Day: October 5, 2010

There’s a trap, and it’s the same thing that happened with fiscal stimulus. You do something in the right direction that’s inadequate, and then people say, well, that didn’t work, and instead of increasing the dosage and proving it right, you give the thing up altogether.
All of this is very familiar if you studied Japan in the ‘90s. In fact, we’re doing worse than the Japanese did. Our monetary policy is a bit more aggressive, but our fiscal policy has been less aggressive. We have a larger output gap than they did, and we’ve had a surge in unemployment that they never had, and our political will to act has been exhausted much faster than theirs was. On the current track, we’re going to look at Japan’s lost decade as a success story compared to us.

Paul Krugman bringin’ the optimism.

National DNC ad You Will Never See

Voice: South Fulton firefighters from Obion, Tennessee, last week stood by and watched as a family’s home burned down because their services were available by subscription only, and the family had not paid the $75 fee. Outrageous? That’s not what conservatives think.
Kevin Williamson: …for their trouble, the South Fulton fire department is being treated as though it has done something wrong, rather than having gone out of its way to make services available to people who did not have them before. The world is full of jerks, freeloaders, and ingrates — and the problems they create for themselves are their own. These free-riders have no more right to South Fulton’s firefighting services than people in Muleshoe, Texas, have to those of NYPD detectives.
Jonah Goldberg: letting the house burn […] will probably save more houses over the long haul. I know that if I opted out of the program before, I would be more likely to opt-in now. No solace to the homeowner, but an important lesson for compassionate conservatives like our own Dan Foster [who came out for saving the house anyway] (Zing!).
John Derbyshire: I am entirely with the South Fulton fire department here. In the terms of Nico Colchester’s great 1996 essay, they are being crunchy rather than soggy […] One of the duties of conservatives in this soggy fallen world is to stand up for crunchiness. For the fire department to have extinguished the Cranicks’ fire would have been soggy, even aside from the considerable degree of sogginess it would have left on the property.
Voice: “Compassionate” conservatism means core serivices like police and fire departments are only for the wealthy. “Compassionate” conservatism means letting your house burn down over a $75 fee. Ask your representatives where they stand on “compassionate” conservatism.