Rock on.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Guns Kill People
I have no idea if this was a domestic dispute gone really bad or a tragic mistake, but either way if there was no gun in the place there most likely wouldn't be a dead person.
I'm sure most of us have experienced a couple of bouts of extreme rage in our lives, rage which overrides our good sense completely. Drugs and alcohol can play a role here, of course. Those events don't always lead to violence, but they can. Some people internalize their rage, some lash out. Even when they do lead to violence, most of us just aren't capable of killing someone absent access to a deadly weapon.
Even if this was a tragic mistake, you really shouldn't be shooting at an "intruder" unless you have good reason to believe your life is being threatened.
I'm sure most of us have experienced a couple of bouts of extreme rage in our lives, rage which overrides our good sense completely. Drugs and alcohol can play a role here, of course. Those events don't always lead to violence, but they can. Some people internalize their rage, some lash out. Even when they do lead to violence, most of us just aren't capable of killing someone absent access to a deadly weapon.
Even if this was a tragic mistake, you really shouldn't be shooting at an "intruder" unless you have good reason to believe your life is being threatened.
Crazies
The idea that the (soon to be former) Pope will face any kind of justice system, whether he deserves to or not, is pretty absurd, but keep on keeping on...
Those crazy rape victims...
Benedict is currently not named specifically in any other case. The Vatican does not expect any more but is not ruling out the possibility.
"(If he lived anywhere else) then we might have those crazies who are filing lawsuits, or some magistrate might arrest him like other (former) heads of state have been for alleged acts while he was head of state," one source said.
Those crazy rape victims...
Shit Is Still Fucked Up And Bullshit
The rich are taking everything.
WASHINGTON — Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of earners during the economic recovery, but not at all for everybody else, according to new data.
Friday, February 15, 2013
The Waltons Will Always Be Rich
But eventually they might figure out that if their potential customers have no money, their business has a bit of a problem.
Human Welfare Is Irrelevant
The debt fetishists like Scarborough don't care about the real world consequences of their desired policies. It's all aesthetic, all a morality play. Who cares if people have jobs? Other people,anyway.
Indeed
And Hemmer was a star of the "liberal" CNN for years.
Things have shifted a bit since, but I understand that for years news execs truly believed that Fox leaned right, CNN leaned left, and MSNBC tried to aim itself at the 5 supposedly moderate Republicans left in the country. Truly bizarre.
Things have shifted a bit since, but I understand that for years news execs truly believed that Fox leaned right, CNN leaned left, and MSNBC tried to aim itself at the 5 supposedly moderate Republicans left in the country. Truly bizarre.
Drawing The Fox Crowd
It isn't exactly what this producer is talking about, but it was fascinating when CNN made a bid to be the Tea Party Network.
Not Just The Kids
I briefly made this point, as I tend to briefly make all my points, but universal pre-k isn't just about helping the children and their future selves.
I honestly have no idea how two worker families with children manage. Of course one worker families with children have a hard time managing for different reasons. But the lack of affordable childcare, school hours/days which don't match work times, ratcheted up expectations about 24/7 helicopter parenting... Obviously pre-K doesn't solve all of these problems, but hopefully it will provide a bit of relief for parents.
I honestly have no idea how two worker families with children manage. Of course one worker families with children have a hard time managing for different reasons. But the lack of affordable childcare, school hours/days which don't match work times, ratcheted up expectations about 24/7 helicopter parenting... Obviously pre-K doesn't solve all of these problems, but hopefully it will provide a bit of relief for parents.
Good morning, Friday!
And here are a few links I found trawling about:
Taibbi in Rolling Stone: "Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail"
Dday in Salon: "Wall Street wins again" - the "Taksforce" was a sick joke.
Alan Barlow in Mother Jones:: "How the NRA Hobbled the ATF" "In effect, the FBI is required to destroy evidence of a crime."
Thursday, February 14, 2013
SMASH
No idea what will happen, but CW thinks the sequestration is going to happen. I don't think it's because of some grand negotiating strategy by House republicans, I just think the teabaggers need to smash a few things and get it out of their system.
Nominal Illusion
I do think the olds seriously suffer from it. They remember when they earned $18K a year and that was A LOT OF MONEY and hear that some lucky youngs today manage to get a starting salary of $40K and that's BIG BIG BIG MONEY. But it's not.
More Nice Things
Some of the More Serious liberalish people have a weird approach to thinking about things. Actually don't really know David Leonhardt's political views, and he's reporter so in theory he doesn't have any, but he probably leans a bit our way. He tweeted this:
It goes on to link to a Jon Chait post about how we could pay for pre-k by switching to chained CPI.
As a thought exercise, it's fine. But I regularly see these false choices being set up. Awhile back Yglesias was saying that liberals should support closing libraries and giving the saved money to poor people. The thing is, I actually agree with both of these points. If I was your benevolent dictator, and had a fixed pot of money to spend on liberal nice things, I'd probably redirect some money for old people to money for young people, and would reduce spending on "programs," including libraries, in favor of just transferring money to poor people.
But these are false choices. These are not deals that are on the table. There is no fixed pot of money for liberal nice things. I'm pretty sure it would be a much better investment to take the F-35 money and spend it on pre-K. Hell, it'd probably be a better "investment" from a national security view to spend less money on flying death robots and spend it on genuine humanitarian aid (I imagine the paint on all those schools is peeling about now).
It's one thing to consider these deals if they're actually on the table, but it's another thing for liberals to negotiate with an imaginary Republican party that does not exist. Sure it can be a useful thought exercise, but it's politically meaningless.
Seems clear that shifting some money from SocSec to preK would lead to faster econ growth.
It goes on to link to a Jon Chait post about how we could pay for pre-k by switching to chained CPI.
As a thought exercise, it's fine. But I regularly see these false choices being set up. Awhile back Yglesias was saying that liberals should support closing libraries and giving the saved money to poor people. The thing is, I actually agree with both of these points. If I was your benevolent dictator, and had a fixed pot of money to spend on liberal nice things, I'd probably redirect some money for old people to money for young people, and would reduce spending on "programs," including libraries, in favor of just transferring money to poor people.
But these are false choices. These are not deals that are on the table. There is no fixed pot of money for liberal nice things. I'm pretty sure it would be a much better investment to take the F-35 money and spend it on pre-K. Hell, it'd probably be a better "investment" from a national security view to spend less money on flying death robots and spend it on genuine humanitarian aid (I imagine the paint on all those schools is peeling about now).
It's one thing to consider these deals if they're actually on the table, but it's another thing for liberals to negotiate with an imaginary Republican party that does not exist. Sure it can be a useful thought exercise, but it's politically meaningless.
Stop Means-Testing Everything
People care about high marginal tax rates except the high marginal tax rates faced by a lot of not-so-well-off people. When you start clawing back deductions and tax credits and add additional means testing to programs, you make the effective marginal tax rate for people, over some range of income, very high.
Universal pre-k should be universal and universally free.
Universal pre-k should be universal and universally free.
Motive
If Tesla is accurate in its criticisms of the NYT reporter...I really just wonder what the motive of the journalist is/was.
Fortunately There's A Policy For That
More human sacrifices should do the trick.
The European Union statistics agency Eurostat said the economy across the 17-nation shared-currency bloc shrank 0.6% in the fourth quarter of 2012, coming in below analysts’ expectations of a 0.4% decline.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
How About 2000 Apartment Units Instead?
I don't know Paoli well enough (been a long time since I was there), but the madness of the park-n-ride model is on display here. Cars take up a lot of space, and parking garages are very expensive.
Republicans Don't Care About Cutting Social Security
The big flaw in the premise of the grand bargain is that Obama is asking them to give away their precious by increasing taxes on the rich in exchange for something they don't care much about. Cutting taxes for rich people is their whole purpose. Cutting Social Security? Well, if they can use Social Security cuts to cut taxes for rich people, sure. But cutting Social Security in order to increase taxes on rich people? Really not interested.
Tax Policy Is The Only Policy
"Broaden the base, lower the rates" isn't necessarily a bad idea, except for the fact that basically the only way we do meaningful policy is through our tax code. All of those deductions and credits will reappear quickly. It's how we do things.
Monoposny In Motion
The simple Econ 101 week 2 view of the minimum wage is that it will decrease employment. But the more complicated (and sensible) view of it is that the impact on employment is pretty ambiguous. Labor markets aren't perfectly competitive for a variety of reasons. Most employers have some monopsony power. To the extent that they do, small increases in the minimum age are unlikely to impact employment levels.
Universal Pre-K
I support taxing the hell out of me and everybody else to make this happen. I don't claim deep knowledge about the research, other than that "pre-k is good and cost effective," but intuitively the benefits are pretty obvious. Whether you support the view of poor parents as being irresponsible unemployed drug addicts, or the view of poor parents as having insufficient time to nurture their children due to their attempts to make enough money by working 3 jobs, in both cases the issue is that poor parents are failing to provide time, attention, and education for their kids.
It's a low cost way to dramatically improve human welfare of the parents and the kids. Do it.
It's a low cost way to dramatically improve human welfare of the parents and the kids. Do it.
$9
I read the speech about 5 minutes before Obama gave it. The big actual news was the support for the minimum wage hike. The big interesting part of that was the plan to index it to inflation in law.
This is one of those issues where Dem politicians are generally incompetent. Raising the minimum wage is popular. It drives voter turnout if you put it on ballot initiatives. There are a lot of popular and good things Dems fail to support sufficiently. We can discuss why. There are a variety of reasons, some rational, some not.
There are a lot of ways to alleviate poverty. Increasing the minimum wage a bit is one way. Just giving money to poor people, through an improved EITC type program is another. I'm enough of an economist to support the latter, but enough of an activist to understand what's more possible. Giving free money to poor people isn't very popular, even when tied to work. Increasing the minimum wage is.
This is one of those issues where Dem politicians are generally incompetent. Raising the minimum wage is popular. It drives voter turnout if you put it on ballot initiatives. There are a lot of popular and good things Dems fail to support sufficiently. We can discuss why. There are a variety of reasons, some rational, some not.
There are a lot of ways to alleviate poverty. Increasing the minimum wage a bit is one way. Just giving money to poor people, through an improved EITC type program is another. I'm enough of an economist to support the latter, but enough of an activist to understand what's more possible. Giving free money to poor people isn't very popular, even when tied to work. Increasing the minimum wage is.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
More Thread
Universal pre-K is good. I support paying taxes for all kinds of things that are unlikely to benefit me directly. Maybe we can get free whiskey day for non-breeders?
Welcome To The Club
A mostly serious person decides it's time for Ben (and his counterparts) to fire up the helicopter engines.
I haven't really looked for it, but I hope one day some smart economists look at the distributional impact of the specifics of Fed quantitative easing in the age of the great recession. I'm guessing it made rich people a lot richer. All things considered I favored more fed action, but there was always another way. Fed-financed government spending and free money for all.
First, it is impossible to justify the conventional view that fiat money should operate almost exclusively via today’s system of private borrowing and lending. Why should state-created currency be predominantly employed to back the money created by banks as a byproduct of often irresponsible lending? Why is it good to support the leveraging of private property, but not the supply of public infrastructure? I fail to see any moral force to the idea that fiat money should only promote private, not public, spending.
I haven't really looked for it, but I hope one day some smart economists look at the distributional impact of the specifics of Fed quantitative easing in the age of the great recession. I'm guessing it made rich people a lot richer. All things considered I favored more fed action, but there was always another way. Fed-financed government spending and free money for all.
Emperor LaHood
One wouldn't have expected the Republican dude from Peoria to be transit-friendly, but, like most places, once upon a time Peoria had a significant rail system. And LaHood remembered.
Not Everything Is A Commodity
I don't think Matt's wrong about the basic logic of securitization, but the problem is that not everything is a commodity, and that securitization can severely misalign the incentives between owners and managers.
Wheat (at least, mass produced industrial farming wheat) is a commodity, but individual farmers are not. Even if we accept that, yes, houses are sort of commodities (I don't), property management companies are not. And it's really difficult to imagine that appropriate contracts and be written and enforced between the owners of slices of property rental streams and those tasked with managing those properties. This was much more likely to work with mortgages than rental income streams, as homeowners have an incentive to maintain their properties, but renters don't and property managers probably don't.
Wheat (at least, mass produced industrial farming wheat) is a commodity, but individual farmers are not. Even if we accept that, yes, houses are sort of commodities (I don't), property management companies are not. And it's really difficult to imagine that appropriate contracts and be written and enforced between the owners of slices of property rental streams and those tasked with managing those properties. This was much more likely to work with mortgages than rental income streams, as homeowners have an incentive to maintain their properties, but renters don't and property managers probably don't.
SOTU Drinking Game
your take a sip words:
balanced
bi-partisan
reform(ing)
responsible
serious
challenges
entitlements
modest
if you hear "chained CPI" you can guzzle a bottle of vodka and go punch a hippie.
balanced
bi-partisan
reform(ing)
responsible
serious
challenges
entitlements
modest
if you hear "chained CPI" you can guzzle a bottle of vodka and go punch a hippie.
Slumlords
I don't think we quite know where this is going yet - I'm not optimistic! - but dday takes a look at your new Wall Street landlords.
The State Of The Union Is Derp
The best we can hope for is some ideas for smart government spending, but what we really need is more spending.
Contractionary policy is contractionary. Just ask the UK.
Contractionary policy is contractionary. Just ask the UK.
Austerity
It's here. Good luck everybody!
In more "normal" times the Fed could accommodate this by cutting interest rates. But now they can't.
If the mild recovery starts going in the other direction, we'll know why.
In more "normal" times the Fed could accommodate this by cutting interest rates. But now they can't.
If the mild recovery starts going in the other direction, we'll know why.
All Human Knowledge Contained In A Device In Your Pocket
The thing is, once upon a time it might have taken a bit of work to actually look up these silly things called 'facts.' That it took a little work doesn't/didn't excuse the failure to do so by a person who is very highly paid to, in theory, inform viewers of true things. But now it doesn't take more than minor powers of google-fu to look up just about anything.
Native
I saw a lot of this when I was in Gullyvornia, and found it weird. I think it is more a western state thing, though admittedly there's some of it in killadelphia, too (but the city, not the state).
Monday, February 11, 2013
Maybe Somebody Should Do Something
There's no chance of more stimulus, as all of the Very Serious People agree that Teh Deficit must go down and any spending must be "paid for." One hopes the animal spirits do their magic, otherwise...
The Political Possibilities
I know that we're not going to increase Social Security benefits this year, or next year, or the next. Probably they'll be cut. Heck, maybe a cut will spur some positive action (and, no, I'm not using that possibility to support a cut). But I would like to see a few candidates out there telling seniors that it's time to raise their benefits. That might actually be popular.
Wang Dang
I'm not sure exactly how Ted Nugent became an important political figure in this country, but the other day CNN was convinced that I needed to be informed of his latest pronouncements. Conservatives can say anything.
Bring Back Earmarks
Maybe we could get more transportation funding if members knew they could put some nice things in their districts.
Polite Society
I actually appreciate that Oregon allows properly permitted owners to carry them into the state Capitol. If that's the gun society lawmakers want, they should experience it. And no I don't mean experience gun violence, just the joys of having people wander around with guns.
Pope'd
I guess caring about who is the next Pope is a bit like caring about who is the next Prime Minister of Spain. Isn't my leader, but is a leader with nontrivial power in the world. I remember last time thinking that there was some small chance that change would lead to some positive steps. But then they chose this one, and...
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Maybe The Evils Of Rent Control?
Krugman makes a wry joke here:
I can't speak about the younger generation of The Econ, but when I was still among them economists spent a reasonable amount of time teaching their students about the evils of policies that barely existed anymore. On the whole, academic economists are probably more liberal than people think (understandably because the public face of academic economists isn't very liberal), but the things "everybody" agreed about were things like free trade good, rent control bad, etc.
But now that protectionism is a trivial issue, what will economists inveigh against?
I can't speak about the younger generation of The Econ, but when I was still among them economists spent a reasonable amount of time teaching their students about the evils of policies that barely existed anymore. On the whole, academic economists are probably more liberal than people think (understandably because the public face of academic economists isn't very liberal), but the things "everybody" agreed about were things like free trade good, rent control bad, etc.
Villagers
There's always a hipster coolcat Daddy-o Republican, hep to the ways of the younger people, and a Real American manly man's man to boot.
Tupac died 17 years ago. Being impressed that Rubio is aware of him is like being impressed if Ronald Reagan, in 1980, had heard of Patsy Cline, who died in 1963.
Tupac died 17 years ago. Being impressed that Rubio is aware of him is like being impressed if Ronald Reagan, in 1980, had heard of Patsy Cline, who died in 1963.
Austerity Forever
Once again we're faced with serious deficit reduction in current law, and once again all of the Very Serious People are against it.
Because they don't really care about the deficit.
Because they don't really care about the deficit.
HOA Hell
I'm always amused that conservatives tend to side with the petty tyranny of the HOAs because, you know, they're "private entities."
Why I'm On This Social Security Kick
At the conference I intended, I was completely dumbstruck by the fact that even though there was general agreement that the 401K system has failed a generation (at least), no one thought there was any way to help that generation. I'm not saying that no one wanted to raise Social Security benefits, I'm jut saying that no one thought it possible. The options on the table were all about various add-ons and tweaks that could, maybe, make it somewhat more likely that the current cohort of 20somethings who can't get jobs with benefits and are drowning in student debt will save money for their retirement.
We have a problem now. Also, too, in the future.
We have a problem now. Also, too, in the future.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)