Category Archives: Economics

Barack Obama…

meet reality:

Whew! What happened? Well, that, no doubt, is what the Obama team must be wondering. It is not merely the president’s poll numbers which are crumbling; it is the premises which formed his world view and domestic agenda which are disintegrating. The world is a dangerous place with despots immune to even “smart diplomacy.” Governments really can’t spend their way to prosperity. And even in an economic recession America remains a right-of-center country.

Obama, it seems, never confronted a critical media or a viable political opponent who could effectively quiz him on his assumptions and policy prescriptions. He waltzed through an election on essentially a “not Bush” campaign and a cloud of feel-good messages ungrounded in the real world. But once in office he finds the world — filled with rogue states, recalcitrant laws of economics, squirrely citizens, and cold, hard budget numbers — is not so easily charmed. Facts are stubborn things, after all.

I always find hilarious the lack of irony with which these people presume to call themselves the “reality based community.”

At Least He’s Being Honest

Sort of:

I’m…glad to see that Ezra Klein is explicit about his acceptance that climate change is expected to have extremely limited effects on the United States for at least the next hundred years. I figure that ought to be pretty important when debating the proper policies for the government of the United States. On the other hand, we continue to disagree about the financial efficiency of the foreign aid program defined by transforming the energy sector of the American economy in order to very slightly ameliorate a predicted problem that might affect people who might live in low-lying equatorial regions of the world decades from now.

As Bjorn Lomborg would say, it’s a lousy deal. But of course, it’s not about economic efficiency. It’s about forcing everyone into the secular religion of our moral betters.

[Early afternoon update]

Keep the lights on! Fight the bill.

Major Economic Downturn

Women, children, minoritiesMen hit hardest:

The senior economists listened attentively as Gandy and Smeal and other advocates argued for a stimulus package that would add jobs for nurses, social workers, teachers, and librarians in our crumbling “human infrastructure” (they had found their testosterone-free slogan). Did Furman mention that jobs in the “human infrastructure”–health, education, and government–had increased by more than half a million since December 2007?

One could pardon him for not being argumentative. His boss at the economic council, Lawrence Summers, had become a national symbol of the consequences of offending feminist sensibilities and had been opposed by feminists in his appointment to the top White House post. Gandy and Smeal found their circle partners to be engaged and curious and were delighted that they stayed longer than scheduled: “We left feeling that all our preparation would bear fruit in the form of more inclusion of women’s needs, and we were right.”

They were right indeed. Our incoming president did what many sensible men do when confronted by a chorus of female complaint: He changed his plan.

No one will ever accuse him of being a strong man. Or a sensible one, actually.

Getting Their Wish

The “social progressives” are always complaining because we’re not more like Europe. Well, they can stop whining now:

The US unemployment rate exceeded Germany’s rate in April and was very close to the rate in France.

Spreading the wealth around. And the poverty.

[Update a few minutes later]

A depressing chart of how hard it will be to recover.

[Update a few minutes later]

My piece on Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxie is up at Pajamas Media (I wrote it a couple weeks ago, but Iran had kept it off the front page, and I have a feeling it will be relevant for a long time, unfortunately).

Househunting

In Flint, Michigan:

As the veteran of a brutal San Francisco home-buying odyssey, there’s no denying the appeal of a place where desperate Realtors sometimes offer up houses by the dozen. But this is more than a quest for cheap housing. I have an almost unhealthy attachment to Flint. I want to do something—anything—to help my hometown. Maybe a “summer place” in what has been ranked one of America’s most depressing cities can pump a little life into the local economy. And I fear that after 15 years in San Francisco—sometimes described as 49 square miles surrounded on all sides by reality—I’m losing touch with my roots, drifting uncomfortably far from the factory town my grandparents moved to at the turn of the 20th century.

How do I know this? Sometimes I fret about the high price of organic avocados. After growing up driving a Buick Electra 225, I now own a gutless four-cylinder Toyota Camry. And then there’s the fact that I’m so jittery in the place where I grew up that I’m sleeping with a bat.

There are some good neighborhoods there still, I think, it’s close to recreation up north (though Saginaw and Bay City more so) and it’s cheap living, if you can work from anywhere. Of course, you could even live up north (though the winters are tougher there than southeast Michigan). On the other hand, there are the Michigan taxes…