Six reasons it can help the GOP win the senate.
Category Archives: Economics
Against Editors
Here is the traditional career track for someone employed in journalism: first, you are a writer. If you hang on, and don’t wash out, and manage not to get laid off, and don’t alienate too many people, at some point you will be promoted to an editor position. It is really a two-step career journey, in the writing world. Writing, then editing. You don’t have to accept a promotion to an editing position of course. You don’t have to send your kids to college and pay a mortgage, necessarily. If you want to get regular promotions and raises, you will, for the most part, accept the fact that your path takes you away from writing and into editing, in some form. The number of pure writing positions that offer salaries as high as top editing positions is vanishingly small. Most well-paid writers are celebrities in the writing world. That is how few of them there are.
Here is the problem with this career path: writing and editing are two completely different skills. There are good writers who are terrible editors. (Indeed, some of the worst editors are good writers!) There are good editors who lack the creativity and antisocial personality disorders that would make them great writers. This is okay. This is natural. It is thoroughly unremarkable for an industry to have different positions that require different skill sets. The problem in the writing world is that, in order to move up, the writer must stop doing what he did well in the first place and transition into an editing job that he may or may not have any aptitude for.
Engineering has a similar problem, in that if you want to advance, you often have to go into management, even though a lot of good engineers are terrible managers.
The Job Crisis
Unlike Clinton’s lies in 1992, this really is the worst economy since the Depression. And for many of the same reasons — government meddling in it.
Extraterrestrial Resources
The next Mars rover will generate oxygen from the atmosphere.
It’s a small step, but a lot better than nothing.
Reagan Versus Obama
Comparing the economic legacies.
It’s not really fair, though. One president knew how to allow the economy to create wealth. The other only knows about, and cares about, redistributing it.
[Friday-morning update]
Post recession, one third of Americans think they’re worse off.
Pretty sure the polling wouldn’t have indicated that in 1986. Of course, the Obama defenders will say that those deluded people have false consciousness.
[Bumped]
When Regulation Kills
Let Africa have a potential weapon against ebola.
The overcautiousness over the past half century as a result of thalidomide has probably killed millions.
Millennials And Workforce Participation
Remember when Bill Clinton lied his way into office in 1992, claiming that it was the “worst economy in fifty years” when in fact it hadn’t been that bad and the recession had actually ended? Well, it really really is the worst economy in seventy years now, and it’s due to the kind of government interference in the economy and war on business that caused it the last time, in the Roosevelt administration:
It seems rather perplexing that the Los Angeles Times could try to creatively rename unemployed millennials trying to survive by working a bunch of “off-the-books jobs for cash to survive as ‘freelancing’”. But the simple facts are that businesses have adapted to the Obama Administration’s taxes, regulations, and the “Affordable Care Act.” Add the burden of Governor Brown’s tax increase to the highest level in the nation, and California millennials are rewarded, according to the Times, with “16.2% of Californians — or about 6.2 million — were either jobless, too discouraged to seek work, working less than they’d like, or in off-the-books jobs.”
It’s not actually perplexing at all, of course.
[Update a few minutes later]
Three quarters of Americans think that their childrens’ lives will be worse than theirs.
They will, if we don’t get a huge change in direction, back to the Republic and liberty.
[Update a few more minutes later]
From apathy to dependence:
Tyler went on to suggest that democracies tended to go through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
It’s ironic that it was Joe Biden who said that it was the Republicans who “wanted to put y’all back in chains.”
[Update a while later]
First link was wrong. Fixed now.
[Update a couple minutes later]
A glimmer of hope from the generation that has been the most abused by these little tyrants:
“An overwhelming majority of these Millennial-aged voters actually think government aid does more harm than good, that the government is at its max when it comes to helping the poor, and – get this – that people on the government dole have it way too easy.”
Being underemployed and underpaid while having to support people who don’t work at all will have that effect.
Leftist Wonks
How Halbig demonstrates that they’re not very good at their jobs:
For a movement that so prides itself on being the vanguard of wonky wonkery on wonkiness, Cohn’s admissions are rather stunning. It’s one thing to believe event X is more likely than event Y, but to write off event Y as unimaginable? To ignore entirely a specific provision of law that says event Y is eminently possible? That’s a special kind of wonkery right there.
“But his 2010 comments didn’t really address the subsidy issue that was central to Halbig,” you might say, “so what’s your point?” That’s a fair question, and I don’t mean to pick on Cohn, who has regularly contributed very helpful information for many years now.
His remarks are important, though, because they reveal the massive gap between what self-styled progressives wonks think they know and what they actually know. That gap becomes increasingly relevant when these same wonks claim that their unparalleled coverage of the bill in 2009 and 2010 magically grants them intimate knowledge of not just the bill’s text, but also the innermost thoughts of the bill’s authors and supporters.
It’s not the only example, but it’s more glaring than most.
Highway Funds
Here’s a crazy idea: Let’s spend them on highways.
The Age Of The Robots
What will we do if and when there are no more jobs?