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Nice day in the urban hellhole.

Don't Overreact

And back then people would try to convince me he was a liberal.

The War At Home

Took about 2 days after 9/11 for conservatives to recognize who the real enemies were: dirty fucking hippies.

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enjoy

9/11 Day

A tragic day which brought out the worst in our country. Not right away, but once evil people saw opportunity to exploit it for their own dreams of destruction.

600 Executives

Companies have 600 executives?

After surging in size and profits during the post-9/11 era, the defense industry in metropolitan Washington is bracing for a major contraction and significant layoffs that economists said could produce a drag on the regional economy for years.

Already, there have been signs that announced cuts in national defense programs are having an impact: Six hundred executives at Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin are accepting the company's offer of a buyout. ITT Defense and Information Systems, based in McLean, this year combined seven business units into three and cut 1,000 workers. Hundreds were let go this year from Northrop Grumman operations in Maryland.

Dogtrack

"Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits - a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities."

Might as well be a thousand words. But...

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Updating: This is Keynes' "animal spirits" explanation of economic activity. Y's post suggests this is a much better way to explain fluctuations in financial activity than the "efficient markets" story. Neither buying strategy should be dominant if financial markets are "efficient." That betting with the crowd is so dominant is....interesting.

Evening Thread

Am out fringe festivaling.

Happy Hour Thread

enjoy

In Case It Isn't Clear

I'd like unemployment to fall so that people have jobs and I'd like the economy not to suck so that we are not ruled by insane Republicans.

They Write Letters

In response to my linking to this:

Duncan -

I saw you link to an argument that my dissertation fifteen years ago on investment subsidies implied that the administration’s recently-announced policy calling for temporary expensing of capital investment and making the R&D tax credit permanent would not work. While I admit to a small amount of joy that someone actually looked at my old research, I think the details in that work say differently. I started from the obvious point that subsidizing the demand for something when there are capacity constraints or a steeply rising supply curve, should tend to drive up prices in the short run rather than purely inducing more purchases. This was often true of capital goods like machinery in the data period I studied (which was from the 1960s to the 1980s).

But this effect centered on the idea that this should be in situations where there were constraints on supply in an industry. The findings in that paper showed quite clearly that the price increases were concentrated only among those products where there were significant backlogged orders/capacity was tight. In places of significant slack, there were no price effects. In a period like today, where capacity utilization in the industrial sector has suffered greatly (and where there are substantial numbers of unemployed R&D engineers), the findings in my old work would clearly indicate there would be little reason to expect the increased demand to go into higher prices. Investment subsidies at a time like this could generate significant amounts of investment.

-- Austan Goolsbee, Council of Economic Advisers

It's true that to the extent that we believe the supply curve is much more elastic (increased demand will increase the quantity sold and not simply just jack up the price) at this point in time, either due to the depth of the recession or due to the different composition of industry now, we'd expect such policies to have a greater impact. We also might think that subsidizing R&D is in general good policy, as there are greater social returns to innovation than private ones. Still my comment was "terrible bang for the buck," and while I'm willing to believe maybe it's "not as terrible bang for the buck," it's hard to see how this is in any way "the best bang for the buck." I suspect that while the full expensing of capital investment will be a nice bonus for firms, it'll cost the government a lot in lost revenue for capital purchases that would have been made anyway. There's also a bonus effect of making capital cheaper relative to labor, perhaps causing some capital substitution down the line. And the R&D tax credit will tend to benefit larger firms who have people on staff whose job it is to figure out how to take advantage of tax credits.

So will it have an impact? Sure, but that doesn't mean it's anything close to the best possible policy. If it's political compromise, then fine, but it isn't being offered as that, so...

Ending The Imperial Presidency

What it will take (and even then only temporarily) is a Republican Congress, a Democratic president, and a real or perceived abuse of power against some part of the conservative tribe.

Prescient Me

March, 2007:

Essentially you need to make it possible for people to refinance, both by getting rid of prepayment penalties and strongly "encouraging" lenders who gave out a bunch of mortages they shouldn't have to renegotiate the terms in order to make repayment more realistic.

Maybe if they'd listened to me we wouldn't have had all those problems all those years.


Joking aside, my real reason for looking that up is that blog time gets very confusing and sometimes I forget how far back it was obvious that the housing situation was going to be a disaster. Quite awhile.

Nobody Is Ever Responsible

And no one will be held accountable.

According to residents, the tragic disaster may have been preventable.

San Mateo Assemblyman Jerry Hill said he was "outraged" to learn that some residents had complained to PG&E about gas leaks in the neighborhood "for up to three weeks" before the explosion.

Hill said the pipe that ruptured was installed in 1948.

Aside from the accountability/responsibility issue, it's also a wee reminder that our infrastructure is old and crumbling, and the impacts of that can range from troubling to catastrophic...

I Know Chris Hayes Is There

Occasionally it'd be nice if there were some questions marginally from "The Left." Could ask about why HAMP was such a disaster, for example. Maybe about the DADT court ruling. Or maybe about assassinations and indefinite detentions.

...Helene Cooper had decent question about corruption in Afghanistan.


...Compton asks about Guantanamo not closing.

Presser

No need to turn on the teevee.


...booo..seems to be auto-on, at least for me. Watch here.

I've Said It Before

But I have no idea why we're talking about the "Bush tax cuts" instead of talking about how Bush's tax cuts are expiring as he intended, and meet the new and improved "Obama tax cuts."

An Excercise In Balance

I think I've mostly avoided talking about the wannabe Koran burner, but it's worth pointing out that the whole thing was just another exercise in false balance by our idiot media. On one hand we have mooooslims doing something "provacative" with that community center thingy, so on the other hand we have a guy burning Korans. That these things are not the same, and that they've established that any random nutcase can make himself front page news for no good reason, will likely not occur to anybody.

HAMP'd

This is a story in which the bank admits they screwed up, but it's the kind of screwup which is enabled by the fact that HAMP encourages homeowners to continue making payments while banks decide how best to screw them.

It's thoroughly depressing.

Who Would Jesus Bomb

I like that he's "self-described."

A Concord man was charged with describing how to make explosives, in an effort to bomb an abortion clinic, after FBI agents found instructions on the man's Facebook page and caught him in a sting, officials said Thursday.

Justin Carl Moose, 26, is a self-described "extremist, radical" and the "Christian counterpart of Osama bin Laden," according to an affidavit filed by FBI agents. Agents arrested Moose, who lives in a northwest Concord neighborhood, on Tuesday.