Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Author: Asymptosis

  • 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…

  • Why nominating Clinton would be a Very Bad Thing

    Electability. There’s a damn good chance she could lose to McCain. She has the highest negative approval numbers of any candidate in polling history. (I don’t think she deserves that hatred, but there it is.) No presidential candidate with her negatives has ever won. She would turn out the Republicans in frantic droves. Obama would…

  • Why Did Edwards Quit?

    Even after his conference call with supporters yesterday (I’ve only seen a brief recap of the call), the question  remains: why? Why did he quit, and why now? His explanations still just don’t feel satisfyingly explanatory. Party unity? Getting poverty firmly on the agenda? Here’s what I would like to believe: He saw that he…

  • Gas-Guzzler Tax: Just Turn it On

    Some years ago, in one of the few instances where the NYT actually published one of my letters, I ranted about how we should institute a heavy tax on low-efficiency vehicles. To the Editor: Gregg Easterbrook’s proposal for a 50-cent-a-gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax (”The 50-Cent-a-Gallon Solution,” Op-Ed, May 25) is absolutely on…

  • Food Stamps as Fiscal Stimulus?

    Megan McArdle, in an uncharacteristically badly-reasoned (and really rather mean-spirited)  post, ridicules an increase in food-stamp benefits as a fiscal stimulus measure. I responded in her comments, but I’m so inordinately proud of my response that I can’t resist posting it here: Geez, Megan, I’m sorry but that ranks as one of the lamer posts…

  • The Long Decline in Equities

    Megan McArdle ridicules an analysis that looks at stock market returns adjusted for the dollar’s value (based on a basket of currencies). Short story, by that measure investors have been big losers (chart) over the last seven years. The author uses it to bash Bush’s "ownership society." Megan, who seems to be responding more to…

  • When to Use Fiscal Stimulus

    Dang it all, but Greg Mankiw does have me going this week. Guy’s got a fine mind, want to see him applying it more acutely. Yesterday he pointed to Alan Blinder’s 2004 The Case Against the Case Against Discretionary Fiscal Policy (PDF), wherein Blinder gives three possible reasons to use fiscal stimulus (note the “or’…

  • We Knew That Already

    Greg Mankiw cites a citation of a 1994 paper analyzing fiscal and monetary responses to recessions. From the abstract: …Federal Reserve typically responds to downturns with prompt and large reductions in interest rates. Discretionary fiscal policy, in contrast, rarely reacts before the trough in economic activity, and even then the responses are usually small. ……