Day: July 12, 2010

…its members are falling away; background sounds once familiar have been silenced. The jangle of the pay phone on the wall, the click of the lighter, the snap and hiss of a match being lighted.

To those retired players in New York City bars, add the hulking workhorse in the back of the pit. It played all night: thunk, thunk, thunk, as the coins dropped into the slot, followed by the grinding crank of unseen gears as the rod was yanked out. The short solo ended modestly, like a tap on a high hat, with the whisper of a pack of smokes wrapped in plastic film sliding into the tray below.

The cigarette machine.

–Michael Wilson, bringing the poetry in an elegiac piece in the NYT about the passing of the old-school mechanical cigarette machine.

I always liked the Art-O-Mat idea: cigarette pack sized art projects you could buy out of re-purposed machines. Gumballs for adults.

[You] should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes; surely Congress has the authority, and it would be right to – if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

John Kyl, apparently thinking he’s making sense on FoxNEWS Sunday.
So, translating this into the Earth language known as English: spending money on people who just need to suck it up and go die in the streets is always wrong, whether or not the cost of that spending has been offset by equivalent cuts or revenue from elsewhere.
Spending money to lower tax rates, on the other hand, is always right and, in fact, that money should never be offset; or at least an offset should never be an impediment to going right ahead and spending the money.
These people could very well be running the House next January and the whole country come 2012.
(via Ezra Klein)

As I understand the structure of the argument, [Josef] Joffe ridicules me because

  1. I have written a number of articles opposing fiscal austerity right now. This shows how foolish I am, because good economists never return to or elaborate on points they’ve made before. Milton Friedman wrote one article about the virtues of free markets, and never mentioned the subject again.
  2. European political leaders aren’t taking my advice. This also shows how foolish I am, because politicians always make the right decisions about economic policy.
Paul Krugman politely responds.