free holidays for the families and children of British miners in the German Democratic Republic.
”The FDGB, the documents say, also co-ordinated the shipping of food parcels, clothing and so on to British miners.”
He added: ”The communists perceived the NUM as an ally in the international class struggle against capitalism - hence the close interest in the strike.
”Relations between the NUM and East European communism had been good since the 1960s.
The article is from 2010, so the documents and the information are no longer “newly discovered.” However, I don’t see many Thatcher remembrances bringing up this issue, so I thought I should.
Here is another thing worth noting:
Baroness Thatcher would have viewed the parties held to celebrate her death as a “remarkable tribute” to her achievements, one of her closest friends has said.
Conor Burns, a Conservative MP who visited Lady Thatcher on a weekly basis in her final years, said she would have been pleased they felt “so strongly” about her.
He said that when he told her that “death packs” including commemorative T-shirts had been sold at the TUC congress last year she saw them as a tribute.
He said: “Funnily enough the parties that we’re seeing, the things in some of these mining communities and those young people opening the champagne in Glasgow, they’re a remarkable tribute to her you know.
“I remember telling her last year about the TUC congress selling the Thatcher death party packs.
“She said the fact that they felt so strongly about her more than 20 years after she left Downing Street was a tribute to the fact she had done something in politics rather than simply been someone.”
If death partiers wanted to insult Thatcher, they would have ignored her passing. They can’t even hate competently.
Having dispensed with the Thatcher-haters, we can turn our attention instead to the Economist, which critiques Thatcher in some respects in its remembrance, but gets the main point right:
Because of the [economic] crisis, the pendulum is swinging dangerously away from the principles Mrs Thatcher espoused. In most of the rich world, the state’s share of the economy has stubbornly risen. Regulations—excessive as well as necessary—are tying up the private sector. Businesspeople are under scrutiny as they have not been for 30 years and bankers are everyone’s favourite bogeyman. And with the rise of China state control, not economic liberalism, is being hailed as a model for emerging markets.
For a world in desperate need of growth, this is the wrong direction. Europe will never thrive until it frees up its markets. America will throttle its recovery unless it avoids overregulation. China will not sustain its success unless it starts to liberalise. This is a crucial time to hang on to Margaret Thatcher’s central perception: that for countries to flourish, people need to push back against the advance of the state. What the world needs now is more Thatcherism, not less.
Quite so.
Honestly. I’m begging you:
On Tuesday, FL Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her colleague VA Rep. Jim Moran openly whined about the impacts of spending cuts on their personal office budgets. Moran fretted that, with the looming sequester cuts, he may have to cut one staffer from his office. Wasserman Schultz upped his ante, however. She, almost literally, suggested that her staff were on the brink of starvation, due to the cuts.
Speaking at a hearing of the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee, Wasserman Schultz worried that prices of meals in House restaurants are getting so high that aides are being “priced out” of a good meal.
At the carry-out cafe in the Cannon Office Building, where Wasserman Schultz has her office, you can get an 8oz bowl of Ham and Bean soup for $2. You can buy gourmet sandwiches and wraps for around $5. Both of these are cheaper than I can get at delis down the street from my house.
There are, of course, so many better arguments against the sequester that can be made.
A special UofC kind of love on Flickr.
If this is actually from Allen Sanderson, then he clearly has both a good sense of humor, and good taste in intellectual heroes.
David Brooks is a nice guy, and that is a nice thing to be. What frustrates me about him is the fact that his nice guy nature seems to compel him to refrain from arguing forcefully for his position when it comes to political/policy debates. I don’t imagine that the New York Times actually wants its conservative columnist to be a compelling debater for the starboard side of the political divide, but unless Brooks’s job at the Paper of Record requires him to be a milquetoast fellow, I don’t see why he should assume the role. One can be a nice guy while also being an able and formidable advocate, and while Brooks has mastered being a nice guy, formidable advocacy is not something that comes easily to him.
It’s not that Brooks isn’t smart—he is. It’s not that he doesn’t know the arguments—he does. It’s not that he’s not well-informed in general—he clearly is. But he perpetually seems to be in search of some kind of Grand Compromise even while his debating opponents are busy kicking him in the teeth. Try listening to NPR’s All Things Considered on Friday afternoons, when Brooks appears alongside E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post. To his credit, Dionne is a very good debater who also gives the impression of being a nice guy (I am sure he is a gentleman—I’ve certainly heard nothing about Dionne being a terror to puppies and/or kittens, or anything like that), but being a nice guy doesn’t keep Dionne from making his case. Anytime he is able to advance liberal arguments and Democratic talking points (but I repeat myself), he does so, and he does so very competently. Brooks, meanwhile, acts as though he expects the debates to be The Grand Moment Of Both Sides Coming Together And Singing In Harmony, and fails to push conservative arguments with the same passion that Dionne displays in putting forth liberal arguments. At the end of the segment, Dionne regularly pwns Brooks, who usually tries to laugh the whole thing off—frustrating anyone and everyone (like me) who hopes that Brooks will do a number on Dionne just one time.
So, these are my complaints about David Brooks’s argument style. I am sure that I shall have occasion to repeat them sometime, but credit where it is due—in his latest column, Brooks shows that he’s eaten his spinach:
There is a statue outside the Federal Trade Commission of a powerful, rambunctious horse being reined in by an extremely muscular man. This used to be a metaphor for liberalism. The horse was capitalism. The man was government, which was needed sometimes to restrain capitalism’s excesses.
Today, liberalism seems to have changed. Today, many progressives seem to believe that government is the horse, the source of growth, job creation and prosperity. Capitalism is just a feeding trough that government can use to fuel its expansion.
For an example of this new worldview, look at the budget produced by the Congressional Progressive Caucus last week. These Democrats try to boost economic growth with a gigantic $2.1 trillion increase in government spending — including a $450 billion public works initiative, a similar-size infrastructure program and $179 billion so states, too, can hire more government workers.
Now, of course, liberals have always believed in Keynesian countercyclical deficit spending. But that was borrowing to brake against a downturn when certain conditions prevail: when the economy is shrinking; when debt levels are low; when there are plenty of shovel-ready projects waiting to be enacted; when there is a large and growing gap between the economy’s current output and what it is capable of producing.
Today, House progressives are calling for a huge increase in government taxing and spending when none of those conditions apply. Today, progressives are calling on government to be the growth engine in all circumstances. In this phase of the recovery, just as the economy is finally beginning to take off, these Democrats want to take an astounding $4.2 trillion out of the private sector and put it into government where they believe it can be used more efficiently.
How do the House Democrats want to get this money? The top tax rate would shoot up to 49 percent. There’d be new taxes on investment, inheritance, corporate income, financial transactions, banking activity and on and on.
Now, of course, there have been times, like, say, the Eisenhower administration, when top tax rates were very high. But the total tax burden was lower since so few people paid the top rate and there were so many ways to avoid it. Government was smaller.
Today, especially after the recent tax increases, the total tax burden is already at historic highs. If you combine federal, state, sales and other taxes, rich people in places like California and New York are seeing the government take 60 cents or more out of their last dollar earned.
Read the whole thing, and kudos to Brooks for punching back on this issue. Incidentally, isn’t it interesting that modern day Keynesians think that temporary government spending on public works is just the thing that the doctor ordered when it comes to revving up a sluggish economy, but public spending on tax cuts is somehow a bad thing? And isn’t it equally interesting that modern day Keynesians think that if we scale back public works spending, there will be terrible economic consequences, but if we engage in nuclear class warfare via the tax code, nothing bad will happen to the economy?
As with anything involving the Hermit Kingdom, there is a great deal of craziness attached to this issue. Prepare to be smacked by gob as a consequence of reading the following:
Other than the foregoing, of course, we can bet our bottom dollars that everything is fine in North Korea, and everyone living there thanks his/her lucky stars on an hourly basis for the good fortune that placed them on the septentrional side of the 38th parallel. I mean, who would want to live with those pesky South Koreans and their significantly larger number of political liberties, their wealth, their much higher standard of living, and their plentiful food options—options which don’t involve eating grass and/or cannibalism?
Alternatie title: “Yes Virginia, Costs Will Be Passed Down to the Consumer”:
The fight over Obamacare, so far held at the 30,000-foot level, is about to hit home. The latest impact hot off the grill: prices of burgers and hot dogs at Five Guys, the national chain that started in Washington, are going to rise to cover the president’s mandated insurance coverage.
“Any added costs are going to have to be passed on,” said Mike Ruffer, a Five Guys franchise holder with eight of the popular restaurants in the Raleigh-Durham, N.C. area. He will need all the profits from at least one of his eight outlets just to cover his estimated added $60,000-a year in new Obamacare costs.
What’s more, he’s iced plans to build another three restaurants until after the administration explains the exact rules and penalties employers will face. The law’s plan to have those available March 1 has been pushed back to October.
Look for the same sort of thing to happen to other businesses. And look as well for Obamaphiles to attack those businesses for doing precisely what the laws of economics predict that they will do.
First, many economists, especially conservative ones, have a libertarian streak. Ever since Adam Smith taught us about the wonders of free markets and the magic of the invisible hand, we have been loath to prohibit mutually advantageous trades between consenting adults. If an American farmer wants to hire a worker to pick fruits and vegetables, the fact that the worker happens to have been born in Mexico does not seem a compelling reason to stop the transaction.
Second, many economists, especially liberal ones, have an egalitarian streak. They follow the philosopher John Rawls’s theory of justice in believing that policy should be particularly attuned to its impact on the least fortunate. When thinking about immigration, there is little doubt that the least fortunate, and the ones with the most at stake in the outcome, are the poor workers who yearn to come to the United States to make a better life for themselves and their families.
Third, economists of all stripes recognize that our own profession has benefited greatly from an influx of talent from abroad. In just the last few weeks, the economics department at Harvard, where I am chairman, has brought in six candidates to be considered for two assistant professor positions. Of the six, three are Americans, one is German, one is Argentine, and one is a New Zealander. The jobs will be offered to those deemed to have most promise as teachers and scholars, regardless of nationality.
The competition from foreign-born economists makes it harder for American economists to get the best positions. But it would be hypocritical for American economists to argue against such competition, as we have long preached that nations are better off over all when they pursue a policy of free and open trade. This principle applies not only to manufactured goods like textiles and aircraft but also to labor services, including lectures on economics.
Read it all. Of course, it ought to go without saying that liberalized immigration policies don’t just help economists churn out a better work product.
Read the full article “Research at the Ransom Center: Modernism and Christianity.”
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