Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Asymptosis: always approaching

  • It’s About Bloody Time. Sheesh.

    Nate Silver: Gay Marriage Opponents Now in Minority – NYTimes.com. Related posts: Conservatives Love to Point Out that Personal Incentives Matter Polling the Pollster Pollers: Obama Still Strong Guns and Gun Deaths, State by State Must. Make. Gubmint. Smaller. Proofiness!

  • Did I Mention That It’s the Health Care Costs, Stupid?

    Via: Medical Billing And Coding Related posts: What’s Wrong with Vouchers? “Usual and Customary”: Macro Effects? Do We Need More Doctors?

  • Best Line of the Week

        HT: @felixsalmon No related posts.

  • Are Tea Partiers Copping a Clue? Paul Ryan Gets Booed

    Paul Ryan Gets Booed By Constituents For Opposing Tax Hikes On Rich (VIDEO) | TPMDC. Related posts: “Anybody else have a question besides this guy?” What’s Wrong with Vouchers? Neoclassical economists don’t understand neoclassical economics Damn this guy sounds like me Bring Back the Philosopher Kings

  • It’s “Obviously” a Spending Problem

    Well, unless “obvious” means “conforming to reality.” Here just the latest: I don’t think I have to draw the trend line for you, or point out that the U.S. spends less than every thriving, prosperous country but two. Update: Way less. To spend is to owe? « Consider the Evidence. Related posts: Is Big Government…

  • “Anybody else have a question besides this guy?”

    PAWLENTY: I like Paul Ryan’s plan directionally. I don’t think it’s fully filled out in terms of the fact that we still have to address Social Security and when we issue our plan later in this process, it will have some differences[…] VOLSKY: Do you support the Medicare cuts in his plan that he keeps…

  • Weimar, Zimbabwe, Here We Come

    Or maybe not. Megan McArdle invokes one of the two standard bogeymen to suggest — classic fallacy of the extremes — that It Could Happen To Us. And I cannot disagree too strongly with the notion that the US can’t default because we can always print money.  It isn’t even technically true–Zimbabwe eventually ran out of…

  • Do You See a Pattern Here?

    Australia: Just wait. Off the Charts Blog | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities | Blog Archive | Top Ten Tax Charts. Related posts: Meritocratic Opportunity: On the Decline The Poor Get Poorer Where Did Our Debt Come From? – James Fallows – Politics – The Atlantic John McCain Pledges to Eradicate Government This Time…

  • If You’re in New York, Run Don’t Walk: Starts This Morning

    And if you’re dweebishly interested in this subject like I am. 20th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the US and World Economies I just heard about this, and only because my daughter was recently admitted to Bard. (Their Levy Economics Institute is running the event.) This event appears to be free.…

  • What’s Wrong with Vouchers?

    James Kwak explains why Paul Ryan’s notion for vouchers replacing Medicare doesn’t work: If you are forty years old and healthy now, you simply cannot insure yourself against the risk that you will be uninsurably unhealthy when you are sixty-five. You retire, and you lose your health insurance. But you’ll have vouchers, right? You can use them…

  • Don’t Like “Money Printing”? Then Stop Borrowing. Whip Inflation Now!

    Cross-posted at Angry Bear. There’s a widespread conception that “money printing” by the government causes inflation, and that “money printing” = government deficit spending. But people don’t realize that: 1. Most money “printing” is done by banks, not government. 2. Government deficit spending is only one of four flows that affect inflation. Here’s how borrowing…

  • Want a Flat Tax? I Got a Flat Tax for You

    Crossposted at Angry Bear. One percent of financial assets. Personal and corporate. Annually. With somewhere north of $55 trillion in U.S. financial assets out there (2009, down from $63 trillion in 2007), a Financial Assets Tax would generate more than $550 billion in annual revenue. What could we do with that revenue? Here are some options:…

  • “Figures might not lie, but liars sure know how to figure.”

    Unassailable winner of The Quote of the Week Contest. Courtesy of Jazzbumpa’s dad. Related posts: Best Line of the Week: Not-So-True Conservatives When Do Humans Want to Share the Wealth? To claim “objectivism” at 20 is predictable. To claim “objectivism” at 60 is plain idiocy. Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and…

  • The Coming GOP Spectacle: “a freak show of stupendous proportions”

    Emphasis mine: I just want to say that I am so looking forward to the Republican primary campaign this cycle. It looks like Michele Bachmann is going to run, Palin might run, Newt Gingrich is probably going to run, Jim DeMint seems like he might run, and I suppose Ron Paul will run again too. This…

  • Gingrich: We’re becoming a secular atheist country dominated by radical Islamists

    I kid you not. “I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9,” Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated…

  • “You Deserve It” Part 243

    John, born in 1973, decided to get married, buy a house, and start a family in 2003. James, born in 1976, decided to get married, buy a house, and start a family in 2006. In 2009, both John and James were laid off. Both were offered jobs in another state. John sold his house at…

  • Age, Wisdom, Sagacity, Common Sense, and Republicanism

    My friend Steve is, I think, claiming that wisdom and common sense (he seems to be implying that they’re the same thing) and likelihood of voting Republican all increase together with age. Which putatively explains the two graphs he posts: It’s funny that he doesn’t show the other graph from his source, showing the Dem space…

  • Clear-Eyed Sowellian “Realists” Hyperventilating. Again. Some More.

    What is surprising — what continually surprises me, even as cynical as Ive gotten — is how seriously polluters are taken in each successive episode of air pollution regulation. By now the script is numbingly predictable: industry commissions rigged studies showing that compliance will threaten power reliability and jack up costs; independent reports show otherwise;…

  • Intolerable Socialism

    Best line of the week (with a couple of elisions by moi): Any effort to reduce government spending on health care … is intolerable socialism, and any effort to increase government spending on health care … is also intolerable socialism. via Yglesias » Making Sense of the Rationing Switcheroo. Related posts: The Problem with “Socialism”…

  • If You Regulate Us, We Won’t Provide Liquidity!

    Providing Liquidity: The evolution of the SOES bandits in the 1990’s into DATEK, ISLD, NSDQ, and finally Big HFT firms who run ahead of your orders. You bid $21.04, six of them bid $21.05 and take stock up to $21.18. This automated sludge is now somehow Providing Liquidity, because it has been repeated often enough.…

  • “Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

    Unfortunately the first statement is no longer true. Dwight David Eisenhower in a letter to his brother, 1954. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are…