Posted on September 8th, 2007 by Gavin M.
We are proud as well as dumbfounded to present for general delectation…
…The Powerliniest post in the entire history of Powerline.
Posted on September 8th, 2007 by Gavin M.
Since we’re on the subject, this is from Marginal Revolution, the libertarianoid econ blog:
The Demand Side Politics of Supply-Side Economics
Alex TabarrokFollowing Jon Chait, Matt Yglesias writes:
…the central element of the Republican Party’s tax policy — lower taxes rates will lead to higher tax revenues — is a discredited crackpot notion.
Fine, but a more fruitful question which I’d like to see Yglesias, Chait and others grapple with is why discredited, crackpot ideas can become central elements of a winning political party in the world’s most important democracy. Explain the demand side and give us your policy prescriptions.
Ah, the old meta-question thing. Well, Alex, the demand side of supply-side, as it were, is analogous to that of pyramid schemes, baldness cures, and penis-enlargement devices — i.e., it tells people something that they want to hear, and relies on the human quality of fecklessness. Specifically, it tells people that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes, because money will magically appear in government coffers whenever taxes are lowered.
Because the funny thing about the Laffer Curve, as you know, Alex, is that we’re always, somehow, supposed to be on the right (i.e., revenue-draining) side of the curve. Always-always-always. Except every time, beginning with Kemp-Roth in 1981, that taxes have been cut to catch the extra Laffer money, revenues have somehow gone down and everyone has been sad and nobody’s penis has gotten any bigger. This is why guys like Yglesias are correct in saying that supply-side is a ‘discredited crackpot notion.’ Because there is no magical cure for taxation.
The first and most immediate policy prescription is that economists, Tabarrok included, must stop arguing for the utility of vacuum-pump penis-enlargement systems. Really. I mean, this doesn’t seem so difficult to fathom. Just stop. Get a quitting partner, mark your wall calendar, schedule rewards for yourself. The pump doesn’t work.
Although perhaps a more fruitful question would be how discredited crackpot theories function in the discursive razzmatazz of the post-ampiquitous frammastan? That is, in case someone gets too close to the main point?
I’m asking; I don’t know how this particular game is laid out.
[Hanx! Jillian]
Update: Prof. Tabarrok replies, via comments:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on September 7th, 2007 by HTML Mencken
Roy wrote something very interesting this morning:
[T]he GOP has been pushing its Ownership Society message for a good long time now. Americans have gloried in self-reliance since well before Emerson blew “a whistle from the Spartan fife.” But when the numbers run so high against so many, when bankruptcy laws tighten and the possibility of washing the slate clean and starting over in another town is rendered laughable by computer-assisted tracking data, when a mortgage can so easily become the instrument of a working family’s catastrophe, even a Spartan may begin to feel that the fix is in.
(My emphasis.)
The point is that glibertarianism is an ideology of a frontier culture. Now it’s true that glibertarianism never worked well with and in a frontier, but it sure as hell doesn’t work without one. And deep down, glibertarians know it:
Contemporary conservatives still value that old American character. William Bennett in his lectures reads admiringly from an account of the Donner party written by a survivor that tells the story in spare, stoic style. He puts the letter down and asks incredulously, “Where did those people go?”? But if you believe that early Americans possessed a fortitude that present-day Americans lack, and if you think the loss is an important one, then you have to think hard about why that fortitude disappeared.
That’s David Frum, who went on to recommend that wingnuts inculcate in the masses a frontier mentality by stressing them to Donner Party levels; make the rabble desperate and starving, and that will reform their character. Thus glibertarianism is an agreeably tautological premise: by destroying the government’s part in the social contract (“there’s no such thing as society!”) you’ll manufacture a self-reliant and cannibalistic populace who will in turn eschew the government’s help… etc.
All this is bad enough, but the glibertarians want to eat their cake (in place of their fellow human beings?) and have it too. To wit: Roy’s point on corporate-friendly laws designed to precisely not give a sucker an even break. They’ll track you down and fuck you up; and you have nowhere to run.
Posted on September 7th, 2007 by Gavin M.
As it happens, I am blogging from a local coffee shop with bloggers Matthew Yglesias and Brian Beutler. Yes, this is the glamorous blogging lifestyle you’ve read so much about.
At any rate, Matt and I were explaining the secrets of creating an ordered (numbered) list and an unordered (bulleted) list in html. At which point, Brian asked: why is a bulleted list “unordered”?
Matt and I responded, with stunning obviousness, that an ordered list has numbers. But then Brian showed us a preview of the post he was writing and sensibly asked “Is there any doubt about what order you should click on the links?”
Now I am trying to formulate a philosophy of numbered lists that distinguishes them from bulleted lists. Reader thoughts are welcome.
Um. Yeah.
God help us all, but it’s almost time for another challenging episode in the running online debate that is the Megan, Matt, and Ezra Show:
Megan McArdle: What I mean is, why do you drive on the parkway and park in the driveway? Isn’t that a contradiction? It seems to me that it’s immoral to fund social programs because black people smell, and also paradoxes, like why is a carpet neither a car nor a pet?
Matt Yglesias: I think Megan misses the point with her post on the morality of social spending.
Ezra Klein: Studies clearly show that black people do not, in fact, have a distinctive odor.
McArdle: When I said that it’s immoral to fund social programs, I was not referring to black people.
Yglesias: Oh, well okay then.
Klein: Oh, well okay then.
McArdle: What I was actually saying was, yes, social spending can be effective in certain ways, but isn’t it just legalized cannibalism, like lower-income Americans of many ethnicities have historically practiced?
Yglesias: I think Meg is barking up the wrong tree in her claim that social spending is…
Klein: I have some data here about the effectiveness of…
Tyler Cowan: Via Megan McArdle, here’s another good argument why smelly black people shouldn’t get any of your money.
Yglesias: AAAAARGH!!!
Klein: GAAAAAH!!!
Yglesias: LET’S KICK TYLER COWAN IN THE NUTS!!!
McArdle: Hi there, Tyler. I like you, Matt.
Yglesias: You! It! And the…! Oh, well okay then.
Klein: Tyler Cowan totally misses the point in his claim that the basis of social spending is premised on…
McArdle: I like you too, Ezra.
Klein: Because according to… Oh, well okay then.
Yglesias: Megan McArdle brings an interesting perspective to her latest post on the economics of having good hair. She does, in fact, have good hair. Howya doing over there, Megan?
McArdle: Doin’ great, Matt!
Yglesias: Cool, catch you later! Doop-de-doop, typin’ on the blog.
Klein: Researchin’ some policy, boop-de-doop-doop…
McArdle: [files nails]
Yglesias: Gettin’ hungry, havin’ a bagel.
McArdle: …Because what I really meant was, okay, carbon offsets, Third World, bla-bla-bla. So why don’t we just burn illegal immigrants for fuel? Are they full of carbon or something?
Yglesias: AAAAARGH!!!
Klein: GAAAAAH!!!
Glenn Reynolds: A good point from Megan McArdle: Can a market-based solution address future energy needs while curbing immigration?
McArdle: What I was saying was, isn’t carbon dioxide mostly carbon? I think carbon offsets are dodgy in many ways, but it’s important to be nice to poor people. Hey Matt, hey Ezra, you guys still there?
Yglesias: Uh, yeah.
Klein: Yeah, sure.
McArdle: I’m going to hold this football here, and you guys come kick it, okay?
Yglesias: Okay.
Klein: Watch out, ’cause I’m really going to kick that football this time.
Posted on September 7th, 2007 by Gavin M.
It’s either time to make fun of Andrew Golis’s appearance, or time to see what new conservative zaniness has come flapping up the old fish ladder — and peace be upon us, for here’s Kaye Grogan:
Above: Putting the ‘doy’ in ‘doyenne’
Scandals and national security . . . don’t mix
Kaye GroganWhat we desperately need in our leaders are “godly” men. Not just in name only, but in actions.
This is a column about Larry Craig, by the way. Perhaps he desperately needs a godly man in him (not just in name, but in actions), but Kaye has long been tired of homosexuals “forcing their lifestyle down our throats.” Is the matter “firmly in hand,” or is it all a lot of “lip service?” Let’s “find out!”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on September 7th, 2007 by Gavin M.
Megan McArdle’s ‘real point’ regarding supply-side economics, as of 5:34PM EST:
[…]
Overall, I’m mildly in favor of ratcheting back the Bush tax cuts, starting with the income breaks for the wealthiest brackets, until we hit budget balance. But on my list of policy priorities it’s somewhere around “What shall we do about France?”
[…]
It’s spending I care about.
Perhaps someday, someone will research this mysterious subject.
Above: Graph of uncertain origin
Nobody knows what the largest factor in the deficit might be, although we suspect the answer might be encoded in one of the jaggy, graphy shapes above, the nature of which is difficult to determine.
Megan McArdle’s ‘real point’ regarding supply-side economics, as of 2:34PM EST:
[…]
What I don’t think is that supply-side economics is dominating Republican policy, which is what Chait, and now Matt, and for all I know everyone to the left of Lincoln Chafee, are now claiming. To release a book subtitled “How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics” you need a little more than “sometimes, in the course of selling their policies, politicians make ludicrous claims based on discredited economic notions”, because that is not exactly a unipartisan vice. To subtitle your book that way, you need the most extreme form of supply-sidism to be the driving force behind Republican tax policy. And it just isn’t.
I don’t know where we ever got such an idea.
Above: Obscure business commentator
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on September 6th, 2007 by Gavin M.
Above: Toot toot! Climb aboard the Reading Railroad
Shorter Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds
- As a Libertarian, I seem to have skipped over the parts of Jack Goldsmith’s excellent new book that describe the Bush White House as an arrogant gang of torture criminals, so gladdened was I by those passages that seem to call for fewer legal restraints on the Bush Presidency.
Shorter Megan “Jane Galt” McArdle
- Having totally rewritten my arguments against Jon Chait’s new book about supply-side economics over the past few posts, which did not happen because I have only been clarifying my position, I must explain to my critics that my actual, real argument all along has been as follows (ahem): “Supply-siders haven’t had the kind of influence that Chait describes since the Reagan administration. And that’s because everyone observed the Reagan tax cuts opening up huge deficits.” In other words, as a Libertarian economic columnist, it has not affected my career arc that I am as ignorant as a sack of pine cones toward the fact that the Bush administration has been financing tax cuts through massive deficit spending. Whee! I am like a giant elf who loves discussing things!
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.
Norbizness adds: That second part wasn’t much shorter.
Indeed, let me try again.
Shorter Megan “Jane Galt” McArdle
- Whee! I am like a giant elf who loves discussing things!
Above: McArdle +/- gingertini = Milton Friedman^-10
All that’s really missing is the links from Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and other serious thinkers.
Posted on September 6th, 2007 by Travis G.
Above: Michael Medved, a nationally syndicated talk radio host,
is author of 10 non-fiction books, including Son of Golden Turkey Awards
Listen up, gang, Michael Medved’s thought of another one:
If preventing public sex in airport men’s rooms is important enough to justify the deployment of undercover cops, isn’t it similarly significant to avoid, at all costs, sexual encounters in military latrines?
Sure. Perhaps we should post undercover cops in there, too. However, that seems like a waste of resources, which I suppose diminishes the “at all costs” part. Perhaps some signs could be printed up and posted in each restroom, or a memo circulated.
Of course, advocates for gays in the military will insist that any such indulgence would involve a violation of the rules, with offenders facing stiff, severe consequences.
Heheh: “Stiff.”
Posted on September 6th, 2007 by Gavin M.
Gee, you know, one of these days I’m going to go on a road trip only to come back and find that nobody has posted anything.
…OH WAIT! OH NO!!!!
Erhm, let’s get the projector from the AV closet. How about a short educational film?
Heh-heh. ‘Toilet practices.’
Posted on September 5th, 2007 by Gavin M.
G’s elderly Malamute, Kotsie, died last Tuesday, and she gave us a picture to post in memoriam.
Above: A Good Dog
[Open dogs-allowed thread, no leashes.]