HT: Vox.com
The Divided States of America
16 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA Tags: political polarisation
The vast right wing conspiracy is done so on the cheap when you follow the money
15 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA Tags: follow the money, JS Mill, Karl Popper, Peter Drucker, vast right-wing conspiracy
Much is made of how the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute are funded by the Koch Brothers to act as their propagandists. Greenpeace and Right Wing was good enough to follow the money:
- American Enterprise Institute: $350,000 in total between 2004 and 2011 as compared to an annual income of $25 million.
- Cato Institute $ 5.35 million over 14 years. Their last annual donation in excess of $250,000 was in 2001. Its annual income is $12 million.
Chickenfeed – on an annual basis, this financial largess would barely pay for a cheap research assistant in a small office out of the Cato’s 90 staff members and 60-adjunct scholars. An average congressman raises more than this in political donations each year. Romney and Obama each spent $1 billion on their presidential campaigns.
Karl Popper argued that who made an argument is of little value. What matters is critical discussion of what they said. Knowledge grows through critical discussion.
Peter Drucker made similar points about people with great strengths also come with great flaws. (Biography sales would be 1/10th of its size if the great were not flawed).
Drucker championed a business rule of never making a decision until there is disagreement; only then do you know the boundary of what you plan to do. Unless one has considered alternatives, one has a closed mind. This above all, explains why effective decision-makers deliberately disregard the second major command of the textbooks on decision-making and create dissension and disagreement, rather than consensus.
Decisions of the kind the executive has to make are not made well by acclamation. They are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views, the dialogue between different points of view, the choice between different judgments. The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement
America’s greatest 20th century President – Warren Harding?
06 Jun 2014 3 Comments
in politics - USA Tags: Warren Harding
Harding kept the U.S. out of entangling alliances such as the League of Nations, released his predecessor’s political prisoners, negotiated a separate peace with Germany, and secured the first significant arms control agreement in U.S. history.
Harding was the first President to openly advocate black political, educational, and economic equality in the 20th century.
Harding cut taxes and may be absolutely right response to the 1920-21 US depression. He did next to nothing to quicken the recovery in the conventional sense we know today.
Source: Gene Smiley.
Harding cut the U.S. budget nearly in half between 1920 and 1922. Tax rates were slashed and the national debt was reduced by one-third.
This forgotten depression started in 1920 and was over by the end of 1921. Both the sharpest downturn and the quickest recovery in American history with 12% unemployment in 1920 replaced by full-employment by 1923.
Justice Thomas as an unlikely hero for the marijuana decriminalisation movement – updated
05 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in Federalism, law and economics, politics - USA Tags: decriminalisation of marijuana, division of power, drug laws, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, meddlesome preferences
The decriminalisation of marijuana possession by American states doesn’t really matter that much because it is still illegal under Federal law. Marijuana markets moved into the open in the states that decriminalised it because the federal authorities have chosen not to enforce their laws against these traders.
Justice Clarence Thomas is a radical view of the interstate commerce clause. This clause of the US Constitution at the height of the new deal was reinterpreted to allow Congress to regulate both interstate commerce and intrastate markets that affected interstate commerce.
The current interpretation of this clause supported by everyone on the US Supreme Court but Thomas is Congress can regulate the possession of marijuana because this affects interstate commerce. Justice Scalia explains:
…the Commerce Clause permits congressional regulation of three categories:
(1) the channels of interstate commerce;
(2) the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and persons or things in interstate commerce; and
(3) activities that "substantially affect" interstate commerce.
As …the Court affirms today, Congress may regulate noneconomic intrastate activities only where the failure to do so "could … undercut" its regulation of interstate commerce.
… This is not a power that threatens to obliterate the line between "what is truly national and what is truly local.
Justice Thomas rejects this view and wants to return to the original meaning of the interstate commerce clause:
Respondent’s local cultivation and consumption of marijuana is not "Commerce … among the several States."
Certainly no evidence from the founding suggests that "commerce" included the mere possession of a good or some personal activity that did not involve trade or exchange for value.
In the early days of the Republic, it would have been unthinkable that Congress could prohibit the local cultivation, possession, and consumption of marijuana
and
If the Federal Government can regulate growing a half-dozen cannabis plants for personal consumption (not because it is interstate commerce, but because it is inextricably bound up with interstate commerce), then Congress’ Article I powers – as expanded by the Necessary and Proper Clause – have no meaningful limits.
and further:
If the majority is to be taken seriously, the Federal Government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives, and potluck suppers throughout the 50 States.
This makes a mockery of Madison’s assurance to the people of New York that the "powers delegated" to the Federal Government are "few and defined", while those of the States are "numerous and indefinite."
In closing, Thomas said:
The majority prevents States like California from devising drug policies that they have concluded provide much-needed respite to the seriously ill.
Our federalist system, properly understood, allows California and a growing number of other States to decide for themselves how to safeguard the health and welfare of their citizens.
The adoption of the view of Thomas could not be more unlikely. Most federal regulation in the United States is based on linking it to the power of the Congress to regulate interstate commerce and foreign commerce. Thomas once noted that:
[w]hen asked at oral argument if there were any limits to the Commerce Clause, the Government was at a loss for words
The decriminalisation of marijuana in the United States will have to be based on more and more states choosing to decriminalise in the hope that the Federal Government does not enforce its rather savage criminal laws on drugs in their state. That’s is what seems to be happening. Whether that will still happen when a Republican wins the White House in 2016 remains to be seen.
Three American States have even passed hopelessly unconstitutional right to try laws. These laws purport to allow the residents try experimental drugs that have not yet received approval of the Federal level by the FDA.
Even under the narrow interpretation of federal powers by Justice Thomas, these laws are unconstitutional. These laws nonetheless have social value because they are push the boundaries of the current political sense consensus.
This evaluation applies to marijuana decriminalisation laws too. They test the current boundaries and can create the possibility of social change through democratic action.
Many who want a strong central government forget that the social agendas of the crazies to the left and right of them will also be implemented all in good time at the national level as well. Power rotates in any democracy so with enough time the meddlesome preferences of most sides of politics will be legislated into law so that everyone ends up been annoyed and over-regulated and more than a few end up before the courts and even in prison.
A wiser course in constitutional design is to give the parliament as much powers as you might wish those wreckers and crazies that make up your political opponents to have when they come to office, as they surely must in six or nine years time. Even the British Labour Party took an interest in devolution and an assembly for London after 15 years of Maggie Thatcher, good and hard.
Poverty isn’t what it used to be
02 Jun 2014 1 Comment
in applied welfare economics, politics - USA, technological progress Tags: poverty, The Great Fact
In 1960-61, according to the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey, the bottom one-fourth of American homes spent about 12 per cent more than their pre-tax reported incomes each year.
By 2011, according to that same survey, those in the lowest quintile were spending nearly 125 per cent more than their reported pre-tax incomes and nearly 120 per cent more than their reported post-tax, post-transfer incomes.
By 2011, average per capita housing space for people in poverty was higher than the U.S. average for 1980, and crowding (more than one person per room) was less common for the 2011 poor than for the non-poor in 1970.
More than three-quarters of the 2011 poor had access to one or more motor vehicles, whereas nearly three-fifths were without an auto in 1972-73.
Refrigerators, dishwashers, washers and dryers, and many other appliances were more common in officially impoverished homes in 2011 than in the typical American home of 1980 or earlier.
Microwaves were virtually universal in poor homes in 2011, and DVD players, personal computers, and home Internet access are now typical in their amenities of the poor that not even the richest U.S. households could avail themselves of at the start of the War on Poverty in 1964.
The charts the third of the charts below shows below show that below American households that are poor and that are not poor do not differ greatly in the consumer amenities that they.
Americans counted as poor today are manifestly living longer, are healthier, better nourished (or over-nourished), and more schooled than their predecessors half a century ago.
The United States’ Big Welfare State
28 May 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, politics - USA Tags: growth of government, welfare state
The United States has long had a larger welfare state than most other Western democracies. Surprised? You may not be aware of the new research on “net social spending.”
Net social spending includes not just government expenditures on social programs, but also tax credits for social purposes and, as a debit, government taxation of social benefits. It turns out that many of the so-called “generous” European welfare states tax social benefits at a high rate. Meanwhile, the United States uses the tax code to help the poor, through the Earned Income Tax Credit. We should also include mandatory private social payments, which are not directly paid by the government.
Using the OECD data, I have plotted total net social expenditure over time for 26 rich countries (click the image to zoom in).
As of 2009, the United States had the second largest welfare state in the world, at 28.8%…
View original post 90 more words
Fraudulent use of Dada | Catallaxy Files
26 May 2014 Leave a comment
in labour economics, politics - USA Tags: data mining, Thomas Piketty
Super-Economy “pre-reviewed ” Piketty in 2010
14 May 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, entrepreneurship, labour economics, liberalism, politics - USA, technological progress Tags: Piketty, poverty versus inequality
The French are poorer that the 3rd poorest American state: Arkansas. The EU-15 as a whole would qualify to be the 49th poorest American state.
The rich in Europe are poor by American standards. The poor in the USA are middle class by European standards. The European middle class has smaller houses, few cars and few consumers durables that the average poor in the USA.
via Super-Economy: Dynamic America, Poor Europe and Tino Sanandaji
The Internet Arguing Checklist for Right-Wingers
06 May 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: infotopia, open society
- Say something offensive.
- Pretend statistics support your offensive statement.
- Claim liberal bias in the media.
- Claim there’s a liberal agenda.
- Offer up a conspiracy theory.
- Call your opponent stupid.
- Gloat about your accomplishments.
- Offer easily disqualified opinions.
- Create derogatory nicknames for opponents.
- Say science proves your point.
- Say science is limited when it conflicts with your point.
- When all else fails, Communism!
via Pox Vopoli: The Internet Arguing Checklist for Right-Wingers.
The Internet Arguing Checklist for Left-Wingers
06 May 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: infotopia, open society
- Skim until Offended
- Disqualify that Opinion
- Attack, Attack, Attack
- Disregard Inconvenient facts
- Make Shit Up
- Resort to Moral Equivalency
- Concern Trolling
- When all else fails, Racism!
Paul Krugman, Tom Sargent and Me
22 Apr 2014 Leave a comment
in macroeconomics, politics - USA Tags: Karl Popper, Paul Krugman, Thomas Sargent, vast right-wing conspiracy, Yes Minister
Paul Krugman seems to be implying that I am the double-secret ring-leader of a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Today in his blog at the New York Times, Krugman said:
…why the sudden attention to Sargent’s 2007 speech?
I think it’s fairly obvious: it’s essentially stealth anti-Keynesian propaganda, cloaked in the form of a widely respected and liked economist uttering what sound like eternal truths.
But they aren’t, and the real goal here is to undermine the case for fighting unemployment in the here and now. There are virtues to that 2007 talk, but right now is no time for 2007 Sargent.
In my reply at his blog, I said that I originally posted the link to Sargent’s speech to make a point that most economic analysis is free of politics because the average economist is a moderate Democrat. Tom Sargent is a life-long Democrat.
To add to my reply at Krugman’s blog, Krugman said earlier in his blog that:
It’s not so much that what Sargent said is wrong, although some of his principles are by no means universally agreed upon, even in normal times.
What’s so striking about Sargent’s points is that it’s hard to think of a worse time to cite them.
And the people citing that old speech clearly have ulterior motives.
I live in New Zealand. Not everything is about U.S. domestic politics.
I rather prophetical said on Marginal Revolution on the 20th that “Too many on social media such as Reddit responded by smearing Sargent as a right-winger and neo-liberal. He is a life-long Democrat.”
My conspiratorial minions span the globe to include initially Newmark’s Door and then Marginal Revolution, Stephen Williamson, Vox.com, the American Enterprise Institute, Catallaxyfiles and the Business Insider to name but a few. There are other unindicted co-conspirators.
Karl Popper argued that conspiracy theories overlook the pervasive unintended consequences of political and social action; conspiracy theorists assume that all consequences must have been intended by someone.
Krugman agrees that Sargent’s 12-points are not that controversial in themselves. Krugman then plays the man rather than the ball:
“How to discredit an unwelcome report:
… Stage Four: Discredit the person who produced the report. Explain (off the record) that
1. He is harbouring a grudge against the Department.
2. He is a publicity seeker.
3. He is trying to get a Knighthood/Chair/Vice Chancellorship.
4. He used to be a consultant to a multinational.
5. He wants to be a consultant to a multinational.Sir Humphrey, The Greasy Pole
Tyler Cowen on the common mistakes of left-wing economists?
22 Apr 2014 Leave a comment
in economics, politics - USA Tags: bias
1. Suggesting that money matters in politics far more than the peer-reviewed evidence indicates.
2. Evaluating government spending on a program-by-program basis, rather than viewing the budget as a series of integrated accounts. Cross check with the phrase “Social Security,” or for use to take many discretionary spending cuts off the table.
3. A reluctance to incorporate sophisticated “public choice” theories into the analysis of favored programs.
4. Sins of omission: there are plenty of bad policies, such as occupational licensing, which fail to come under much attack from the left. Sometimes this is because the critique would run counter to the narrative of needing more government or needing more regulation.
5. Significantly overestimating the quality of the political economy of an America with more powerful labor unions and underestimating the history of labor unions as racist, corrupt, protectionist, and obstructions to positive change.
6. Overestimating the efficacy of fiscal policy, underestimating the power of monetary policy, and sometimes ignoring or neglecting how the two interact (“the monetary authority moves last”).
7. Citing weak versions of structural unemployment theories and dismissing them with a single sentence or graph, while relying on stronger versions of structural theories in other, non-cyclical contexts.
8. Lack of interest in discussing ethnicity and IQ as relevant for social policy, except in preferred contexts.
9. Overly optimistic views of the fiscal positions of state governments. Since the states don’t have the same tax-raising powers that the feds do, and since state government spending is favored, there is a tendency to see these fiscal crises as not so severe, or as caused by mere obstructionists who will not raise taxes to the required levels.
10. A willingness to think that one has “done one’s best” in the realm of policy, and to blame subsequent policy failures on Republican implementation, rather than admitting that a policy which cannot be implemented by both political parties is perhaps not a good policy in the first place.
11. Use of a strong moral argument for universal health care coverage, combined with a fairly practical, hard-headed approach to the scope of the mandate, and not realizing the tension between the two. Failure to indicate where the “bleeding heart” argument actually should stop and at what margins we should (and will) let non-elderly people die, if only stochastically.
12. Implicitly constructing a two-stage moral theory, which first cordons off the sphere of the nation-state (public goods provision, etc.) and then pushing cosmopolitan questions off the agenda in the interests of expanding a social welfare state. (In fairness, many individuals on the right don’t give cosmopolitan considerations even this much consideration, although right-oriented economists tend to be quite cosmopolitan.)
13. What about countries? Classical liberals are increasingly facing up to the enduring successes of the Nordic nations. There is not always a similar reckoning with the successes of Chile and Hong Kong and Singapore; often this is a sin of omission.
14. Reluctance to admit how hard the climate change problem will be to solve, for fear of wrecking any emerging political consensus on taking action.
What do Ross Perot and the Tea Party have in common?
20 Apr 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: Ross Perot, tea party
Popular uprisings are common in US politics. Of late, there has been the Tea Party, Moveon.org and the anti-Iraq war movement.
Remember Ross Perot? He was a well-mannered, TV friendly version of the Tea Party. Perot won 19% of the presidential vote in 1992, and 8.4% in 1996.
Perot appealed to disaffected voters across the political spectrum who had grown weary of the two-party system. NAFTA played a role in Perot’s support, and Perot voters were relatively moderate on hot button social issues.
Perot siphoned votes nearly equally among Bush and Clinton in 1992, but of the voters who cited Bush’s broken "No New Taxes" pledge as "very important," two thirds voted for Clinton.
Attacking Perot as politically unrefined, arrogant and more than a little unstable did not do any good in 1992. Just made him fight harder and also belittled the concerns of his potential supporters thus turning them even more against the major party candidates.
The worst way to ask for someone’s vote is to belittle what troubles them and insult them personally to round things off.
Combining fiscal conservatism with social moderation was Clinton’s response to the Perot insurgency by the time of the 1996 election; adapt or lose office. Clinton was re-elected easily. This made him the first elected incumbent Democratic president to be re-elected since Roosevelt.
Obama’s opportunistic record on fighting global warming
18 Apr 2014 Leave a comment
in environmentalism, global warming, politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: global warming, Matthew Kahn, McCain, obama, Yes Minister
Even in the US, where nothing can be done through legislation thanks to Republican delusionists.
The 2008 Republican Party presidential nominee supported cap-and-trade. McCain had a strong legislative record; he introduced a bill with Joe Lieberman to introduce carbon trading in 2003.
McCain has been one of the most outspoken members of Congress on the issue of climate change’ and he “managed to force the first real Senate vote on actually doing something about the largest environmental peril our species has yet faced.
McCain used a Senate parliamentary manoeuvre that forced a floor vote on the climate legislation. The McCain-Lieberman bill lost 43-55.
In 2007 he reintroduced his bill, with bipartisan co-sponsorship. Obama missed the June 2008 vote on McCain’s Climate Security Bill.
In a March 2008 speech, McCain called for a “successor to the Kyoto Treaty” and a cap-and-trade system “that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner.”
McCain’s climate policy includes several target dates. By 2012, McCain said U.S. emissions should return to 2005 levels. By 2050, he says, the U.S. emissions should be 60 per cent below 1990 levels.
In January 2010, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the importance of twenty-one issues. Climate change came in last.
After winning the fight over health care, another issue for which polling showed weak support, Obama moved on to the safer issue of financial regulatory reform.
There were 5 Republican senators who would have voted for cap and trade in April 2010: Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Scott Brown, and George LeMieux. There were 57 Democrat Senators. It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster.
President Obama could have fought harder to get the Bill the House passed through the Senate but he did not.
Blame Obama, no one else. He is supposed to make change happen. He lacked the political skills to build coalitions even within his own party to deliver.
Many others, including McCain softened or reversed positions as voter support waned as the great recession deepened.
In Copenhagen’s final private negotiations, Obama, Brown, Sarko and Merkel sat down with He Yafei, the Chinese vice-minister of foreign affairs. There is a tape of this meeting at Der Spiegel. HT: The Guardian.
He Yafei was the smartest guy in the room – listen to the tape. Wen Jiabao refused to attend most of the negotiating sessions.
Given the choice of walking out and sitting down with a vice-minister, they chose humiliation. One response of Obama was:
It would be nice to negotiate with somebody who can make political decisions.
Rather than blaming vast right-wing conspiracies, using Google searches for “unemployment” and “global warming”, Kahn and Kotchen found that:
- Recessions increase concerns about unemployment at the expense of public interest in climate change;
- The decline in global-warming searches is larger in more Democratic leaning states; and
- An increase in a state’s unemployment rate decreases in the probability that Americans think global warming is happening, and reduces the certainty of those who think it is.
The middle-of-the-road voters changed their priorities and their political leaders followed them.
It’s the peoples’ will, I am their leader, I must follow them. – Jim Hacker, The Greasy Pole
As Geoff Brennan has argued, CO2 reduction actions will be limited to modest unilateral reductions of a largely token character. There are many expressive voting concerns that politicians must balance to stay in office and the environment is but one of these. Once climate change policies start to actually become costly, expressive voting support for these policies will fall away, and it has.
President Obama’s persistent ’77-cent’ claim on the wage gap gets a new Pinocchio rating–updated
13 Apr 2014 Leave a comment
in human capital, labour economics, occupational choice, politics - USA Tags: gender wage gap, lies dam lies and statistics, obama
The fact checker at the Washington Post said:
Few experts dispute that there is a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women — such as women tending to leave the workforce when they have children — make it difficult to make simple comparisons.
…From a political perspective, the Census Bureau’s 77-cent figure is golden. Unless women stop getting married and having children, and start abandoning careers in childhood education for naval architecture, this huge gap in wages will almost certainly persist. Democrats thus can keep bringing it up every two years.
…There appears to be some sort of wage gap and closing it is certainly a worthy goal. But it’s a bit rich for the president to repeatedly cite this statistic as an “embarrassment.” …The president must begin to acknowledge that “77 cents” does not begin to capture what is actually happening in the work force and society.
In premiere episode of ‘Factual Feminist’ Christina Sommers explains how the gender wage gap is based on bogus statistics
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