I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords

If you look to the right you can now see my shared RSS items from Google Reader. I recently switched to Google Reader from Outlook for my RSS needs, and you can share the benefits.

Aren't you excited?

Late Kudos

This is way late, but whatever. Kudos to my man Nick for getting all 65 correct in the NCAA field last Sunday.

What Kind of Regulation?

Yesterday, Matthew Yglesias took on the deregulation of the financial markets with his usual combination of light substance and heavy snark.

What nobody has told me and I don't understand is this: how exactly would regulation of the financial markets have prevented the current situation. My understanding is that securitization of mortgages has never been prohibited, under Glass-Stegall or any other regulatory regime. I could be wrong about this; I am hoping my vast readership will fill me in if so.

Anyhow, now the Krugmans and Yglesiases of the world are calling for regulation. I don't have anything against regulation per se, but it would sure be nice to debate something concrete.

I think there is an opening for the Republicans here; while "stick it to those bastards!" is nice rhetoric, it's not good policy. If the McCain campaign can actually come up with something that might ameliorate the specific problems without strangling innovation, it could be helpful in the election.

Win Ben Stein's Vote

This is actually from a week ago or so, but I missed it when it happened. Apologies if you've already seen it.

We all know that the New York Times's idea of a ideal conservative is one that disagrees with conservative ideas. Fine, but not all ideas identified as conservative are good ones, and this Ben Stein column is making some points that need to be made:

In other words, tax cuts do not pay for themselves, at least not on any basis I can see. Certainly, they are not worthless. They make taxpayers feel good and they generate growth. But basically, they shift the tax burden from us to our progeny and add immense amounts of interest expense to the federal budget. At this point, taxpayers shell out about $1 billion a day just for that item.

I would say that tax cuts shift the burden to our progeny only if they aren't counterbalanced by spending cuts, but we all know that's not going to happen. Spending control is all we can hope for.

It is my belief that the government gets enough money to meet needed infrastructure priorities if it focused on the right things, but in time of war it may be necessary to raise taxes. As our Democratic friends constantly remind us, keeping our nation safe is expensive. While I cannot agree with their solution (failing to keep our nation safe), some accounting for the costs may need to be done. I'm all for circumspection in raising taxes, but John McCain (or any other politician), shouldn't take any cards off the table.

For your daily quota of disgustingness

Read the wonderful self-loathing on this AlterNet comment thread. A sample:

There's a potential silver lining here. As he condones and authorizes assassinations, a principle of International Law will kick in...the notion of reciprocity...and Young George himself might be targeted and taken out. Fine with me, so long as Cheney, Condi, and Rummy are with him at the time. :o)

At the risk of sounding like a member of the lizard army at LGF, just go to Canada or Amsterdam or Baghdad. We won't miss you.

You can have a legitimate debate about what sort of measures against terrorism are morally and legally justified. Insisting that President Bush be executed for crimes against humanity is not Step 1 of that debate.

Cost/Benefit

This article in The Nation should be supported by any conservative:

Can we out-trump the conservatives on economics and demand a policy payback analysis to all federal or state investments? How would pet Republican programs do if their corporate welfare programs had to be benchmarked against, say, proven pre-kindergarten education investments for kids? Let's get the substantive cost-benefit analysis done to make that case on everything we are in favor of achieving in the next thirty years.

It's easy to rag on corporate welfare and certainly there's a bunch of it in the budget, much of it perpetrated by Republicans. It's this sort of anti-conservatism that has us in danger of being left as a 20% rump for a generation. Embracing this sort of rigorous analysis would lead us to a better understanding of what the proper role of government would be.

I also want to take up this:

Conservatives would be forced to take a public stance against doing the math on what government buys, and abandon their argument that government spending is useless.

Nobody in American government believes that government spending is useless. As this article so ably points out, history is replete with examples of government programs with lots of upside benefit that exceeded their cost. It's even more replete with programs that didn't work worth a damn or whose benefits were overwhelmed by unintended consequences. A really rigorous cost/benefit, that took into account all the costs and benefits of a program, monetary or not, would really help us to identify those expenditures that will be helpful, and those that won't. I don't think that sort of work would favor much of the current Democratic agenda, but if it did, let's do it. Republicans (especially the current crew) don't have a monopoly on good ideas, after all.

David Mamet sees the light

Check it out.

Who pays for health care?

While you may not be able to tell from reading this blog, health care is an interest of mine. This article (which is based on a paper in this week's JAMA) takes on the intersection of health care and employer relations.

What does this mean, exactly? Simple: “the common claim that employers, government, and households all pay for health care is false. Employers do not share fiscal responsibility and employers do not pay for health care.” In fact, the “money [for health care] comes from [our] own pockets.”

Well, no kidding. No rational employer gives a rat's behind whether they're spending their compensation dollars on cash, health care, or free donuts in the break room; they do what enables them to keep their employers happy. In today's tax environment, often that's health care. With that said, dollars spent on health care are dollars that come out of somewhere else; they have to. The customers will only pay so much for whatever good or service is being produced; there's only so many dollars to go around. What comes out of one pot necessarily comes out of another.

With that said, the statistics you so often see about the stagnation of middle class wages leave out the dramatically increasing health-care part of the compensation package. The fact that people have chosen to take more health care benefits instead of wages represents the people's choice, not a decline in living standards. I may do a post on that in the future once I dig up some of the stats.

More Future of the Union

I told you; there's all kind of good stuff on there.

This is from the Lansing State Journal, from a story about how the Detroit Three might start hiring pretty soon:

There might be a disconnect between what the automakers are willing to pay and the skills they want from new workers.

Wait, what's this? You mean that employers might have to pay more than they'd like to attract good employees? I thought that more money was only obtained by unions or government or a gun?

This must be a mainstream media trick or something.

Who deserves to get paid for labor?

I am a regular reader of the Soldiers of Solidarity site Future of the Union. It's a rank and file publication that had its genesis out of the Delphi issues a few years ago. They reprint a lot of stories that are of interest if you follow organized labor news as I do.

This popped up there yesterday:

Who owns the jobs? Who created the wealth that American Axle invested around the globe?

The answer to that one is pretty obvious: the customers paid for everything. In American Axle's case, that's the Big Three directly, but ultimately American car buyers who have decided not to pay the bill anymore. Whether you're a CEO or a line worker, if you're busier trying to grab a piece for yourself than satisfy the customer, pretty soon there won't be any pieces to grab.

Just to review

Your wife: OK

Chicks that do it for free: unsavory, but not illegal




Paying $4300: Not cool.

Some inequality numbers to think about

I don't like inequality, I just think the alternatives are worse. I'm not here to defend it but I think the statistics used to justify big government interventions to reduce it are overstated. Apparently, Brad Schiller agrees with me.

From today's WSJ (if you can't read this and are interested in seeing it, email me):

The "typical" household, however, keeps changing. Since 1970 there has been a dramatic rise in divorced, never-married and single-person households. Back in 1970, the married Ozzie and Harriet family was the norm: 71% of all U.S. households were two-parent families. Now the ratio is only 51%. In the process of this social revolution, the average household size has shrunk to 2.57 persons from 3.14 -- a drop of 18%. The meaning? Even a "stagnant" average household income implies a higher standard of living for the average household member.

And from later in the article. . .

The increase in nominal GDP since 2000 amounts to over $4 trillion annually. If you assume that all that money went to the wealthiest 10% of U.S. households, that bonanza would come to a whopping $350,000 per household. Yet according to the Census Bureau, the top 10% of households has an average income of $200,000 or so. The implied bonanza is so absurd that the notion that only the rich have gained from the economic growth can be dismissed out of hand. Clearly, there is a lot of economic advancement across a broad swath of population. Dramatic changes in household composition, household size and immigration tend to obscure this reality.

"They're both not ready. . ."

Of course neither Senator Clinton or Obama is ready to face the challenges of the war on terror and keep our country safe. We knew this.

But, why take it from me when you can listen to Sen. Obama's foreign policy advisor Susan Rice:



If you're serious about defending our country, you have one choice.

For the counterfactual crowd. . .

You might enjoy this from Volokh Conspiracy. It asks for nominations about the long-term effects of Supreme Court cases being differently decided. There's quite the interesting comment thread developing.

Union Math: Where All Children Are Above Average

From the CtW blog:

The study finds that only one in four jobs in America can be described as "good jobs" -- where good jobs is defined as a job that offers health insurance, a retirement plan, and that pays at least an amount in inflation-adjusted dollars equal to the median male worker's wage in 1979 (!). (Nearly a third -- 29% -- of workers surveyed hold jobs that meet none of these three criteria.)

I wonder what the relevant figure was in 1979. I guarantee that it was below half, because _by definition_ half of the male worker's population is below the median,and women's wages are lower than men's.

If you're trying to pull up the percentage of people who are below the median income, you're going to have a tough time with that one.

Ohio and NAFTA

In their Ohio campaigning, the Democratic candidates have decried NAFTA as having cost a whole bunch of Ohio jobs and generally serving only the rich.

Displaying typical Democratic powers of analysis, they have ignored one tiny fact: The unemployment rate in Ohio in December of 1993, the month before NAFTA took effect, was 6.5 percent. Since that month, it has never been that high.

Free trade causes dislocations, there is no question about that. We as a society need to do better at helping people who suffer the downside of free trade obtain new skills in more productive avocations. Having a wealthier society makes that a lot easier. We can only tax what someone makes.