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Archive for 2014
February 4, 2014
SPENGLER: The Exhausted US Economy, and a Lesson for Republicans. “The problem now is obstacles to investment: the highest corporate tax rate in the world, onerous regulation, the crazyquilt uncertainty of Obamacare. America needs aggressive tax cuts and regulatory rollback. It also needs to spend more on infrastructure, which is becoming a major obstacle to growth. It needs to spend more on R&D, particularly on cutting-edge military R&D. The way to do this, I’ve argued for years, is to emulate Roosevelt’s alphabet-soup federal agencies and put unemployment Americans to work repairing infrastructure at $20 an hour, rather than paying $50 an hour to the construction unions. That’s heresy from a free-marketeer like me, but it makes economic sense and will drive the Democrats crazy. If Republicans stage more cliffhangers around the budget, they may yet snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. They should talk about nothing but growth and jobs. Many Republican analysts claimed that Obama just got lucky in 2012, that the econonmy was turning up in any event and the incumbent got the credit. That is self-consoling nonsense: the Republicans lost because Mitt Romney came across like a silver-spoon princeling, and because Americans (with good reason) blamed the Republicans as much as the Democrats for the economic mess.”
WELL, THAT’S COMFORTING: Asia’s 1937 Syndrome.
RICHARD EPSTEIN: My Rand Paul Problem: Why classical liberalism is superior to hard-core libertarianism. “Libertarians fall into two distinct groups: strict libertarians like Rand Paul and classical liberals such as myself.”
IN THE MAIL: From Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 271. It’s a big one today.
LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Going On 30, Living With Mom And Dad. “Perhaps a chunk of millennials will never catch up, our lives channeled by the deep grooves of an economic calamity forced upon us by the timing of our births and graduations.”
THE HILL: CBO: ObamaCare Slowing Growth, Contributing To Job Losses. “The non-partisan group’s report found that the healthcare law’s negative effects on the economy will be ‘substantially larger’ than what it had previously anticipated. The CBO is now estimating that the law will reduce labor force compensation by 1 percent from 2017 to 2024, twice the reduction it previously had projected.”
UPDATE: This must have been painful for Chuck Todd to write: “CBO essentially reaffirms GOP talking points on health care. Says it will cost jobs, feel as if it raises taxes and contributes to deficit.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Flashback: FactCheck.Org: A ‘Job-Killing’ Law? House Republicans misrepresent the facts. Experts predict the health care law will have little effect on employment. So were these “fact-checkers” right about anything? Or were they just engaged to defend the Obama narrative until after the election?
ED DRISCOLL INTERVIEWS FRED SIEGEL about his new book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.
HOPEY-CHANGEY: The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business World.
In Manhattan, the upscale clothing retailer Barneys will replace the bankrupt discounter Loehmann’s, whose Chelsea store closes in a few weeks. Across the country, Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants are struggling, while fine-dining chains like Capital Grille are thriving. And at General Electric, the increase in demand for high-end dishwashers and refrigerators dwarfs sales growth of mass-market models.
As politicians and pundits in Washington continue to spar over whether economic inequality is in fact deepening, in corporate America there really is no debate at all. The post-recession reality is that the customer base for businesses that appeal to the middle class is shrinking as the top tier pulls even further away.
The good news is that some of the loss is due to middle-class people becoming upper-middle-class. That bad news is that others are sliding down.
Plus: “Even more striking, the current recovery has been driven almost entirely by the upper crust, according to Mr. Fazzari and Mr. Cynamon. Since 2009, the year the recession ended, inflation-adjusted spending by this top echelon has risen 17 percent, compared with just 1 percent among the bottom 95 percent.”
I predict a change, as new taxes kick in. Also, when the stock market drops, people in the top percentages feel poorer, and that seems to be going on now. This, of course, will cause the economy to do worse, which will probably lead to more calls to increase taxes.
JOHN FUND: Wendy Davis’s Media Meltdown.
WINTER IS STILL HERE: At Amazon, Save Up To 50% On Outdoor Clothing.
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MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ON OBAMA ON ART HISTORY: College And The Trades.
OBVIOUSLY NOT, SINCE GUN OWNERSHIP AND GUN-CARRYING HAVE SKYROCKETED, WHILE CRIME HAS PLUMMETED: Is price of an armed America a more dangerous America? Note that the Tampa theater shooting that’s discussed involved not an ordinary armed citizen, but a retired police officer, the sort of “trained professional” who would have been allowed to carry even before the revolution in carry permits.
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: George Will: IRS targeting scandal on par with Watergate, Iran-Contra.
JAMES TARANTO: Skid Roe: What accounts for declining abortion rates?
One factor both the Post piece and the study cite is “the economy,” meaning the recession that began in late 2007 and the slow recovery that has followed. “Women and couples facing economic uncertainty may have been particularly motivated to postpone, or even forgo, childbearing,” Guttmacher speculates. Fertility rates declined as unemployment rose: “Presumably, then, more women and couples were making conscious decisions to avoid pregnancy and so resumed or continued using contraceptives.” Then again, abortion is also a means to avoid childbearing, so the economic downturn would cut both ways.
One difficulty with the explanations discussed so far is that they involve recent technological and economic trends. Thus they cannot explain the long-term decline in the abortion rate, which is quite clear in the chart that accompanies the Post piece. The rate climbed steadily in the middle and late 1970s before peaking at 29.3 in 1980. The trend has been steadily downward ever since and was especially sharp during the booming 1990s.
Read the whole thing.
MICHAEL BARONE: The Democratic class of 1974 passes from the scene.
NATIONAL JOURNAL: Gun metaphors used to be evil, but now we kinda dig them.
CHANGE: Carper: US should ‘lead way’ in Bitcoin regulation.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) called on the U.S. to “lead the way” on regulation of Bitcoin after a new study found most countries do not have rules in place to address virtual currencies.
“The United States may not be as far behind the curve on virtual currencies as some have argued,” said Carper, who commissioned the study. “In fact, the United States might be leading the way for a number of nations when it comes to addressing this growing technology.” The report surveyed government officials from around the world and shows many countries are still considering what to do with Bitcoin. China and Brazil are the two exceptions, having already begun regulating Bitcoin.
The study looked at 40 countries and asked whether they recognize Bitcoin as legal tender; what negative impacts Bitcoin could have on national currencies; what concerns they have about fraud; and how tax authorities view Bitcoin transactions.
According to the study, there is “widespread concern” about the negative impact Bitcoin could have on national currencies and how it could be used to fund criminal operations and tax fraud.
Read the whole thing.
LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Nearly Half of America Lives Paycheck-to-Paycheck.
Perhaps things haven’t come all that far from the early days of hope and change, when this iconic photo captured the national mood.
KEN MASUGI: Obama’s Left-Wing Foot.
ACCORDING TO CASS SUNSTEIN, Elena Kagan is a Paranoid Libertarian. But is she paranoid enough?