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Why not simply return to the property franchise? Say, $1m and up.
John Amato: Republican Voter ID Laws Disenfranchise Former Speaker Of The House Jim Wright: Noted
**John Amato:** Republican Voter ID Laws Disenfranchise Former Speaker Of The House Jim Wright: >Republicans who have been changing the voter ID laws to disenfranchise American voters have always responded by saying they just want to root out voter fraud. They haven't found any voter fraud, but t...
Unavoidable observation: I failed
Corollary: Success is impossible
(twist Fama beyond recognition, take him off the reservation and you have the beginnings of a rationalisation there ...)
Alan Greenspan Tries Unsuccessfully to Have It Both Ways: Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot Weblogging
**Jake Tapper:** Alan Greenspan defends legacy from harsh criticism: >[David] Dayen suggests Greenspan shares the blame with JPMorgan Chase for duping investors into purchasing mortgage-backed securities that were stuffed with garbage loans because his “allergy to regulation and unshakeable belie...
"Economic Failure Causes Political Polarization - John Taylor"
Yet again, another once-respectable republican economist getting causation 180 degrees wrong.
Links for 10-29-2013
The Confidence Gnomes - Paul Krugman The 'endowment effect' not present in hunter-gatherer societies - EurekAlert Abenomics and Japanese Inflation Expectations - Carola Binder Three Centuries of Debt and Interest Rates - Paul Krugman If Prices Go Up, Incomes May Lag - NYTimes.com Economic F...
As an employee of a multinational, I can attest that high modernist central planning is not the exclusive province of government. I would add that governments address the problems of high modernist central planning in some measure, whereas my corporate culture is less constrained.
James Scott and Friedrich von Hayek: Hoisted from the Archives from October 24, 2007
Brad DeLong : James Scott and Friedrich Hayek: October 24, 2007: JAMES SCOTT AND FRIEDRICH HAYEK My review of James Scott (1998), [Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0300070160/braddelong00A/) (New Haven: Y...
I stopped reading that fantasist, Cowen, at this point:
"I’ll also assume that Republicans will acknowledge that a feasible rewrite of the bill cannot give the Democrats nothing."
If we're into fantasy, why not consider as a possibility a US health care regime that resembles any of those in other first world countries -- take your pick -- none of which cost more than 2/3 per capita what the US regime costs, even allowing for the Heath Robertson contraption devised by the AEI known as ObamaCare.
Yes, the notion that the US might do the obvious is, once again, fantasy.
Links for 10-20-2013
Lies, Damned Lies, and Fox News - Paul Krugman The Middle Class Gets Wise - NYTimes.com The decline of evidence based policy - mainly macro Does business-cycle volatility matter? - vox Driving a New Bargain on Obamacare - Tyler Cowen Who’s Afraid of Chinese Money? - New York Review of Books...
A supermodel would be equally useless, though preferable.
Mark's post sits well with http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/05/hoisted-from-the-archives-the-tribal-dislike-of-john-hicks-and-is-lm-history-of-economic-thought-edition.html
'DSGE + Financial Frictions = Macro that Works?'
This is a brief follow-up to this post from Noah Smith (see this post for the abstract to the Marco Del Negro, Marc P. Giannoni, and Frank Schorfheide paper he discusses): DSGE + financial frictions = macro that works?: In my last post, I wrote: So far, we don't seem to have gotten a heck of...
It's perfect, William. It's the best university money can buy.
Kenneth Rogoff Is Smart Today
Here: >"Europe’s Lost Keynesians" by Kenneth Rogoff But I don't have time to react…
But, sadly, the gods are late to the party, and half-baked. And they made Harvard mad before they turned to Ferguson. How else to explain his tenure?
Niall Ferguson "Quos Deus Vult Perdere, Prius Dementat" Weblogging...
Niall Ferguson (April 22, 1995): >It is not too much to infer from these emotive phrases some kind of sexual attraction [for Carl Melchior]…. [T]here is no question that the attraction Keynes felt for him strongly influenced his judgment…. [T]hose familiar with Bloomsbury will appreciate why Ke...
"Would any right-wing intellectual whose reason does transcendently grasp objective reality do so?
Is there any other kind of right-wing intellectual nowadays?
Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?: Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard Edition
Why do the *Weekly Standard's* writers work so hard to persuade me that they lack both intelligence and honor? I mean, they work really hard to do so--and they do so quite effectively. Let's back up, and start with one of my favorite readings from Thomas Nagel (2012), *Mind and Cosmos*: >If I d...
Think of it as an academic respectability sacrifice with a view to a wingnut welfare checkmate.
The Thoughtful and Intelligent Tyler Cowen Gets Four Wrong: Fiscal Finance Weblogging
Tyler Cowen: >Can we agree that… >1. Debt-financed government spending must eventually be paid off and the estimated deadweight loss of taxation is at least twenty percent. That immediately puts a hurdle rate of twenty percent or more on projects, even when real borrowing rates are very low…. ...
Why should a dependable, responsible, moderate, even-handed professional like Clive give up his centrist credentials? Be fair. The moment he succumbs to the temptations of logic and integrity, another dependable, responsible, moderate, even-handed professional will be found to take his place.
Wednesday Hoisted from the Archives from Four Years Ago: Clive Crook Seems to Have It Slightly Off... Weblogging
Of all the weird things to happen over the past decade, one of the weirdest has been Clive Crook's transformation into the anti-Ezra Klein: someone who uses his knowledge of policy to cloud and confuse. More and more we find Clive Crook taking refuge in the position that: * Barack Obama's polic...
I might add that five Judge Judies in drag now constitute a Supreme Court majority.
Judge Judy On The Entitlement State
Renown Political Philosopher Judge Judy absolutely nails the Entitlement state in this great clip. Make sure to watch the whole thing! Christopher Buckley once wrote a satire about how a Judge Judy character was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court... I'm starting to think, watching this, that...
Since this post uses a US GOP-framing word - "entitlements" - and enlists the rhetoric of a US tabloid TV program based on an imaginary worst case, I'll quote a US economist (Brad Delong)who is neither mathematically challenged nor prone to ignoring the mathematics in furtherance of ideology:
"Go to Nick Eberstadt's A Nation of Takers and you discover him writing about:
The breathtaking growth of [personal] entitlement payments.... In 1960, U.S. government transfers to individuals from all programs totaled $24 billion. By 2010, the outlay for entitlements was almost 100 times more... the nominal growth in entitlement payments... was rising by an explosive average of 9.5% per annum for fifty straight years...
But of that 9.5%, 6.9% is a simply matches the growth of potential nominal GDP from inflation, labor-force growth, and productivity growth.
That leaves excess entitlement spending growth of 2.6%/year.
That excess has three causes. First, 38% of federal transfer programs are health programs. Few indeed drop out of work today and become moochers because they want to qualify for Medicaid, or they look forward to Medicare. A government that pays doctors for treating sick people does not a nation of takers make.
Second, an aging population since 1960 is responsible for 1/10 of today's non-health transfers. And the depressed economy is responsible for another 1/7: more old people, families that don't normally qualify for food stamps qualifying for them because of unemployment, and workers who paid into the unemployment insurance system using it for what it was intended for. This is not a shift in the generosity of our safety net.
Subtract off these, and you are left with the third cause: our non-health safety net has become more generous over the past two generations.
By how much?
The non-health aging- and cyclically-adjusted transfer spending of the federal government has grown since 1960 relative to potential GDP at a rate of 0.9%/year. It has grown from
That is less than one-tenth of Eberstadt's headline number
It is that less than 1%/year growth rate is supposed to have turned us from a self-reliant entrepreneurial people in 1960 into "a nation of takers", an "an incoherent amalgam of interest groups ... vying for benefits ... at the expense of other Americans" today?
That dog won't hunt. That fish won't swim. That bird won't fly.
The systemic crisis in right-of-center use of arithmetic runs far deeper than just polling."
Judge Judy On The Entitlement State
Renown Political Philosopher Judge Judy absolutely nails the Entitlement state in this great clip. Make sure to watch the whole thing! Christopher Buckley once wrote a satire about how a Judge Judy character was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court... I'm starting to think, watching this, that...
Guy thinks the GOP will come to the party. What is he? Some kind of moron? Dem pitch should be "give us the House and 60% of the Senate or the country is screwed". Clear and highly credible. Also, finally, authentic.
DeLong-Summers Smackdown Watch: Peter Orszag Lifts His $11 Trillion Barbells...
I can't bench press nearly that much… Peter Orszag: >Barbell Approach Only Way to Lift Heavy Economy: We are still in the midst of the hard slog following the financial crisis, and we still face a massive long-term government budget deficit. Let’s hope that dismal combination is all we face -- be...
Enough with the rhetorical questions.
Does Niall Ferguson Think Before He Speaks?
You cannot make this stuff up. Matthew Yglesias has clear and convincing evidence that he does not: >Niall Ferguson on the Educational Credentials You Look For In A President: >>The president wants this election to be the White House vs. Wall Street. But if it’s really Harvard Business School v...
and "endure" they did - hence the GFC
Letter from Margaret Thatcher to Friedrich Hayek
I would dearly love to see what this is a reply to: >Letter from Margaret Thatcher to Friedrich Hayek | Naomi Klein: >February 17, 1982 >Thank you for your letter of 5 February. I was very glad that you able to attend the dinner so thoughtfully organized by Walter Salomon. It was not only a great...
"Can somebody please point me to someone, somewhere who likes it?"
Broder, surely?
Obama Budget Message FAIL
I have--so far--seen nobody applaud Obama's "spending freeze." From the right and the center: 1. The Note: Obama Spending Freeze Lands on Hill with Thud... 2. Nate Silver: FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The White House's Brain Freeze: My first reaction to tonight's news is that it's a mist...
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