Asymptosis: always approaching
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Greenspan: “certainly illegal and fairly criminal”
At the Fed’s Return to Jekyll Island Forum last week, Greenspan had some eye-opening comments (emphasis mine): There are two fundamental reforms we need – to get adequate capital and, two, to get far higher levels of enforcements of statutes of fraud statutes, existing ones. I’m not even talking about new ones. Things were being…
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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
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Murray, Manzi, McCardle, and Coastal Elites: Who Knows What?
Undoubtedly spurred by Charles Murray’s recent (and reliably predictable) op-ed, Megan McArdle comments on Jim Manzi’s anti-elitism: extremely well-educated people from a handful of metropolitan areas, few of whom have ever, say, been responsible for a profit and loss statement, or tried to bring a gas station into compliance with local and federal EPA regulations. You don’t…
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The Deadweight Loss From Taxes: Anti-Taxers Don’t Care
Anti-tax zealots are wont to point to the problem of “deadweight loss” when trying to demonstrate how awful taxes are. The rule/theory of deadweight loss says that a tax in general makes us all worse off than we would be without taxes, because a certain amount of production and value simply disappears as a result…
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Why Would We Rather Be Wrong than Perceive Ourselves as Being Wrong?
Why would we rather perceive ourselves as right than be right? Why does believing ourselves to be right feel so good? People hate being wrong. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. If we’re wrong about the world out there, we’re less likely to survive and produce grandchildren. You’d expect being wrong to feel bad,…
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Midterm Democratic Losses: It’s Not (Quite) As Bad As It Seems
Ah, the consolations of philosophy. If you look at the last sixty years, you see that in bad economic times, the incumbent presidential party always loses seats in the midterm. It’s to be expected. No matter whether it’s fair, the incumbent party gets the blame. Political scientist Douglas Hibbs predicted before the election that structural…
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Why Non-Correlations Tell Us More Than Correlations Do
Most readers here will know the problem with correlation and causation: post hoc ergo propter hoc (it came after therefore it was caused by). It’s one of the classic logical fallacies. Suppose you find that people with good teeth have higher lifetime incomes. Are the good teeth the cause? Or is there some other factor…
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1098 Naysayers: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
The Sky-Is-Falling Crowd says that 1098’s income tax will be immediately extended to lower earners. If you’re so sure, here’s a chance to make a buck on your certainty. Fifty bucks, actually. Here’s the bet: If, as of April 15, 2014, Washington-state taxpayers with incomes below $200,000 (individual filers) or $400,000 (joint filers) are paying…
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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…
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1098: If Millionaires Vote With Their Feet, They Apparently Don’t Care About Income Taxes
All the gnashing of teeth and tearing of breasts about “the most productive members of our society” voting with their feet and abandoning our state if we institute an income tax has always seemed a little … overblown. Turns out it is. If it was true, you’d expect to find a much smaller percentage of…
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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.…
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Government Is So Inefficient and Poorly Managed
The Office of Management and Budget reporting on tracking for Recovery Act funds: Of the 74,244 prime recipients required to file last quarter, just 352 failed to file a report last quarter — that’s 99.5 percent participation. Of the 352 who failed to file, 89 percent of them — or 312 — were first-time non-reporters.…
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Is Gerrymandering the Flocking Problem?
My regular readers will know that I’m fascinated by systems with “emergent properties” — systems where a few simple rules that individuals operate by result in complex and surprisingly organized behavior by the group — group properties that don’t seem to have any obvious direct relationship to the simple rules. Birds flocking is a great…
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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:…
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Why I Didn’t Write This Post (Wonky)
Re: our trade deficit with China, their undervalued currency, and their purchases of our treasuries. I queried in comments on a couple of econoblogs a few months back (with no response): why don’t we just prevent China from buying our treasuries in retaliation for their currency policy? I was going to write up the idea…