Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Category: Uncategorized

  • Savings ≠ “Savings.” Investment ≠ “Investment.” Spending ≠ “Spending.”

    And guess what? Saving ≠ Investment. Even though it’s the fundamental “identity” of national capital accounting. Update 2/2/2011: It’s no wonder people think economics is confusing. I’m being facetious. As defined, the Savings Identity is obviously true. But what is an “accounting identity”? It’s basically a definition of terms, a statement of accounting methods. And…

  • New Comment-Spam Filter for Asymptosis

    I’ve gotten a few comments over the years that comments were getting bounced as spam — generally, it seems, because they contained URLs, or too many URLs. I could never figure out why this was; according to its documentation, WP-Spam Free, the plug-in I’ve been using, doesn’t filter based on that. And I’ve found no…

  • 1798: Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Private Health Insurance

    In July of 1798, Congress passed “and President John Adams signed – An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen. The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance. Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance…

  • Certain Regulars Will Find this Amusing

    You know who you are. No related posts.

  • Private Liquor Sales in Washington State: I Jumped Ship

    We’ve got state liquor stores here in Washington for everything but beer and wine. I have to go to one to get booze instead of patronizing the store half a block away. I probably go five, maybe ten times a year, but I have friends who are cocktail aficionados who go far more often. I…

  • “Asymptotically Stagnant Activities”

    When I first saw this term, I assumed they were talking about me and all the time I spend on my little blog here. (They probably should have been.) It is all about me, right? But they were actually talking about a much more interesting phenomenon: the shift in spending from “progressive” to “non-progressive” activities.…

  • Mea Culpa: Rivlin-Domenici Needs Work

    I got so excited about some of the smart, obvious solutions included in the Bipartisan Policy Center’s reduce-the-deficit proposal (a.k.a. Rivlin-Domenici) that I didn’t see some of its fatal flaws. First off, it cuts Social Security, which is exactly the opposite of what we want to do: we want to make both social programs and…

  • Steve Martin: Atheists Just Sing the Blues

    “Nobody ever wrote a tune, for godless existentialism.” Related posts: Shakespeare Authorship (sigh): They’re At It Again Galbraith Translates “Trickle Down”: Eat Shit

  • Barry Ritholtz Turns It ON: “Time for Criminal Charges To Be Filed.”

    Corporations that get free speech rights also have liability for their own criminal actions. Its way past time we start forcing those responsibilities to have some meaning. This is not about keeping deadbeats in their homes, as a few idiots and liars have asserted. The corporate sympathizers who are too busy fellating the bank to recognize…

  • Pubs Don’t Cut Spending. They Just Refuse to Pay Their Bills. Video.

    Ted K gives us this in the comments: Un. B. Effing. Lievable. Brad Delong (bold is mine): As Milton Friedman liked to say, and as he did say when he — I am told — yelled at George W. Bush during his 90th birthday celebration at the White House — to spend is to tax.…

  • Who Owns Congress? A Campaign Cash Seating Chart

    I’ve been meaning to write up a post on this but haven’t found time. And it pretty much speaks for itself, so I’ll just give it to you and you can do with it as you will. Congressional Seats by Top Donors to Each Seat It’s pretty clear who wins that X vs. Y encounter:…

  • The Economic, Political, and Intellectual Equivalent of Bloodletting

    Colorado: Tax-slashing proposals scare GOP, Democrats By IVAN MORENO Associated Press Writer Businessmen gather at an empty Denver Broncos stadium, with an ominous warning: The more than 70,000 vacant seats around them represent the number of state jobs that would be lost if three tax-slashing and debt-cutting measures are approved in next month’s election. While many states…

  • What’s Wrong with Free Markets: “The ‘Wisdom’ of the Crowds”

    This may seem obvious to many, but it’s been very clarifying for me. People often argue against the free-market system — which is based on the idea of rational actors — by saying “people are obviously not rational actors!” But that’s a stupid argument. It misses the point. Nobody thinks that everyone, always, makes rational…

  • Religious Knowledge of a Devout (and Morally Committed) Atheist: 100%

    My results on the latest Pew survey: Here’s how you did on these 15 questions (excerpted from the larger U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey) compared with a nationally representative sample of 3,412 adults. Read the Full Report Your responses on the quiz do NOT affect the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey’s results. Take the test here. Or…

  • Damn this guy sounds like me

    But way way way way richer. I’m rich; tax me more Congress should let the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthiest Americans and use the additional tax revenues that are generated to invest in infrastructure and research. – Los Angeles Times. Related posts: This Time Mankiw’s Just Plain Lying. And He Knows It. Republicans,…

  • Family of Four on $11K a Year: 19 Million Americans Live On That

    Update, 4/16/15: A friend points out that this post misrepresents what’s reported in the linked Census data table. From the Census definitions (PDF), emphasis mine: Receipts from the following sources are not included as income: capital gains, money received from the sale of property (unless the recipient was engaged in the business of selling such property);…

  • On That New York Mosque

    Michael Bloomberg: The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the…

  • The Best Argument Against Climate Legislation — And the Best Answers

    I’ve long lauded Jim Manzi for his cogent and convincing arguments against carbon taxes. He’s the antithesis of the “1998 was really hot! Look: it’s cooler now!” school of head-in-in-the-sand self-delusionists. Rather, he takes the 2007 IPCC report as the best available consensus scientific knowledge we have, and uses it to think through a clear-eyed,…

  • Is “Starve the Beast” Finally Working? At (Almost) the Worst Possible Time?

    Even as some vaguely sane voices on the right — notably former Reagan budget officials — are acknowledging that the thirty-year experiment in “starve the beast” has failed…it seems to be working. The austerity principle is finally taking hold — just when the opposite should be true. The basics of fiscal and monetary policy aren’t…

  • Obama’s McMoment? McMaybe.

    Has anyone else noticed? McLellan. MacArthur. McChrystal. Makes me think of this post. As Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., argues in his 2004 book, “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” the Scots-Irish are a particularly pugnacious people, self-reliant and hyper-individualistic, who place honor above profit. … Once Democrats, Webb says the Scots-Irish created the “core…

  • Presidents and Congress, Republicans and Democrats: Spending, Taxation, Debt, and GDP

    Cross-posted at Angry Bear. Thanks to yeoman’s work by Larry Bartels, Mike Kimel, and a host of others, we’ve seen that over many decades, the American economy has performed far better, by almost any measure, under Democratic presidents. Larry Bartels’ key graph mapping income growth by quintile, 1948–2005 (from page 33 of Unequal Democracy) is…