Well, Arnold Kling certainly isn’t mincing any words:
“I think about the stimulus as an economist but I feel it as a father. Barack Obama is destroying my daughters future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs. That’s how I feel, now back to how I think.”
As noted if you read the whole thing, this isn’t a “stimulus” plan. It’s a grow-government-and-make-us-all-increasingly-dependent-on-it plan. The welfare provision alone is proof of that.
It’s the return of malaise.
More confidence building, from the “indispensable” tax dodger who is now in charge of collecting our taxes:
Where was Geithner the Technocrat when you needed him? Because that is just what the markets need right now: a detailed, technocratic explanation of the way forward. This might have been the clincher as far as investors are concerned: “We are exploring a range of different structures for this program, and will seek input from market participants and the public as we design it.” In other words, “We have have concrete and high detailed plan to develop a concrete and highly detailed plan. We’ll get back to you.”
Oh, and it would be nice if he could do all that without painting such an unremittingly bleak picture of the economy. But more important is to change the mark-to-market accounting rules that are needlessly driving the financial system into the ground. Former FDIC Chairman William Issac has told the Securities and Exchange Commission that every money center bank in the 1980s would have gone bust had they been forced to sharply write down the value Latin American debt: “If we had followed today’s approach during the 1980s, we would have nationalized nearly all of the largest banks in this country and thousands of additional banks and thrifts would have failed. I have little doubt that the country would have gone from a serious recession into a depression.” Sound familiar?
And along with that change, how about embracing the private sector as the surest path back to prosperity? Cut corporate taxes. Suspend capital gains taxes. Indeed, one reason why Geithner may have been so vague about the bank rescue plan is that ultimately the plan may entail such high government borrowing that announcing it now would have derailed the current $800 billion Obama stimulus plan.
And wouldn’t that be a shame?
Speaking of cutting corporate tax rates, what would really help would be to simply eliminate them. A simple reduction in rate does nothing to reduce the high costs of bookkeeping and accounting that are made necessary by the need to sort out taxable deductions from other expenses. I’m sure that this is a huge drag on the economy (though it would still exist, unfortunately, for individuals). Eliminating the tax completely would free up vast amounts of corporate wealth for more productive activity.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Well, people do laugh at clowns:
The laughter was at its height when Obama officials explained that the White House planned to guarantee a wide swath of toxic assets — which they referred to as “legacy assets” — but wouldn’t be asking Congress for money. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a bailout opponent in the fall, asked the officials to give Congress the total dollar figure for which they were on the hook. The officials said that they couldn’t provide a number, a response met by chuckling that was bipartisan, but tilted toward the GOP side. By guaranteeing the assets, Geithner hopes he can persuade the private sector to purchase a portion of them.
Financial messes like this are fundamentally a crisis of confidence. The Dow plunged 400 points after the news conference. I think that the Geithner pick is turning out to be a disaster, on multiple levels.
[Another update]
More thoughts from Megan McArdle:
I don’t envy Geithner his position. But he’s known this was coming for months. I expected a little more than telling us that he wanted to spend a lot of money to help banks clean up their balance sheets. We knew that much already.
I’m glad I don’t have his job, but I wish that someone else did. And the buck stops with the man who appointed him.
Jon Goff has a proposal for doing lunar missions with a bi-elliptic transfer. It makes a lot of sense, actually, for Low Lunar Orbit, or deep space, though I’m not sure there’s any benefit for a Lagrange point, because the plane change out at that distance doesn’t cost much anyway (one of the many reasons that I find Lagrange points preferable to LLO).
The basic idea is to do the plane change at a very high altitude. In fact, this is a technique that can make sense even for LEO plane changes, if they’re big enough. I forget where the crossover is, but there is a certain amount of plane change where it is actually cheaper to go out to GEO (or higher) and back than to do it with a single burn in LEO. We looked at it a lot back in the eighties when we were doing tug studies.
He claims that there is a consensus among economists that we must pass this bill quickly. But no such thing exists.
Here’s what looks to be a great site for orbital mechanics, with lots of software, free and otherwise.
AP is actually fact checking President Obama’s nonsense about pork and earmarks.
Some thoughts from (space lawyer) Glenn Reynolds.
Thomas Sowell has some useful thoughts.
So, I’m trying to import my Perl-generated file as a CSV into Open Office. Apparently, if the data coming into a cell is of the form “D.D.D” where “Ds” are digits, it obviously and absolutely must be a date, and it converts the incoming cell to that format.
Well, no. I wanted it to be (for example) literally “1.3.5.” Really. No kidding. It’s not 01/03/05. But it won’t let me do it.
I don’t want to have to manually go in and change the format for each cell where this happens, and even if I did, there’s no obvious way to do it and retain the original info without manually retyping the number with a single quote in front. Is there an Open Office guru out there?
BTW, I really appreciate the help with the Perl problem. It was invaluable (which means, it was very useful, but I don’t know how to pay for it, or what it was worth to those providing it).
OK, so we have a bill that has passed both the House and the Senate, both of which are controlled by the Democrats. In both houses, they were rushed through with little debate, and in the House, it was almost entirely crafted by the Democratic leadership, without even significant input from the Blue Dogs, let alone the Republicans. It is hundreds of pages, and totals close to a trillion dollars (a mind-numbing number that may necessitate updating the old Dirksen quote) in new spending, paid for with money that the nation doesn’t have. It has many items in it that are not obviously aimed at stimulating the economy, but rather in advancing various social and political goals, but it’s hard to be sure because few have had the opportunity to even read, let alone comprehend the whole thing.
Now which is the more likely scenario?
A. It is the output of a sober, long-debated process that was totally focused on improving the American economy, carefully considering the potential unintended consequences of every item in the bill, with associated committee hearings and qualified witnesses, or
B. It is an overnight cut’n’paste concatenation of every item on pent-up Democrats’ wish lists going back to 1994, when they lost control of the Congress, because everyone wants to get a ride on the late-Christmas tree that is sure to go through via fearmongering by a popular new president.
Come on, folks. William of Ockham had just the tool for this conundrum.
I know where my money is.