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Media Infiltrations: TARP Looking More Criminal by the Minute  National Review Online April 24, 2009 Death By Rescue National Review November 17, 2008
"What has been your worst blogging experience? "That's a guy who actually stalks me on the Web and once stalked me personally." "I'm saying this...guy's a jerk."
 The Great Depression and the New Deal Eric Rauchway What I'm listening to:  Langley Schools Music Project What I'm watching:  There Will Be Blood What I'm playing:  Speed Racer Order these from Amazon.com at Amazon's normal low prices... and a fraction of your order goes to help support this site. Thanks!
Thanks to Irwin Chusid, public editor.
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Chronicle of the Conspiracy
Join us as we discover, document, expose and challenge the bad people, the bad institutions and the bad ideas that stand in the way of wealth creation -- and show you how to fight back!
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
KUDLOW REPLAY Save us from the Austrians! Is it just the "narcissim of small differences," or is it especially annoying when self-proclaimed "specialists" like Michael Pento get it vaguely right -- but not because they really understand anything, but only because they've memorized a few free-market slogans and econobabble statistics? Or is it just his sheer amateurishness? The raving about "Phillips Swerve analysis" and the "ay-po-gee" of the bond market rally? Well, not to complain -- after all, he's promised me 7% of his income (now if only he had an income).Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:20 PM |
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HEALTH CARE "REFORM" TALKING POINTS Brilliant! Best ever! A simple catalog of right-on responses to all the liberal BS about why we need government-run and government-rationed health care. Read them all -- but I like these especially:
"Forty-five million people in the U.S. are uninsured."Even if this were true (many dispute it) should we risk destroying a system that works for the vast majority to help 15% of our population?
"The cost of treating the 45 million uninsured is shifted to the rest of us."
So on Monday, Wednesday and Friday we are harangued about the 45 million people lacking medical care, and on Tuesday and Thursday we are told we already pay for that care. Left-wing reformers think that if they split the two arguments we are too stupid to notice the contradiction. Furthermore, if cost shifting is bad, wait for the Mother of all Cost Shifting when suppliers have to overcharge the private plans to compensate for the depressed prices forced on them by the public plan.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:48 AM |
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AMTRAK TODAY, GENERAL MOTORS TOMORROW! What wonderful things happen when the government owns companies. "Mick Danger" snapped this on the Acela between Washington and New York. He says, "Maybe the Senate will junk the Pelosi-Waxman-Markey bill and just let frequent train travelers cash in their miles to handle global warming."
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:32 AM |
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009
DOES OBAMAMANIA HAVE NO LIMITS? It's the end of the world.With Wal-Mart’s endorsement of a legal requirement that employers provide health benefits to their workers, the nation’s largest employer has broken from the business community...The Chamber of Commerce is not pleased:Moreover, Wal-Mart declared its support for the employer mandate in a joint letter to Obama with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the liberal Center for American Progress, which is run by John Podesta, a close associate of the White House.
“We are entering a critical time during which all of us who will be asked to pay for health care reform will have to make a choice on whether to support the legislation,” says the letter, signed by Wal-Mart President and CEO Mike Duke, SEIU President Andy Stern and Podesta.
The Chamber issued a blistering denunciation of Wal-Mart's action Tuesday, saying the company is trying to undermine other retailers through anti-competitive means.Update... My DC-insider friend "Mick Danger" says,"Some businesses make the decision to use the government as a weapon against their competition," James Gelfand, the Chamber's senior manager for health policy, said in a statement. "We do not agree with this method -- the government is a blunt instrument and taxes have extreme unintended consequences, negatively affecting the economy as a whole. We also recognize that momentum is moving against an employer mandate. The business community will be stepping up our advocacy as necessary, too."
Anything to hold off the union.Whenever business in general needs strong defenders, as is often the case regarding free trade, they are AWOL.
Can’t say I’m surprised. I suspect they they see it as wooing employees to stay non-union.
I am not a fan. They freeloaded their way through Reagan until now. Huge, huge beneficiary of policy world when it was pro-growth and spent not a dime to make it so or to defend those who did.
If they get f#cked it's b/c they have no friends and thousands of enemies in the business community.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:18 PM |
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CHECK YOUR PREMISES This kind of moral/political commentary masquerading as economics is a very dangerous thing. Here's a blog post by James Kwak, part of the Baseline Scenario blog, a cottage industry of quotable commentary on the current economic crisis (he and his colleagues like Simon Johnson are constantly showing up as "expert" interview subjects, mouthing off on whatever twist or turn happens to be in the news that day for admiring reporters).
Mark Thoma links to a medical paper that brings up the issue that few people want to talk about: at what point is the cost of medical care to extend life not justified? Like Thoma, I don’t have a great answer, except to point out that in a world of scarce resources, the answer cannot be that any effort to extend life by any small amount is always a good idea. (And as David Leonhardt explained, our health care system is certainly constrained by scarce resources, whether we like it or not.)Set aside whether the fault is with this blog post or the sources it links to (it's both). The problem here is the premise it is implicitly based on -- the idea that medical goods and services are different from any other from the consumer's point of view, or from a moral point of view. How can a "medical paper" opine on whether a health care cost is "justified"? Doesn't each consumer have his own utility function for that, just as he does for all other goods and services, based on his personal needs, preferences, and endowments? Why is it useful to point to a New York Times' reporter's banal observation that these services are scarce resources? What services are not?
These questions only mean anything worth debating if you presume from the start that government is supposed to be paying for these things. That presumption makes these questions a matter of public choice, and this debatable. But if you assume that patients ought to be free to decide as they will, then who cares about any of this?
Framing it this way is not about actually debating the issue of scarce resources at all. For economists like Kwak (aptly named, I might add), the idea is to insert the unspoken premise of government involvement for its own sake -- to make a "baseline scenario" of the debate, not to be questioned.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:26 AM |
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Monday, June 29, 2009
SCOTUS DETERMINES THAT WISE LATINO WOMAN IS NOT SO WISE AFTER ALL Breaking (good) news:The Supreme Court, voting 5-4 in a case that has been a lightning rod for high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, invalidated a Connecticut city's decision to scrap the results of a firefighter promotion exam in which the white candidates scored better than their black peers....Ms. Sotomayor was one of three judges sitting on an appeals court panel that upheld the city's decision not to certify the test results.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:15 AM |
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HOW DOES GREG MANKIW KEEP HIS COMPOSURE? From his blog this morning:
In a brief blog post on healthcare, Paul Krugman says that George Will and I are "either remarkably ignorant or simply disingenuous." I cannot speak for George, but I can attest that I am completely ingenuous. So I suppose I must be remarkably ignorant.Thanks to Rohit Dewan.There is a lot of that going around lately. In an earlier post on the state of macroeconomics, Paul says, "Brad DeLong and I have been sort of tag-teaming the Great Ignorance which seems to have overtaken much of the economics profession."
What is going through Paul's head as he writes these posts? ...He likely believes that civility is overrated. He seems to think that in the blogosphere, and perhaps in the public debate more generally, you score points simply by insulting your intellectual adversaries. Sadly, I am afraid he may be right.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:12 AM |
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Friday, June 26, 2009
WILL THE GLOBAL WARMING TAX PASS THE HOUSE TODAY? "Mick" thinks its a defining moment for Nancy Pelosi:Here, this morning’s buzz: Pelosi is still short of the votes on BTU Tax Deux, er, Waxman-Markey.If they don’t have the votes by 2 pm, the buzz will shift to “will they pull the bill”?
Guesses about how far short have no credibility. Having done vote counting for 31 years, those who know the hard counts, don’t leak.
Three outcomes:
If it passes, a pollster I trust say it could swing 10-12 seats in 2010.
If it gets pulled, it creates havoc on the left. What can they bring back?
If it fails, it’s both a loser for the Dems, now & in 2010.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:26 AM |
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PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE PROPERTY RIGHTS WHEN THE PROPERTY IS OWNED BY A UNION! Congress is looking at taxing so-called "gold plated" health care plans in order to pay for Obamacare. That might impose a tax on some legacy union plans that are extremeley generous by current standards. Surely -- surely! -- those union plans will be grandfathered in without the tax. Fair is fair, at least if you are a union!
Gerald Shea, an AFL-CIO official lobbying for health-care reform, said grandfathering benefits negotiated in a collective bargaining agreement is a “common thing when there is a big change in federal law.”My DC-insider friend "Mick Danger" points out that unions don't seem so concerned with preserving the contractual expectations of other people -- only themsleves. Remember the way Chrysler bondholders had their contractual rights trampled? Mick says, "Read this quote and substitute 'bond' for 'collective bargaining' and 'investor' for 'worker.'"“Once a collective bargaining agreement is set, employer’s budgets are set, workers expectations are set. It doesn’t make sense to go back in the middle of the contract and change it,” he said. “If they didn’t do this, it would be shocking and if they do, it’s a normal course of events.”
Union groups and workers said Congress shouldn’t target contractually-negotiated benefits.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:28 AM |
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Thursday, June 25, 2009
BLINDING GLIMPSE OF THE STATISTICALLY OBVIOUS From this morning's Wall Street Journal:Global flows of foreign-direct investment halved during the first three months of 2009 as the value of cross-border mergers and acquisitions plummeted, a United Nations agency said Wednesday... "If the first-quarter trend continues, projections for the whole of 2009 are for global FDI inflows to drop by close to half."
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 7:44 AM |
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009
GO AHEAD, MAKE MY BARBECUE Our Texas correspondent Richard Ridgeway sends in this example of vernacular architecture seen in Centerville.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:39 AM |
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LET'S HOPE IT DOESN'T COME TO THIS When the FOMC meets this afternoon, let's hope they remember that there are better solutions to inflation than beans and chicken-heads, as illustrated in this cookbook from the 1970s.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:57 AM |
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THE NUB OF THE PROBLEM Holman Jenkins hits on it exactly this morning in the Wall Street Journal:
There's no question that the Obama administration has opted for an unspoken policy of regulatory forbearance with respect to various too-big-to-fail banks...True enough. But how can it work if the Obama administration is doing everything it can to retard growth?This is a bet on growth, the only decent solution out there, because neither nationalization nor capital raising by banks can get the Federal Reserve off the hook of inflating away the banking system's massive additional losses on consumer, business and housing loans if growth doesn't come back.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:53 AM |
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009
IF ONLY IT WERE THIS EASY Here's a comic book put out by the Fed in 2000 (cover just below, and selected frames in the three posts below this post). I'm glad they have this playbook to guide them in the difficult monetary policy decisions they have to make nowadays.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:00 AM |
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