This has to be one of the weirdest blogging stories I’ve read in a while, if not ever.
Poison Gas And “Torture”
Cliff May has some thoughts.
Poison Gas And “Torture”
Cliff May has some thoughts.
Poison Gas And “Torture”
Cliff May has some thoughts.
What A Shocker
Supply-side economics works:
The country was facing the largest projected deficit in history when Bush promised to halve it as a percentage of GDP by 2009. Due to high wartime spending and the residual effects of the 2000
Great PR
If this is true, that’s the ultimate product placement–for something that doesn’t yet exist. (Not implying that Mark isn’t right–just that I didn’t follow the link, because I didn’t want to see the spoilers.)
Protecting Us From Ourselves
Thomas James (and Dr. Sanity) says that the media are treating the American public like children. Or irascible excitable red-state rednecks. Or perhaps they don’t make a distinction. Of course, the funny thing is that the Canadian press is doing the same to the Canadian people.
[Update on Monday evening]
Alan K. Henderson has further thoughts.
Dems Deride, Truth Dies
John Fund writes about the Democrats’ dilemma in their continuing attempts to rewrite history.
Most people, including me, are willing to discuss and debate the wisdom of both past and current policy in Iraq. But it’s not possible to debate seriously people who continue to insist that Bush lied, and that it was about oil, or avenging his daddy, or because he’s a bloodthirsty warmonger. And people who continue to spout such nonsense are (thankfully) going to continue to lose at the polls, regardless of how unhappy the American people are with the Iraq situation. Which is better news for the Republicans than they deserve.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should add that I actually agree with the Democrats that the administration has been incompetent in the war. The problem is that in this (as on almost all issues), the Dems would be even worse (in many cases, not even being willing to actually wage it). As I’ve said on numerous occasions, I wish that we’d had better choices in 2004.
Technical Difficulties
I got in all right last night, but my laptop’s hard drive is dying (wish I’d known that before I left–I would have brought my other one). I’m posting this from work, but won’t be able to do much of that, so posting may be light this week, until I get back to Florida Friday night.
Not Trade Deficit, Capital Surplus
The Economist Friday said:
In a rare instance of economic consensus, almost everyone now agrees that the current-account balance, which was over $800 billion in the red at the end of last year, is unsustainable.
They should know that there is no such thing as a consensus of economists. I am not a macro guy, but if the US economy continues to generate capital (intellectual property, companies with lots of educated workers, houses, etc.) at a tremendous rate, then the capital surplus will result in other countries giving us non-capital goods in exchange for our capital goods. A capital surplus and a trade deficit are the same thing.
For all our regulation, taxes and flaws in our judicial system, most of the rest of the globe has less rule of law, higher taxes and more flaws in their judicial systems. The US is a great place to make safer investments like real estate and blue chip corporate bonds. Do you think the Norweigians and Saudis invest their huge current account surplus in their own respectively not so dynamic and not so productive economies?
As I said before, our human and physical captial stock is growing by a lot. Even though the average house price went down for one quarter, it has been growing at 6.5% in money terms for 43 years or 2.1% accounting for inflation. That leads to $440 billion in appreciation of the existing capital stock. The number of homes has also been growing. I estimate this by looking at the home ownership rate, the number of people per household and the growing population. Together they indicate we add another 1.8% a year to the housing stock in numbers. (This could be offset by less rental housing capital, but I doubt it.) So that is about $800 billion we are adding to the housing capital stock and residential housing construction is just 3-4% of GDP.
We can grow the US owned capital stock forever and have plenty left over to sell to foreigners.