Category Archives: Economics

The Real Fat-Cat Party

Thoughts from Jonah Goldberg:

My biggest objection is not to what isn’t true about the claim that the Right is the handmaiden to big business, it’s to what is true. Too many Republicans think being pro-business is the same as being pro-market. They defend the status quo against bad reforms and think they’ve defended economic freedom. The status quo stinks. And the sooner Republicans learn that, the sooner they’ll deserve to win again.

Of course, there are a lot of things they’ll have to learn to deserve to win again.

More Evidence That These Are Religious Fanatics

After doing yeoman’s duty in going through the CRU emails, Steve Hayward notes:

How is it possible for a group of smart people to write over 1,000 e-mails over the course of a decade without a single shred of wit or humor in any of them?

As the title says…

And as Mark Steyn notes at the link, the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin has been excommunicated.

A View From Inside The Sausage Factory

…from someone who escaped:

In Washington, he used his BlackBerry to determine the bailout sum presented to Congress. His arithmetic: “We have $11 trillion residential mortgages, $3 trillion commercial mortgages. Total $14 trillion. Five percent of that is $700 billion. A nice round number.”

Looking back, he says, he is more confident about the two-by-sixes.

“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’ We didn’t know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.”

I’m glad he got out, and wish him well in his new life in California. But it doesn’t instill confidence in the government, nor should it.

More Climaquiddick

California style:

Crafty use of statistics, lack-of-transparency, wild projections about future calamity requiring government intervention now…Hmmmm.

If all of this is sounding familiar there’s a reason. Stefan Rahmstorf is one of the CRU e-mail clatch and a contributor to Real Climate. For instance, here is an e-mail in which he is desperately seeking help writing a reply to a critic.

Based on this alarmist study, Schwarzenegger and the State of California have put together…a…video which includes the Rahmstorf’s prediction of a 4 foot sea level rise by 2100 and images of San Francisco inundated by rising seas.

By the way, the California Energy Commission which is pushing this is the same group that outlawed future sales of my TV a few weeks ago. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it since TVs don’t work well underwater anyway.

I’ll be OK. We’re a couple dozen feet above at least, with dunes between us and the beach a mile and a half away.