FELIX SALMON: Europe’s Disastrous Summit. “Remember how Wolfgang Münchau said that the Euro zone had to get it right at this summit or it would collapse? Well, the Euro zone has most emphatically not got it right.” This could get ugly. And over there the lampposts aren’t always just metaphorical.
Archive for 2011
December 9, 2011
IN THE MAIL: From John Hornor Jacobs, Southern Gods.
FASTER, PLEASE: 17-year-old wins 100k for creating cancer-killing nanoparticle. (Bumped, because we need some good news.)
MATT WELCH TO BARACK OBAMA: Hey, what about that “net spending cut” you promised back in 2008?
Plus this:
Candidate Obama campaigned every day—and rightly so—against the “fiscal irresponsibility” of the Bush era. “When George Bush came into office, our debt—national debt was around $5 trillion. It’s now over $10 trillion. We’ve almost doubled it,” he complained in his second debate with Republican nominee John McCain. “We have had over the last eight years the biggest increases in deficit spending and national debt in our history.”
As president, Obama tacked on another $5 trillion in debt in record time. In every measure of basic budgetary incompetence, the last three years have dwarfed the previous eight, despite the candidate convincing a majority of voters of his superior credentials as a fiscal steward. United States debt zoomed through the 100-percent-of-GDP threshold around Halloween, and as the Baby Boomers get ready to scoop up their old-age entitlements, there isn’t even a proposed end to the budget leakage in sight.
And it’s not just the size of government, it’s the scope. Obama has given historical leeway to regulators on health care and financial reform, and (like presidents before him) is increasing his influence on executive branch enforcement at a time when his sway over the congressional branch continues to wane. All of which begs a question: If we just finished three years of a cautious and centrist Obama, what in the name of government vigor will the next 12-60 months look like?
By the end, we may see profligate politicians hanging from lampposts. But there’ll be a lot of bad stuff, too. . . .
UPDATE: Reader Robert Crouse emails:
I know the below post was intended to be funny, but it came across (to me) as a little over the line:
“By the end, we may see profligate politicians hanging from lampposts….,”
Well, in an era when the President himself openly threatens bankers with pitchfork-wielding mobs, and jokes about auditing those who disrespect him, it’s hard to know where the line is. Or if there even is a line. Maybe Frances Fox Piven knows.
But all joking aside, if the current profligacy continues, and America winds up in a Greece-style (or worse) collapse, politicians may not wind up hanging from lampposts (we don’t really do that here), but they will at the very least likely face the kind of investigations, prosecutions, and social opprobrium normally reserved for child molesters and Bernie Madoff types. I don’t think they fully appreciate that. If they did, they’d be acting differently.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Virginia Postrel: Universities Feast on Federal Student Aid: Virginia Postrel.
Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.
It’s not as crazy as it might sound.
As veteran education-policy consultant Arthur M. Hauptman notes in a recent essay: “There is a strong correlation over time between student and parent loan availability and rapidly rising tuitions. Common sense suggests that growing availability of student loans at reasonable rates has made it easier for many institutions to raise their prices, just as the mortgage interest deduction contributes to higher housing prices.”
It’s a phenomenon familiar to economists. If you offer people a subsidy to pursue some activity requiring an input that’s in more-or-less fixed supply, the price of that input goes up. Much of the value of the subsidy will go not to the intended recipients but to whoever owns the input. The classic example is farm subsidies, which increase the price of farmland.
Read the whole thing. Including this:
A good chunk of the educated public has decided that college educators are decadent and lazy. Many are positively lusting to see higher education get its Detroit-style comeuppance.
This attitude is unfortunate and often unfair, but it’s the direct result of decades of federal policies. Any strategy to reduce college costs needs to look beyond traditional subsidies to remove some of the insulation that stifles innovation and feeds public resentment.
Indeed.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Texas Law School Dean Resigns Immediately in Wake of Faculty Division Over Compensation. Is the availability of $500,000 forgivable loans a sign of a bubble? Possibly.
I DOUBT THEY’LL LET GREENS BLOCK DEVELOPMENT: China Hits It Big With Shale Gas. I’m guessing this is why they were so uncooperative at Durban.
Will Tom Friedman now start singing the praises of shale gas?
METAPHOR ALERT: We can’t get to the Moon any more, and we can’t even keep track of the rocks we brought back when we could. “Astronauts may have had the ‘right stuff’ to go to the moon, but when it comes to keeping track of what they brought back, NASA seems to have misplaced some of that stuff.”
Moon rocks, money — it’s all gone missing.
FLIGHT CAPITAL: European CEOs Move Cash To Germany.
MICHAEL WALSH: Eric Holder Stonewalls On. “There you have it: One of the most incompetent (at best) and murderous operations ever undertaken in the name of the Justice Department, and all the attorney general can do is say they’ve closed the barn door now that the horses have fled, taking the guns and ammo with them.”
MATTHEW HOY HAS SOMETHING FROM THE HOLDER HEARINGS THAT DIDN’T MAKE THE TRANSCRIPT. “Hundreds are dead as a direct result of actions undertaken by your subordinates and you wish to shame Congress?”
Okay, I think he stole this idea from Tim Blair. But you could steal from worse. . . .
ALSO GOOD FOR PRANK CALLS: This “Voice Changer” Toy. Though I guess in the age of Caller ID, prank calls are out of style.
JAMES TARANTO: Democrats for Buchanan: “Core institutions” of the president’s party turn against Israel. “Whatever one may think about the Middle East, the emergence of CAP and MediaMutters as ‘core institutions’ of the Democratic Party is unsettling. It suggests that the donks are increasingly organizing themselves around tactics of bullying and slander. That’s good news for the GOP inasmuch as it indicates the Dems’ underlying weaknesses. But it’s bad news for the country that one of the two major parties has so lost its moral bearings.”
NEAL MCCLUSKEY: The Student Aid Myth Myth.
MICHAEL KINSLEY ON OBAMA’S CLASS WARFARE RHETORIC:
For every group Obama takes to task, he also has a “to be sure” passage in which he tries to make clear that he’s not talking about you. But if you listen to the music, not the words, you might well think otherwise. A wish to raise taxes on top-bracket taxpayers doesn’t prove that you “hate the rich” or that you’re trying to stoke the fires of class warfare. It doesn’t mean you define an income of $250,000 as “rich.” It simply means that you believe that the people who’ve been most fortunate in this country are in the best position to contribute more to solving its financial problems. But this distinction is hard to maintain if you’re simultaneously suggesting that there is something ill-gotten about most rich people’s gains.
People really resent this. I have a friend, a banker, who voted for Obama in 2008 but senses that he is being picked on unfairly. Which he is. And he is not pacified by reminders that Obama’s grandmother was a banker, as charming and surprising to some as that may be.
Aren’t most typical white people bankers? Plus this: “In addition to being unfair, conflating actual crooks and the innocent affluent makes it hard to claim that raising their taxes isn’t punishment for some form of misbehavior. Taxes are not a punishment; they are a source of necessary revenue. But if you tie them to the financial scandal, they sound pretty punitive.”
That’s not all that Obama has done to make taxes seem punitive. . . .
HELPFUL MEDICAL NEWS: CDC: Castrating Lambs With Your Teeth May Make You Sick.
PUBLIC PENSION UPDATE: Chicago Union Officials Face Criminal Probe Over City Pensions. “The reports focused on a 1991 law that allowed union leaders who once worked for the city to receive credit in public pension plans for their private union work. When they retire, the union officials’ pensions aren’t based on their old city paychecks but on their much higher union salaries. That opened the door for them to land public pensions that far exceeded their pay as city employees — even as they continued to earn lucrative salaries from their unions.”
HMM: Mysterious planet-sized object spotted near Mercury.
Theorists have seized on the images captured from the “coronal mass ejection” (CME) last week as suggestive of alien life hanging out in our own cosmic backyard. Specifically, the solar flare washing over Mercury appears to hit another object of comparable size. “It’s cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it’s cloaked,” YouTube-user siniXster said in his video commentary on the footage, which has generated hundreds of thousands of views this week. Now, how this user was able to determine that the object was “obviously” a cloaked spaceship with no other natural explanation remains as much a mystery as the object itself.
I suspect it’s connected to the alien base on Saturn, and that mysterious explosion on Uranus. And, of course, the alien probe that whizzed by Earth. Then there were those mysterious happenings in the Gulf.
Science fiction story idea, along the lines of Charlie Stross’s CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN backstory: All sorts of bizarre phenomena today are explained by secret preparations for alien attack. The “Food Pyramid” approach that has produced worldwide obesity is actually meant to fatten people up to prepare for post-apocalyptic food shortages. The “Financial Crisis” is actually a manipulation to cover up large sums of money going to the alien defense effort. And, of course, the Iraq War was really about getting access to a crashed alien spaceship that Saddam wouldn’t share. (Oh, wait — that one’s true, according to an unimpeachable source.) Etc., etc. To my science fiction author readers: No payment needed, but if you write this one, make me a minor character or something.
UPDATE: I’m not the only one who picked up on the USDA/Space Alien connection.
ANOTHER UPDATE: All of Obama’s gun-control talk? Just a ruse to get Americans to stock up on guns and ammo before the alien attack! Face it, more people bought guns than would have if Obama had come right out and encouraged it . . . .
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: This “weird jet-propelled space object” is either an alien probe — or perhaps a test flight of one of our experimental alien-interceptors.
Oh, and lookie here: Cassini Spies Mysterious Object Named ‘Peggy’ at Edge of Saturn’s Rings. We’ve all read Footfall, right?
MORE: Cloaking Device activated!
Plus, I was expecting an Earth-shattering kaboom!
STILL MORE: An idling alien spaceship?
December 8, 2011
A PRETTY GRIM PROGNOSIS FOR EUROPE. I hope it’s wrong.
UPDATE: Citi: Euro Collapse Would Spark Global Depression, Push Unemployment Above 20%.
Don’t forget the laser sights.
EUGENE VOLOKH: A Cautionary Note for Readers of “The People” of the Second Amendment: Citizenship and the Right To Bear Arms, 85 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1521 (2010). “Yet unfortunately, none of the sources that the article cites actually shows that early American laws barred poor whites, women, and noncitizens from owning guns. Perhaps there are such early sources. But the article does not cite them, nor do the sources that the article cites on these matters sufficiently support the article’s assertions.”
This sounds like a reprise of the Bellesiles thesis, which also lacked for support.
ERIC SEGALL: A Liberal’s Lament on Kagan and Health Care. “So far it appears that only Republicans and conservatives want Kagan to recuse herself from hearing the case, while liberals and Democrats take the opposing view. I have been a liberal constitutional law professor for more than 20 years, and a loyal Democrat. I believe the Affordable Care Act is constitutional and that it would be truly unfortunate for the country (and the party) if the court strikes it down. I also recognize that there is a much greater chance of the court erroneously striking down the PPACA if Kagan recuses herself. That said, I believe that as a matter of both principle and law, Kagan should not hear the case. . . . I am not arguing that Supreme Court justices should recuse themselves any time they are called upon to hear a case involving a law supported by the president for whom they once worked. But this situation is far more complicated than that. This isn’t just about parsing the words of the recusal statute for plausible defenses; it’s about the appearance that a Supreme Court Justice with a conflict of interest is sitting on a major case. This is the perfect storm of events that should require Kagan’s recusal.”