…that the president doesn’t read much. I’d be willing to bet that one of the things he hasn’t read is Hayek. Or Friedman. Or Sowell. If he had, he wouldn’t be such an economic ignoramus.
Speaking of which, IBD:
Only minutes after her department reported that payrolls had shed another 131,000 positions in July, there was Secretary Hilda Solis speaking brazenly of the “strong and immediate action” the White House had taken to save or create “more than 2.5 million American jobs.”
But as the market action showed, investors could see she didn’t know what she was talking about.
But then, Solis is no different from any number of administration officials who by their comments or actions demonstrate almost daily that they know nothing about creating jobs or anything else to improve the economy.
And why should they? There’s never been an administration led by so few people with any experience in the private sector — including the president, the vice president and even the treasury secretary, who last week wrongly called it a “myth” that raising taxes on high-income Americans would hurt small business.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
Rand,
When you walk into the office already knowing everything that needs to be known, of what use is reading? If he wanted different ideas than his own, he’d have appointed people with such ideas as advisers. He didn’t because he doesn’t. Remember, when you are already at the top of the heap, there is no where to go but………oh damn!
‘Yeah, you have very little chance to really read. I basically floss my teeth and watch Sports Center.’
It shows.
Before he’s done he will have saved ten trillion jobs. All those corpses that voted for him in Chicago need work too. How to get to ten trillion? Well, he’ll just save the same job over and over and over…
If he reads he might come across an idea that upsets his world view. Much, much safer to watch Sports Center.
“Well, he’ll just save the same job over and over and over…”
I bet you thought you were being funny, and yet several temporary census workers reported being let go and re-hired repeatedly.
When you have a guy in his 40s who has basically accomplished nothing, it’s telling that he’s writted (allegedly) two autobiographies. Reading, not so much. And yet, we were repeatedly told how intelligent Obama is with very little in the way of evidence to back up the claim. Maybe he appears intelligent to a bunch of dumb asses (channeling my inner Red Foreman) but to the rest of us…
Bill Clinton was touted as “Mensa material” in 1993 in the organization’s own magazine despite never having taken an IQ test that I knew of.
Meanwhile, known ignoramus George W. Bush got better grades than either Al Gore or John Kerry…
Now who’s intellectually incurious?
No, you wingnuts don’t get it — he’s so intelligent that he already knows what’s in those books. The information needs flow only one way — from his Christ-like visage down to the fever swamps where you Neanderthals live, see…
I think we’ll lose many more jobs by this November, and more still by November 2012. And here’s hoping one changes hands in January 2013.
Slange!
The ability you have to comment on things you actually don’t appear to have read is wonderful.
The quote actually contains all the data you need.
” ‘Well, yeah, but come on. I’m out here on the campaign trail with you, you’re up even earlier than I am, and I’ve been carrying around this Philip Roth book with me for two months and I’m yet to even crack it.'”
This gives zero information about the president’s actual reading habits outside of the campaign trail.
Frankly, I’m surprised he had time to floss.
And amusingly, the next paragraph in the interview starts with:
“But he’s a great fan of Philip Roth, so we got talking about him.”
Anybody that can carry a book around for two months without cracking it open is no reader. Try again Daveon.
If you read the piece again you might note that the interviewer was the one who hadn’t cracked the book.
Try again Ken.
I’ll even repost the bit for you again:
‘Well, yeah, but come on. I’m Michael Powellout here on the campaign trail with you Obama, you’re up even earlier than I am, and I’ve been carrying around this Philip Roth book with me for two months and I’m yet to even crack it.’”
Does that help?
Geez. I thought *I* was the one with apparent comprehension problems.
He’s never read Friedman?
Tom will be so disappointed….
Meanwhile, known ignoramus George W. Bush got better grades than either Al Gore or John Kerry…
It’s safe to say he got better grades than Obama as well, unless you have proof to show me I’m wrong.
Heck, Obama didn’t even have time to read the 15 page Arizona law.
I’ll even repost the bit for you again:
‘Well, yeah, but come on. I’m Michael Powellout here on the campaign trail with you Obama, you’re up even earlier than I am, and I’ve been carrying around this Philip Roth book with me for two months and I’m yet to even crack it.’”
Does that help?
That might be more meaningful if Obama’s response wasn’t “… [I] watch sports center”.
No, not really, but nice try.
Oh, and a nice way to dodge the “He actually laughed at that point” bit.
A sense of humour? Heaven forbid!
I should probably cut back on my reading a little bit so I’ll have time to floss.
This gives zero information about the president’s actual reading habits outside of the campaign trail.
There has never been a time when Obama has been “outside of the campaign trail.” Your point is meaningless.
Shorter Daveon: “LEAVE Obama ALONE!” *wail*
Bush-era tax cuts expiring == raising taxes on rich people.
Framing the debate really is the first and last battle.
Reading Hayek, Friedman and Sowell might reinforce some good instincts about freedom, responsibility, and precaution, but I wouldn’t say failing to do so makes you an economic nitwit. Not when discussing a field that has yet to produce reliable forecasting in any particular time frame or at any scale of interest. I guess that’s why Sowell and a lot of conservative and libertarian economists got out of the academic publishing game entirely. Shame really, the Left now enjoys a decisive advantage in handwaving with math and models in both macro and micro.
http://theinfosphere.org/images/thumb/8/8f/VoodooEconomists.png/225px-VoodooEconomists.png
You forgot the link.
I can’t even watch that. Titus, yer killin’ us.
a field that has yet to produce reliable forecasting
Huh? It’s a dynamic field with a lot of variables, but that doesn’t mean they can’t show relationships that hold true… reliably.
The problem is liars denying the truth of certain relationships between actions and results for their own political advantage.
Public spending reduces private spending. A relationship that is obvious if you give it two seconds thought, but that doesn’t stop loudmouths from denying it.
Um, that’s precisely what it means.
How wonderful it must be to attribute disagreement to dishonesty.
Well that’s obviously false. Both real GDP and federal outlays have trended upwards as far back as we have data for both. Does this mean you’re mistaken, want to clarify, or are–by your rules–a liar?
Both real GDP and federal outlays have trended upwards
Thank you for providing a PERFECT EXAMPLE of how some economist lie.
What you’ve done is add another variable… growth. Here’s that two seconds of thought I mentioned which you need…
Where does public spending come from? Taxes? Give that man a ceegar.
Taxes come from where? Private people and companies.
Now this is real hard but I have faith in you (faith that you’ll willfully miss the point.) If these private people have less money because the government took it. Do they have more or less money to spend?…
Bzzzzzt. Your two seconds are up.
You’re also missing the point that even with growth of both going up, taxes still reduce private spending from even more private growth… So even throwing in another variable, as liars like to do to confuse the issue…
The statement is still true.
Sometimes they lie by leaving out a variable they should not. For example the willful confusion of tax rates and revenue. In this case they talk about the result of changing the tax rate and willfully ignore a dependent variable… changing the tax rate changes people behavior.
How wonderful it must be to attribute disagreement to dishonesty.
When does disagreement become dishonestly? When an obviously intelligent person continues to miss the point for no obvious reason. Simple points that really can’t be argued. Like…
Public spending reduces private spending.
Forgive me Rand, I’m done.
I think it’s a prime example of how you have no idea what you’re talking about, but we’re all entitled to our opinions.
What I’ve done is parametrized in time two independent variables–real GDP and federal outlay–and noted that they both trend upwards, in direct contradiction to your hypothesis that public spending reduces private spending. You apparently find that objectionable for some reason. Why?
I’m certain it took you more than two seconds, and you’ve still nothing to show for it.
Non sequitur. No raised the issue of the source public spending, but you did propose that said spending reduces private spending. This is obviously not the case. You’ve already identified why that is; growth, yet you insist your hypothesis is valid. By your own rules, does this make you a liar?
What point? You have no point now. The one point you did have didn’t survive comparison with the data.
Congratulations, you can subtract. What does this have to do with anything?
I don’t remember agreeing to playing economic Calvinball with you.
I can either generously assume you’re stating a qualitative intuition (which I share), or that you’re making a quantitative argument that taxation always and everywhere depresses private growth. If the latter, then the volatility in macro–let alone micro–indicators clearly denies you the evidence needed to prove this hypothesis. This is probably because we’re in a regime of taxation vis a vis private sector economic activity where fiscal policy in the main has no clearly correlated effect. Intuitively, this should make some sense to you, since the government doesn’t hoard taxed income but releases it back into the economy.
Which brings me to my original point; macroeconomic forecasts in time frames of interest (quarterly to decadal) are so unreliable that their accuracy approaches that of flipping coin.
We’ve already established that by your own rules, you are a liar. Glass houses and all that.
Then certainly you should be able to provide evidence. Otherwise, why not just simply declare this to be your own value judgement and leave it at that?
“Intuitively, this should make some sense to you, since the government doesn’t hoard taxed income but releases it back into the economy.”
And how much of the “stimulus” has actually been spent so far?
Shorter Daveon: “LEAVE Obama ALONE!” *wail*
Hammer him all you like, I honestly don’t care about right wing fantasies, but, in this case, the article doesn’t even say what you think it does!
Sometimes they lie by leaving out a variable they should not. For example the willful confusion of tax rates and revenue. In this case they talk about the result of changing the tax rate and willfully ignore a dependent variable… changing the tax rate changes people behavior.
In other words, when an obviously intelligent person disagrees with your unevidenced, unquantified, and barely intelligible reduction of economics to alchemy. Seriously, I would not be surprised if this sort of know-nothing belligerence is the key reason why economic libertarians get their butts handed to them not only by Democrats, but by their own political allies. It isn’t even the rejection of incessant, unreliable modeling in favor of principled, limited–dare I say, conservative–accounting. It’s the attempt to elevate such intuition to general scientific fact that diminishes its credibility. And at the end of the day, it loses to charts and numbers every single time.
Except, of course, we have data falsifying this assertion–your malapropistic handwaving aside.
Depends on how you do the accounting. If you pretend that appropriated funds are on hand, then about half. If you acknowledge revenue, then its 100 percent as the feds are currently in deficit.
If you’re making a back door comment on the effectiveness of the stimulus, you’re more or less preaching to the choir. The forecasts for unemployment were obviously way off when they were made, and there’s no way to tell whether tweaking the coefficients to make backcasts–i.e., jobs created or saved–should strike Americans as a dubious practice.
Presley Cannady Says:
August 14th, 2010 at 7:27 am
“What I’ve done is parametrized in time two independent variables–real GDP and federal outlay–and noted that they both trend upwards, in direct contradiction to your hypothesis that public spending reduces private spending. ”
Actually, it doesn’t contradict it, because you fail to distinguish which data history leads the other. You and your leftist cohorts claim that public spending happens with GDP growth as a result. The record shows you lie. What in fact happens is that GDP growth happens, which expands economic activity, which expands tax revenue, which enables greater public spending. But I shan’t further confuse you with the truth…
And that is relevant why?
First, I suggest you pull your head out of your ass long enough to find an actual leftist to debate. Second, once you find one, keep your head out of your ass long enough to avoid making this “correlation equals causation” mistake again. The record no more gives lie to the hypothesis that public spending leads GDP growth than it falsifies it.
Sombody needs a bitch-slap. Why does this nice aerospace blog keep attracting left-wing trolls?
Probably because your IFF is on the fritz.
This stuff isn’t complicated.
Government raises taxes, taking away some of the incentive to produce, leading to less production.
Government then spends money, often paying people to do stuff less productive than the private sector would demand for the money, further depressing the economy. In some cases people are paid allowing them to be totally unproductive, or worse.
Money is merely a token of value. The true measure of the economy is the goods and services produced. Injecting money does no good if it doesn’t lead to production of value.
Presley, you need some guidance in a real simple thought process. K.I.S.S.
Public spending reduces private spending.
To refute that statement, all you have to do is refute either one of these.
1) The government gets it’s money by taxation (by any name.)
2) People with less money have less to spend.
Refute either one of those and you’ve won the argument. Do anything else and you’ve lost. Is that so hard?
Unfortunately, it is. On considerably more levels than we’re considering here.
On the other hand, government also spends money where market availability is non-existent or too weak to sustain itself to meet a particular public need. Aerospace, for example.
You might say that finding the balance where public outlays produce diminishing returns and hurt the economy is a great challenge in macro. Of course, that leaves the reader with the impression that economics is an otherwise established science.
The economy is goods and services produced. Money serves as a convenient measure; it is the information transmitted through the economy about the value of a good or service at any particular point in space and time. Our markets result from imperfect knowledge of this aggregate information at the micro-scale, yielding profit and thus incentive to continue producing. Or so theory goes.
Undoubtedly. Optimal strategy for spending (or saving)–not simply on behalf of the public but by agents in the free market –is also a great problem in economics. As libertarians and conservatives, we’re inclined to spreading decisionmaking along with risk as much as possible out of sheer caution. Liberals, on the other hand, seem utterly too comfortable placing the reins in the hands of a few while–to borrow one of their recently favored phrases–“socializing the costs.”
If Obama wants to understand the Tea Parties, he needs to read Langston Hughes. While the author had a different people and situation in mind, despair is universal – and sometimes it freakin’ explodes.
He should be thankful that the explosion is more like 1989 East Germany than 2010 Greece. Of course, in Greece it’s the parasites and not the producers who were exploding…
My guess is you read that as “Keep Insisting on Stupid Sloppiness.”
You’ve definitely got the repetitive aspect of KISS down pat.
Easy. I’ll take 1). Government rakes revenue from subway fare. What do I win?
Well, that’s not exactly the case, but I did so anyway. If you had any idea where to start defending your hypothesis, you’d realize that it is somewhat more difficult to falsify than simply showing the silliness of one of the two ridiculous premises you mistakenly believe underlies it. But only somewhat, as I’ve already done so in previous comments.
I wonder if Obama read the book that Hugo Chavez handed him. We know he certainly wasn’t too interested in reading the simple letter Gov. Perry of Texas tried to hand him. Unlike Hugo’s book, he shrugged away from the letter like there was a coiled up snake waiting to jump out of it.