Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Month: February 2008

  • Guantanamo Chief Prosecutor on Guantanamo

    In case anyone missed the NYT Op-Ed ten days ago by Col. Morris Davis, formerly chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, the opening paragraph speaks more volumes, more movingly, than I could ever hope to achieve: Unforgivable Behavior, Inadmissible EvidenceTWENTY-SEVEN years ago, in the final days of the Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A.’s Tehran station chief, Tom…

  • Consumption Inequality Revisited: Uh…Hello??

    Coming back to the Cox and Alm Cox article in the NYT, whose basic argument was that poor people spend 50% as much as rich people in America. Everyone’s good. Don’t worry. Be happy. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this, and I’m utterly at a loss as to why…

  • Wealth and Innovation: The Freedom to Do Cool Shit

    If there’s (only) one thing that macroeconomists agree on, it’s probably that innovation and entrepreneurship are the driving forces behind the vast improvements in well-being that we have seen over the decades, and over the centuries. (It’s also what’s allowed for some of the most heinous acts imaginable. But still.) I pointed out in a…

  • Wacky Objections to an Obama Senate Bill

    Greg Mankiw links, apparently approvingly, to a VoxEU post by Willem Buiter and Anne Sibert savaging an Obama-sponsored bill in the Senate. (Cloyingly titled the Patriot Employer Act.) Felix Salmon has replied quite effectively, pointing out that the bill would not have the kind of disastrous effects the authors suggest, and that their objections are…

  • Blind Trusts for Campaign Donations

    Robert Reich has been talking up this idea recently, conceived by Bruce Ackerman (Yale law school), Ian Ayres, and some of their cohorts. They’ve been talking about it themselves for quite a while, notably in their 2004 book, Voting with Dollars and in assorted articles. Simple idea: donations to political campaigns go to blind trusts set up…

  • Equality and Prosperity: Can We Have Both?

    Yesterday, I (I hope) drove a final stake into the heart of the myth that small government creates national prosperity. I hope I also brought some backwards progressives to understand that the conservatives are right in one regard: economic growth has been the main engine that has made the poor–and everyone else–much better off by…

  • Small Government Spurs Growth? Economists Say No.

    Small-government conservatives’ most powerful economic argument–which progressives have failed to counter effectively in the minds of Americans–is that making government smaller results in faster economic growth. So, by this theory, small government makes all boats rise–rich and poor alike. It follows that progressives who argue for higher taxes and government spending are either foolish or…

  • Obama takes 62% in Texas, 53% in Ohio!

    It seemed like I’d noticed Obama significantly outperforming the polls since February 5. Which led my curious mind to wonder if he might do so in Texas and Ohio as well. So I threw together an utterly unsophisticated spreadsheet to see what’s happened, and what might happen. It pretty much speaks for itself. The poll…

  • Shopping is Good For America. Right?

    Harold Myerson today in the Washington Post bemoans America’s dependence on our own shopping as an engine of the economy. Household consumption accounts for 70% or our GDP. I checked his numbers and he got them right: Britain ranked second among nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, at 61 percent, then came…

  • Paying More Taxes (again…)

    Without actually using the word “hypocrite” Megan McArdle makes the following assertion in her latest post on people who are in favor of higher taxes, Tax me more. In other words, they don’t so much want higher taxes on themselves, as to purchase the good “State coercion of other affluent people”. I posted the following…

  • The Reality-Based Community: Why I want to pay higher taxes

    Mark Kleiman responds nicely to Megan McArdle’s post saying that nobody wants to pay higher taxes. I’ve already explained why I’m willing to pay (higher) taxes: because it made me rich. And I want my kids to have the same opportunities I had. Related posts: Paying More Taxes (again…) My Patriotic Millionaires Pitch Weimar, Zimbabwe,…

  • Superdelegates Don’t Matter

    The pledged delegates will decide it. Neither the Dem powers-that-be nor the superdelegates will dream of countering the popular choice. It would be a nuclear meltdown in which they would be immolated. Why are the press and the bloggers spending so much time on this? There’s only one situation in which the superdelegates might have…

  • So 300 libertarians get on a commercial airliner

    ……..That’s the whole joke. Related posts: Is the Elasticity of Labor Demand at Zero?

  • Mankiw: Post Friedman Ergo Propter Friedman

    Andrew Schleifer (PDF) and Greg Mankiw share in a paean to Milton Friedman and the glorious growth and prosperity he has brought to all the poor and oppressed of the world. I'm kind of shocked, as I usually am when Professor Mankiw goes into Friedman adulation mode. Because he should know better than anyone: 1.…

  • Facts and “Healthy” Conservatism

    Jim Manzi makes what some might consider a questionable statement: …healthy conservatism from Burke onwards has been the party of “facts trump theories” Let’s look at the three legs of the conservative stool: Supply-Side Economics: Based on a theory written on a napkin, contradicted by all the empirical evidence (read: "facts") as analyzed every which…

  • U.S. Poverty: We’re #2!

    Lane Kenworthy rightly chastises Paul Krugman, correcting the belief that the U.S. has the highest poverty rate among affluent countries. We actually have the second-highest rate. Mr. Kenworthy is right that “relative” poverty measures are (my word, not his) garbage. They’re based on a percent of median income in each country, so a wildly rich…

  • Supply Side: Are We Winning Yet?

    Here’s how we’ve been doing versus the socialist welfare states over the last thirty-five years: I had no idea what results I’d find. (Though I’ll freely admit that I hoped to see Reagan and the Bushes looking rosy-cheeked.) Not so much. Zealots will tout the biggest plus year (Reagan) and biggest minus (Clinton), but that’s…

  • New Federal Budget Blog: Just the Facts, Ma’am

    Here’s the kind of solid, factual information you can expect from rdavis: Anyone who’s not familiar with his federal-budget web site should take a look right now. He does yeoman’s duty presenting current and past budget numbers in very useful formats–both tables and graphs. He also provides some commentary and opinion, but it’s mostly solid…

  • “Usual and Customary”: Macro Effects?

    The NY State attorney general is investigating (NYT) health insurers for gaming the system on “usual and customary” charges. Turns out the database used to determine the charges is managed by Ingenix, which in turn is owned by UnitedHealth Group–one of the country’s biggest health insurers. The database is licensed to other insurers as well.…

  • Fiscal Stimulus: $336,000 Per Job. But…

    This one really made me think twice. Greg Mankiw does the arithmetic: $168 billion in fiscal stimulus will create 500,000 new jobs (according to Edward Lazear, chair of the Council of Economic Advisors). That’s $336,000 per job. You have to do some awfully long-term projections and assume some kind of mighty macro effects to justify…

  • Wealth Equality and Prosperity

    Amongst all the ruckus generated by the Cox and Alms’ piece in the NYT about consumption versus income inequality in the U.S., Lane Kenworthy has pointed out that they’re both utterly dwarfed by wealth inequality: It sure doesn’t seem fair. But if that level of wealth inequality creates greater economic growth for all, we shouldn’t…