Dave Weigel asked [the] Heritage [Foundation's] Brian Reidl if the right-wing's growing calls for a "spending freeze" aren't a recipe for macroeconomic disaster and he offered-up a non-responsive response
February 2009 Archives
I think we'll be growing again in late 2012 and Obama will probably get re-elected no matter [what] Republicans say or do.
But The Washington Post, by standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is is, is pissing that brand away....
There will be a proliferation of niche media, and there will also be a handful of global English-language news media brands offering video, test, and audio coverage.
I'm quoted in the piece, but I think I could possibly have been clearly.
And yet the other part of the speech about the banks--the part about how rescuing the financial system isn't about rescuing bankers its about rescuing the entire American economy--was spot-on.
At any rate, I thought the base might like Jindal's text, but eve the Fox News panel couldn't stomach the delivery:
Nothing about the banks in question being big, or about the United States being a large country, change the fact that the other options are bad. Isaac offers this alternative prescription
Great power conflict, by contrast, merely ensure than any actual or would-be dictator or revolutionary can always count on the support of one or the other external players.
One is simply that the possibility of appointment-driven changes in partisan makeup of the Senate is weird distorting effect on presidential appointments.
And it was easy to sell the mortgages as securities irregardless of their quality, because big sophisticated financial services firms devised tactics for slicing and dicing the securities into packages that could be easily resold.
As expected, Matt's commenters have a merciless disdain for made-up words.Brock puts it bluntly: "Harvard called; it wants your degree back."
The hope is for that trend to turn around. First, employment starts trending up. Then incomes start treading up
To extrapolate a bill, more Charlie Crists and fewer Bobby Jindals....
If I had a more serious job, I would prefer Excel despite its ugly charts, but for the blogger in your life get Numbers[.]
The moral of Jindal's parable, is basically that's it's per se wrong to implement policies that increase the national debt. That doing [so] is "irresponsible" due to the burden it places on "our children."
The seal sounds is cool, too.
Bonus trivial, the next guy who I arbitrarily decided should be president was Howard Dean and, indeed, I watched the Locke SOTU response from a motel in Burlington, VT where I'd gone to check the Dean campaign out.
I suppose the rhetorical function of this sort of right-wing rhetoric about "Europeanizing" America or a "social democratic" model is to get progressive to swiftly disavow any ambitions of changing the country in a serious way.
And you sometimes do see him cosigning these kind of manifestos....
If you [are] genuinely interested in Russian democracy, you don't crowd the US-Russian bilateral relationship with counterproductive hostility.
Clearly, a new VP was needed, and Roosevelt tapped Wallace, a reliable liberal, in part to ensure loyalty and in part because FDR new full well that he was turning away from the New Deal and toward national security and wanted to keep the New Dealers in the tent.Wallace went back to farming, [and]supported the Korean War in 1950.
Why? Well, we don't have any high-voltage transmission lines going into the part of the country where the best onshore wind resources are, and we have few lines going to where the best solar power sights are:
Mark Kleiman does it buy it and argues, convincingly in my view, that "the demographics aren't right."
And as Joe Klein observes, what Jindal seems to be for is tax cuts for wealth individuals.
Obviously, given those kind of sentiments from even very hawkish and anti-Arab American Jews, sensible Israelis are going to wonder about the possible impact of the Liebermanification of their national security posture on U.S. public opinion.
I think everyone understands the human phenomenon whereby we mistaken deem our own personal experiences to be more typical than they are....
Update: As detailed here, my facts are a bit off as college attendance rates.
Whether or not you think Emanuel is right about the legislative politics, it seems to significant for the White House Chief of Staff to concede that Krugman is correct about the economics and the legislation President Obama signed into law may, in virtue of its concessions to conservatives, be too small to rescue the economy.
The transportation of certain "fight"/"sports" tropes into the context of a fake sport plays with the genres and enormously complicated our understanding of what's happening.
He stayed in this position for nine years until, in 1931, New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt but Jesse Straus in charge of an agency called the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration....
Hopkins was a hugely important figure in the New Deal as the administrator [of] relief and jobs programs such as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
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As such, Hopkins was shifted out of the Commerce job and sent overseas as an unofficial adversary to Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin as well as to a key role in the Lend-Lease program.
Well, he says that's not a big problem (
White people live Starbucks more than black people.
I liked Mark Kleiman's letter to Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander regarded George Will's climate change misrepresentations and the Post's odd defense of it very much.
Felix Salmon comments on the stock market dropping below its November lows:The fact is that prospects for the economy are much worse than they were in November. As such, it stands to reason that stock prices should be lower than they were in November: if they were much higher, and the Dow was still above 9,000, that would be the real news, since it might imply that the November lows were panic-driven rather than rational.
That's right, but I think people's Dow-driven anxieties point to a larger pathology that started at the policy level and has now infected the media and the general public's understanding of how the economy works.
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And the increase in value was driven by a combination of speculation, and buy the fact that consumption was creating economic activity.
Rosenbaum knows this because it wrote about it in his book, but for the purpose of this article he's glossed over it....
In Prussia, for example, Otto Braun's SDP coalition was happily in power through democratic means until July of 1932 when the federal Chancellor Franz von Papen decided to abrogated constitutional government, kick Braun out of power, and start running the state himself.
If someone charged Matt from every typo he made, would that discouraging him from being so careless?
A VMT tax just discouraging driving as such....
So I'm not sold. When it comes to pricing driving-related activities, it makes sense to charge people from things that actually impose costs on others--burning gasoline, and taking up space on crowded roads--not the mere act of driving.
Ezra's main point is that coverage that's utterly trivial and that poisons public understanding of crucial issues that effect the lives of billions of people is rewarded by the market, and that Politico does a good [job] of delivering on coverage that's utterly trivial and that poisons public understanding of crucial issues that effect the lives of billions of people.
Not only is Canada very high on the list of our trade partners, but due to the nature of the geography, the trade volume belies on unusual level of actual integration whereby Canadian and American business enterprises are completely intertwined....
A day-trip to Ottawa early in the administration is the least we can do and Mexican-American voters can be quoted with other means.
There's a lot of dogma about to the effect that jobs working for the government aren't "real" jobs--that somehow the police and teachers and firefighters and the guys who build the bridges and drive the buses aren't creating anything of value.
This separates the people who live in the rowhouses immediately north of New York Avenue from the supermarket and other retail that's in the ground floor of the condo building I life in immediately south of NY Ave, and it separates us in the building from the Metro station a few blocks away.
The volume of leaks and hints that Governor Kathleen Sebelius is likely to be our next secretary of Health and Human Services [is] growing.
I suppose you'd have to say that the major downside to this plan is not so much the cost, which is small relative to other stuff that's happening, but the reality that messing around like this means that whenever the economy gets back on the upswing it's going to be harder for people to get mortgages now that banks now that if things go wrong the government may well step in and start re-writing deals.
He agrees that they're statements are false, but somehow I'm to blame?
But nevertheless, the most serious analysis out there consistent found Shays['] position to the right of every single member of the House Democratic caucus, even though many Democrats represented more GOP-friendly seats than Shays'....
What makes congress polarized is when even the most-liberal Republican is more conservative than the most-conservative Democrat. And you can't blame that on polarization.
The people who would be the main beneficiaries of a more social democratic policy dynamic--a couple of non-college parents who could really use some free child care and and guaranteed health care and pension, for example--are relatively unlikely to have personal experience that cuts one way or the other [in] regards to how terrifying Europe is.
My inbox is ablaze with different people forwarding me information about the President deciding to dispatch a Marine Expeditionary Brigade and an Army Stryler Brigade to Afghanistan.
It turns out that beyond his serious distortions regarded the alleged "global cooling" scare of the 1970s, George Will's latest climate change denialist article contained some very clear-cut factual errors.
Richard Danzig, a former Secretary of the Navy who was a key Obama defense policy adviser thoughout the campaign, will be taking a position at the Center for a New American Security rather than joining the administration. Initial transition speculation had him serving as Robert Gates' deputy at the Pentagon in anticipation of taking over the top job down the road, but evidently that didn't work out and none of the other jobs he was offered were too his liking.
Not only do day-to-day fluctuations in the stock market simply not tell you very much, insofar as they do tell you something about an announcement like this they're heavily influenced by perceptions of how favorable a plan is to the interests of those who current own stocks in the affected companies.
You also get innovative proposals like James Capretta['s] vision of recycling
John McCain's substantively unsound and wildly unpopular health care plans.
Nor were conservatives running a "campaign to find pork barrel projects int he stimulus bill" they were inventing fictional projects.
Nowhere in the works of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, for example, is there anything about how if science indicates that [a] certain form of human activity that was long thought to be harmless to others is, in fact, doing massive, hard-to-reverse damage to the long-term interests of billions of people that the correct response is to retreat into dogma and ignorance....
Now as [you] probably know, the media sometimes hypes up bogus trend stories with no real basis in evidence.
But by the same token it's also true that the Republican Party is dominated by its upscale wing. Johnny Isakson may in some sense "represent" a middle-and-working class constituency but his personal fortune is valued in the $8-24 million range. Mitch McConnel who likes to play a Europe-hating rube in TV is in the $3-13 million range.
He flagged the critical research by Claudia Golden and Lawrence Katz on the importance of improved performance from the school system to our future prosperity and the prospects for a decent mount of equality.
Certainly I don't see direct diplomacy on the highest levels as particularly critical, though it would be nice of Chávez and Obama could say "hello" as long as they're both at the same summit.
But it's important to be clear--those tactics included lockstep opposition to a Clinton economic program whose opponents set it would wreck the economy, but in fact laid the groundwork for years of prosperity.
It seems to me that Roland Burris never should have accepted Ron Blagojevic's offer to have him become a pawn in the corrupt governor's insane gambits.
Editor's note: Perhaps Matt was referring to the impending indictment of Blagojevich when he said "[t]he good news, though, is that Blago is on his way out one way or another," but I would have thought his impeachment and removal from office would have implied that Blago was already out and not just on his way.
I bet Man, the State, and War could sell more copies if they wound a way to reposition it as a dating advice book.
Back in late January, I praised Rep. John Micah of Florida for calling for the inclusion of more passenger rail funding in the stimulus bill. ... And what did Rep. Micah do?
Editor's note: When Matt blogged about Mica in January, he got his name right, so this isn't a "Ron Blagojevic" situation where it appears Matt doesn't know the correct name.
There are dozens of Senate conservatives who could have said "I don't believe in the idea of Keynesian stimulus, but as long as you guys want to do a Keynesian stimulus you may as well do one properly, thus even though I'll vote 'no' on the final bill I'll agree to vote 'yes' on cloture if you undue the damage done by Sens. Specter, Collins, Snowe, and Nelson."
Bush Forced to Buckrake in Canada Since All Real Americans Despite Him
Realistically, though, the largest impacts of the stimulus are going to be things that are hard to see because they're things that aren't happen.
You could solve the entitlement problem fairly easily, if brutally, without tackling the health care problem--just pair back benefits.
The technical term involves something I've mentioned previously, the "velocity of money" -- the speed through which economic activity moves through the system....
But perhaps a bigger issue is that the didn't actually clean up their banking system.
Second, as regard Lieberman I think this is totally wrong.
Many will see the situation as regrettable, but see the Arabs as primarily "at fault" and the perpetuation of [the] situation as necessary for Israeli security.
For a bunch of down-home regular folks just tryin' to stay in such with the good people back in their rural districts, members of the Blue Dog caucus do seem to spend an awful lot of time speaking to a nationwide audience of political junkies on daytime cable news and Beltway-only publications.
Editor's note: Matt caught this one and corrected it. Also, Matt's commenters think this particular error is evidence of Matt's use of speech recognition software, but we aren't sure. Mat also has a lot of typos that look like he just missed the right key on his keyboard.
This would be over triple as costly as the stimulus that will soon be signed, probably less effective at producing jobs, and much more devastating to the United States' long-term budgetary situation.
This amounts to saying "just because nationalization worked in Sweden doesn't mean it'll necessarily work here, so I'll try something else that also might not won't work."
Eighteen months ago there were lots of social welfare [projects] that Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton or John Edwards or Bill Richardson) could have embraced to endear himself to Democratic Party primary voters except advisers would come back and say "Senator, that'll cost $350 [billion] over ten years--we can't do it." But it's a much smaller number than $2.5 trillion.
The FT's Martin Wolf continue to make the case for bold action of cleaning up the banking sector, and makes the point that if the United States were dispensing advice to a supplicant nation, we'd be urging them off the kind of wishful thinking that seems to be governing a lot of policymaking:
Centrists Wast $1 Billion on Nuclear Weapons Stimulus
But a fiscal stimulus measure is a situation where time really is of the essence and it would be pretty irresponsible for the President or his team to send congress a proposal that [is] so outside the ballpark of what congress is prepared to consider.
The other thing I've noticed about this, however, has been the sad, albeit understandable, tendency of these kind of media outlets to respond to the fact that their old gurus all turned out to be full of shit by attempting to anoint some "new gurus."...
He argued that risk models were inherently flawed; they systematically neglected the possibility of blowups and then were used to argue that investments strategies based on the impossibility of a blowup were safe.
It wasn't entirely clear if they were making an epistemic argument in which the success of the Cavs demonstrated that it must be the case that Williams is having an All-Star season or if it was a causal case in which the Cavs' success simply mandates that you must make Williams and All-Star irrespective of the quality of his play.
Now on some level, that can [be] fine.
The authors of the constitution never intended for their to be a supermajority requirement for legislation to pass the Senate, and until extremely recently there was no such requirement.
Perhaps the most obvious thing to do in fiscal policy terms is to extent the automatic stabilizer effect that you see on the federal level down to the state level....
And in the most severe cases, cutbacks in assistant to the severely impoverished will have a decades-long impact on the well-being of their children.
For from being free, Dubai is ruled by a dictator, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, dignified with royal title in virtue of the fact that he inherited his political power from relatives rather than seizing it of his own accord.
But even though the economy as a whole depends on consumers like me spending me, my personal decision to cut back shouldn't particularly have any macroeconomic impact.
I'm sure Senator McCaskill's pride will be a great confort to those hundreds of thousands of additional unemployed people and to their children, spouses, friends, parents and other loved ones.
When you see conservative complaining that the stimulus bill is too expensive and won't be fast-acting enough, keep in mind that had they not blocked stimulus last year on the grounds that it was too slow and expensive, we probably wouldn't be in a position today where we need such a large fiscal expansion.
Editor's note: Matt's made this mistake before.
Indeed, one of the really scary things about this kind of problem--especially when you consider its global spread and the enormous size of the epicenter country--is that there are decent theoretically reasons to believe that we could semi-permanently settle on a new low-output, high-unemployment equilibrium.
It's never pleasant to be laid off from your job, but in Europe such layoffs won't generally have major implications for your ability to acquire health care for yourself and your family or for your ability to pay for your children's schooling.That's nice for the unemployment, of course, but beyond that it can help maintain a certain level of confidence in the future.
Editor's note: It appears that Matt meant to say "unemployed" instead of "unemployment." This is the second time he has made this mistake. (The first time is here.)
The same logic also leads to the conclusion that monetary policy can't boost the economy. Sure, you could lower interest rates thus encouraging firms to take advantage of cheap money to engaging in some debt-financed investment but since those companies don't "have a vault of money to distribute in the economy" they won't be creating new aggregate economic activity, they're "just transferring it from one group of people to another."
Editor's note: In the original text of this post Matt forgot to close a blockquote tag, making it appear as though Brian Riedl made an argument and then immediately began to rebut himself with some snarky commentary. Matt was merciful enough to correct the mistake.
It's hard to quote the mistake, but in the first typo since his return from Spain, Matt manages to misattribute three paragraphs that he wrote and a picture of Scrooge McDuck diving into a pool of gold to Brian Riedl.
If Brian Beutler is to be believed, our contest has come to an end. It ended with a bit of a whimper as we noticed no typos today.
But that won't stop us from declaring that Brian Beutler is the most Yglesian of all this week's guest bloggers. Congratulations, Brian! In your 69 posts this week, we found 11 typos. Not quite to Matt's level, but I don't think any of us were expecting you to match Matt typo for typo.
Brian is having no trouble holding on to his lead. His total now is more than double that of his two competitors combined.
Continue reading Guest Blogger Contest Still Looking Good for Brian Beutler.
After a quiet day yesterday, we have a few new entries in the guest blogger program.
As you can see, Brian Beutler has moved into a commanding lead. Let's see if he can hold on to that lead for the rest of the contest.
Continue reading Guest Blogger Contest, continued.
It's time again to highlight a few of the week's most egregious mistakes. Help us decide which one is the worst.
For the week of January 25 through 31, we've selected the following four nominees:
Check them out, and vote for your favorite.
Since this site is devoted to catching and correcting Matt Yglesias's typos, we won't be cataloging all the errors that his guest bloggers make. But, in order to have some fun while Matt is out of the country, we decided put together a little competition for the guest bloggers. Each day we'll be tallying and reporting the number of errors that we caught for each blogger and giving you the running total. And then, at the end of the week, we'll award the guest blogger with the most errors with Yglesias Errata's "Most Like Matt Guest Blogger" award.
So here's where things stand as of right now:
We'll keep you updated as the week goes on.
Note: updated to reflect some additional typos from the past few days.
Continue reading Guest Blogger Contest.
Remember when former prospector, Elliot Spitzer, hung up his gold pan and pickaxe to serve as governor of New York? And remember the scandal that ensued when he was later caught paying 22-year-old State Prosecutor, Ashley Dupré, for extra-marital legal advice? Man, that gave a whole new meaning to the term "billable hours."
Okay, so maybe it didn't happen quite like that. But Matt's version is a lot funnier, and that's why his January 24 post, "My Assignment Desk," is the mistake of the week.
Thanks to everyone who voted. Check back later tonight for the next batch of nominees.
I won't try to pretend to have a particular deep grasp of the situation, but while the whole world is doing poorly right now Spain is doing especially badly
But because at least some progressives genuinely care about good government, Blagojevic has been unable to turn the allegations against him into a "partisan" controversy meriting "even-handed" press coverage.
The alternative in which we buy American and the Japanese buy Japan and the Europeans buy European is quite a bit worse for everyone....
Indeed, while all countries need to engage in stimulus it seems to me that we actually need bigger stimulus relative to GDP from surplus countries like Japan, China, and German than we ourselves engage in.
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And it's also true that [while] the "explosions and corpses" aspects of foreign policy attract the most attention, America's peaceful interactions with Latin America, Europe, and Asia have more impact on the average citizen's life than do the elections in Iraq.
One feature that I wish more American cities has is bike lanes that are actually separated from the flow of traffic so that they can be used for bicycling rather than as double-parking lanes
