SHOCKINGLY, “M.D.” DOESN’T ACTUALLY STAND FOR Mucho Dinero.
Archive for 2011
June 2, 2011
NILE GARDINER: Why Barack Obama may be heading for electoral disaster in 2012. I recently talked with a law-school classmate who was a big Obama supporter in 2008, but whose critique of Obama’s economic policies sounded like a Tea Party press release. He was very unhappy about Obama’s stance on Israel, too.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Fannie & Freddie got $400 million in no-bid deals from TARP?
CHANGE: U.S. economy: Manufacturing slowdown the latest sign the recovery is faltering.
Related: ‘Sugar High That Has Buoyed US Economy Is Wearing Out.’
Also: Obama has only himself to blame for economic doldrums. “This week’s anemic economic reports provide the latest in a steadily lengthening parade of news that demonstrates Obama’s policies not only have not produced the promised recovery, but very likely have retarded it. As the maxim goes, insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.”
Plus: Walter Russell Mead On The Death Of The American Dream. “For eighty years we have defined the American dream as an owner occupied family home, preferably with a nice swathe of crabgrass-free lawn around it. The latest downturn in the housing market is one more grim signal that in its current form, the American Dream is going the way of the dodo. . . . Part of it is the breakup of the blue social model. In the heyday of the old economy, the average American job was long term — lifetime employment in the car factory, working for the phone company or the local bank, or working for the government. A thirty year mortgage with steady payments made a lot of sense in a world of lifetime employment.” And: “Divorce creates two new households at a lower income than the original one, forces the split up of assets and changes the nature of real estate markets. A nation with a high divorce rate, all things being equal, is a nation of worse credit risks than a nation which marries for life.”
MEGAN MCARDLE: The Euro In Crisis.
I’ve been making the argument for a long time–at least seven years in print, and in private before that–that the eurozone looks about as stable as the Unabomber. Especially when you have a fiat currency, you need to think about what makes an optimal currency zone–the largest unit that can easily share a unit of money. The euro countries are not an optimal currency zone: their economies do not move in sync, and they are not fully integrated. That means that at any given time, monetary policy will be too loose for some countries, too tight for the others–Italy was in recession even as Ireland was overheating.
That’s not necessarily fatal–the United States isn’t an optimal currency zone either, since the state economies have their own local business cycles which can be quite different from the country as a whole. But over the centuries, the US has evolved a number of ways to mitigate these stresses. . . . In today’s Financial Times, Martin Wolf finally says what I’ve been thinking: “the eurozone, as designed, has failed.” As the PIIGS teeter on the brink of insolvency, the central banks are financing their banks–and the governments–by accepting discounted public debt as collateral. And because of the interlinkages between creditor-nation and debtor-nation banks, practically speaking, the Bundesbank is now guaranteeing all that debt. Cosigning a loan for someone with shaky credit is a very risky activity; there’s not much evidence that it works better at the international level. The picture Wolf paints is pretty dire.
If the Euro were not in crisis, I think the dollar would be in much bigger trouble than it is.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Record Low 68% of 2010 Law Grads Have Jobs Requiring Bar Passage.
SO IS THIS TRUE? Libertarians Who Live In The Real World Vote Republican.
UNEXPECTEDLY! New Jobless Claims Fall Less Than Expected.
FEMINISM BY TREATY.
ERIC HOLDER: Hey, let’s let drug offenders out of jail early. I actually think that this might be a good idea, but it strikes me as political dynamite.
LIVEBLOGGING THE SPELLING BEE over at Throwing Things. And this is a good time for me to plug Spellbound again. I competed in the National Spelling Bee, and I still have friends I made then.
UP TO 60% OFF on Milwaukee Tools.
Also, a big markdown on the Leatherman Skeletool. I have one of these. It’s very cool.
THE DEAFENING SILENCE of the Australian Greens. “This deafening silence on Syria is emblematic of the ethical bankruptcy that infects Leftwing foreign policy. The selective outrage of the Greens and their fellow travellers bespeaks a fundamental hypocrisy that that strips bare their pretensions to any sort of moral superiority.”
INSTAVISION: The Undersea World of Glenn Reynolds: How Capitalism Can Complement the Environment. On YouTube, too. (Bumped).
WASHINGTON POST: Anthony Weiner’s plan to cool Twitter furor backfires.
HOWARD KURTZ ON WEINERGATE: “It has come to this.”
Meanwhile, on Facebook, Don Surber writes: “Enough with Weiner’s wiener already. When will the press cover that 97-0 shellacking that O’s budget got in the Senate?”
UPDATE: Jim Treacher emails that this represents a change in tune.
BARACK OBAMA ON LOCHNER. With errors helpfully annotated.
I’M SORRY, BUT THE cleaning robot technology just hasn’t advanced as far as I’d hoped.
WEINERGATE: A Third Act Plot-Twist? “Cool! That would turn it from a bad episode of The Good Wife into a good episode of The Good Wife.”
AND ALSO, A PATHETIC LOSER: Somali Suicide Bomber Was From Minneapolis.
WHAT’S WRONG with the Precautionary Principle.
Simply put, the precautionary principle is not a sound basis for public policy. At the broadest level of generality, the principle is unobjectionable, but it provides no meaningful guidance to pressing policy questions. In a public policy context, “better safe than sorry” is a fairly vacuous instruction. Taken literally, the precautionary principle is either wholly arbitrary or incoherent. In its stronger formulations, the principle actually has the potential to do harm.
Efforts to operationalize the precautionary principle into public law will do little to enhance the protection of public health and the environment. The precautionary principle could even do more harm than good. Efforts to impose the principle through regulatory policy inevitably accommodate competing concerns or become a Trojan horse for other ideological crusades. When selectively applied to politically disfavored technologies and conduct, the precautionary principle is a barrier to technological development and economic growth.
You’d almost think that was the goal.
JOHN MERLINE: Hands Reach Across The Aisle, Then Turn Thumbs Down:
In the past two weeks, President Obama has managed to produce something woefully elusive in Washington: bipartisanship. Unfortunately for him, it’s been bipartisan opposition to his agenda.
This Tuesday, the House voted overwhelmingly against the “clean” debt limit increase Obama had been advocating for months.
In addition to every House Republican, 82 Democrats voted against the bill. That means, despite White House insistence that “the debt limit should be passed as a standalone bill,” any increase in the current $14.3 trillion debt ceiling will now require a package of spending cuts to get approved in the House.
That comes on top of last week’s embarrassment, in which the Senate unanimously voted against the president’s 2012 budget. The opposition party routinely declares White House budgets dead on arrival, but it’s remarkable that not one Democrat in the Senate was willing to show support for Obama’s plan.
And Obama’s mid-May speech, in which he called for Israel to accept a Palestinian state based on “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” raised a chorus of bipartisan attacks.
Hope and change!
WELL, IT’S NOT HOPE, BUT IT MIGHT BE CHANGE: Consumer Confidence Is Now Lower Than During All Recent Financial Crises And Tragedies.