Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Category: Politics

  • Fetishizing Food and Sex: Libs and Cons

    A propos of B. R. Myers’ takedown of moralizing, self-satisfied, holier-than-thou foodies and food writing in The Atlantic: It’s been said that liberals fetishize food the way conservatives fetishize sex. But I realize there’s a difference: for conservatives, out-of-wedlock sex is bad. For libs, bad food is bad (especially — but not only — when…

  • Is This Person Liberal or Conservative? In One Question.

    The OK Trends blog on the OK Cupid dating site is pretty amazing. They pull all their hundreds of millions of pieces of data and suss out amazing facts about how people are, and how they interact. Here’s a beaut re: politics and ideology (Jonathan Haidt, take note): The Best Questions For A First Date…

  • Say it Ain’t So!

    Hands over ears, eyes closed, humming loudly. (Hey, it always works for me.) During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panels final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and…

  • Government Investment and the Post-70s Prosperity Gap

    Does this look like a smoking gun to you? To me, at least, it looks like a very likely contributor to the stagnation of prosperity growth that we’ve seen since the 70s. This is fed, state, local spending combined. I’ve cut off the top and bottom to concentrate on the post-war period, and because earlier…

  • “No significant deregulation of financial institutions occurred in the last 30 years”

    This from a dissenting view (PDF) to the Report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, by Peter Wallison — a fellow of the (wait for it…) American Enterprise Institute. The depths of Republican self-delusion continue to be nothing short of breathtaking, even awe-inspiring in their magnificence. Related posts: What Caused The Great Recession? The Economist…

  • It’s Unanimous: Cut Spending! (As long as you don’t cut spending!)

    Voter Ignorance Threatens Deficit Reduction. By Bruce Bartlett. A Feb. 1, 2011, YouGov poll found only one program, culture and the arts, on which a majority of people are willing to spend less… A Jan. 26, 2011, Gallup poll found 59 percent of people favoring cuts to foreign aid, but a majority opposed cutting any other programs……

  • It’s Not the Innovation, It’s the Distribution. Lane Kenworthy on Tyler Cowen

    Lane Kenworthy has provided the best response that I’ve yet seen to Tyler Cowen’s assertion that median family income growth has declined over recent decades because of a decline in innovation. The great decoupling « Consider the Evidence. Here’s the key graphic (red arrows mine): Lane points out: 2007 $s ’47-’73 ’73-’07 Annual Percentage Increase…

  • What Caused The Great Inflation, ’65-’83?

    I’ve been befuddled about this for a while. The widespread belief is that government deficit spending caused the inflation of the sixties, seventies, and early eighties. But: • Government debt as a percent of GDP was steadily declining until 1981. and • Government debt/GDP started to soar in the early eighties (for the first time…

  • Do High Marginal Tax Rates Kill Economic Growth? Again: No

    Mike Kimel once again does yeoman’s duty to compare the two: Tax Rates v. Real GDP Growth Rates, a Scatter Plot | Angry Bear. In this post commenter Kaleberg adds a very cool scatterplot. Each dot is a year (t), compared to another year one to four years later (t+1, t+2, etc.). Bottom axis is the…

  • Taxing Businesses, Encouraging Investment: Running the Numbers

    Both Mike Kimel and commenter Jazzbumpa have suggested recently that higher personal tax rates encourage business owners to invest in their businesses — “investment spending” in truly productive fixed capital — as opposed to “investing” the money in financial instruments (IOW, “saving” it). (If you’re not totally clear on “investment” versus “savings,” and versus investment…

  • Government Consumption Spending Revisited

    I really love it when somebody points out that I’m wrong. (At least, when they’re right that I’m wrong.) Jazzbumpah in an email pointed out a whopper of an error in a previous post, in this graphic: The blue slice is State and Local. The red slice is Federal. Here’s the real picture: (Expenditures: NIPA…

  • Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation: Government Spending Section

    I’m quite taken with the central notion of Tyler’s new mini-book — that America has been picking the economic low-hanging fruit for decades or centuries, and that there’s a lot less of it around over the last three to six decades. Before I get to the parts I like, I have to instantly respond to…

  • Two Thirds of Tea Partiers Want to Raise Taxes on the Well-To-Do

    …rather than increase the retirement age for Social Security. Somebody just asked them. See Question 11: Would you rather have people pay social security taxes on salaries above $106,800, or would you rather see benefits cut and the retirement age increased to age 69? Self-identified tea party members:* 67%: Raise taxes 20%: Cut benefits, raise…

  • Line of the Week

    The always fabulous Steve Randy Waldman: the fabulously successful strategy of governing incompetently while using each failure as evidence that government action cannot help but be corrupt and inept. Heckuva job, Brownie! via interfluidity » Endogenize ideology. Related posts: Beckworth Promotes Platinum Coins as Obama’s “FDR Moment”! Small is Beautiful? Maybe. But Big is Bad.…

  • Equality, Growth, Lane Kenworthy, and the Earned Income Tax Credit

    Update 10/26/2011: Lane has a great article on upping the EITC here. I’ve long been meaning to post about the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which I believe we should expand significantly. Much of my thinking on the subject has its roots in work done by Lane Kenworthy, so it’s not surprising that his latest post…

  • Canadians Flooding Over the Border for Health Care! (Not)

    Health is priceless. Given that, and given the widespread meme that Canadians wait months for crucial, life-saving tests and procedures, you’d expect them to flood into the U.S. in large numbers to buy health care services. Do they? Apparently not. Like really, really not. In fact, an astonishingly small number do. You guessed it: somebody…

  • Line of the Week: “A better world is by definition not the world we live in.”

    Will Wilkinson This is a gem, IMO. It utterly undercuts the (a?) central premise of most “conservative’s” creed: the presumption that wherever we are now is where we should be — because it’s the best we’ve managed to work out so far, right? I can only say that I’m extraordinarily happy that the British parliament…

  • What Conservatives Should Ask Themselves Every Day: What Would Dwight David Eisenhower Do?

    These posts by Arnold Kling and Will Wilkinson prompt me to write up a post I’ve had in mind for a long time. I don’t want to write a history paper here, so I’ll just share a few facts, and some quotes from Wikipedia to highlight the differences between Eisenhower’s prudence and responsibility,  and the…

  • Sarah: On Target

    We gotta give Sarah Palin credit. She took this map off her site. Today. We should also give her credit for being right: It’s time to take a stand. H/T Barry Ritholtz Related posts: Stockman: How the GOP Destroyed the U.S. Economy | The Big Picture Banks’ “Bigger Concern”: “Republicans will no longer defend Wall…

  • Minimum Wage Laws are Bad for the Poor, Right? Wrong Again.

    Righties love to claim that minimum-wage laws hurt the poor because they discourage employers from hiring. They claim that the disemployment effect cancels out the higher-wage effect, making the poor worse off. But over and over again, research shows that it just ain’t so. Here’s more (PDF). A new and stunningly well-executed study comparing adjacent counties…

  • Fundamental Fallacies: Taxing Investments Reduces Investment

    Over at Angry Bear and Presimetrics, Mike Kimel makes his usual brilliant case for the stupidity of right-wing and many orthodox economic beliefs. But he makes one statement in the course of it which he considers to be unobjectionable by all, that as far as I can tell is almost completely false. It’s one of…