Of course, Mankiw could always reply that current marginal tax rates are so high that they have dampened his incentive to get the correct numbers.
Zing.
Tag: yep
As NAME ISSUE HERE has come to light, the Obama administration has resisted calls for a more forceful response, worried that added pressure might spook the banks and hobble the broader economy.
Stimulus, bank rescue, China, foreclosure; it applies all along. At each point there were arguments for not acting; but the cumulative effect has been drift, and a looming catastrophe in the midterms.
Or to put it another way, the administration has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And soon there won’t be any more opportunities to miss.
Paul Krugman, extending what we were talking about in the previous post.
Watching Christine O’Donnell debate Chris Coons last night, we were struck by how sensible a person like O’Donnell can seem, given our brain-dead political norms, if she has been prepared in a few modest ways. O’Donnell tossed off familiar claims about “supporting big government,” “raising taxes” and “supporting the special interests” (along with a few specialized inanities about having once been a “bearded Marxist”). But our discourse has been so dumb for so long, it truly sounded, by American norms, like she was making real statements.
Bob Somerby, getting it exactly right.
You want an existential threat to Our Republic (as the GOP so frequently labels everything, large or small)? This is it. Until somebody in the media goes to work on raising the level of discourse that is allowed to pass for debates and serious discussions in this country, and then continues working on that same issue for a decade or more, we’ll be one downturn, one election, one heartbeat away from utter disaster. Nobody else can do it, and nobody but nobody in the MSM seems at all interested in taking up the cause, even for an hour a week. Oh look, a shiny penny!
You want an existential threat to Our Republic (as the GOP so frequently labels everything, large or small)? This is it. Until somebody in the media goes to work on raising the level of discourse that is allowed to pass for debates and serious discussions in this country, and then continues working on that same issue for a decade or more, we’ll be one downturn, one election, one heartbeat away from utter disaster. Nobody else can do it, and nobody but nobody in the MSM seems at all interested in taking up the cause, even for an hour a week. Oh look, a shiny penny!
Will the “Real” McCain Please Stand Up?
…the McCain phenomenon has always baffled me. Even back in the glory days of the Straight Talk Express he seemed like a consummate phony to me, sucking up to reporters not because he was being unusually candid, but because it seemed like a good strategy to beat a well-financed guy who was running ahead of him. He’s always been nasty, he’s always been hot tempered, he’s always looked out for number one, and he’s always been willing to take whatever position was convenient at the time.
Yep. The media enjoyed the perception of total access, and thus created the myth of the maverick. As David Foster Wallace showed us (but whose text no longer appears to be online), the truth of “Bullshit 1” was always out there, they just refused to mention it. Too busy talking about Al Gore being told to wear un-American four button suits while discovering the Love Canal and then lying about these and other entirely media-created falsehoods.
It’s easier for [Democrats] to believe that their liberal and progressive base is naïve than to acknowledge that we are not alienated for their failure to pass appropriate legislation, but for their failure to fight for such legislation. And our upset with Obama is not that he didn’t accomplish what he couldn’t accomplish, but that he didn’t do the one thing he could do: consistently speak the truth, tell us and the country what was really happening in the corridors of power and what the constraints are that he was facing.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Daily (via brooklynmutt)
Yep, yep, yep, a million times: YEP.
Indeed this election really is all about The Democrat being a secret Socialist…and, as Chait notes: the obvious cure here is a big tax cut for the top 2%. What other possible course of action is even possible with a graph like this?
Now, [the GOP] will say, ‘Well, we’re going to cut spending.’ So you say, ‘Okay, what are you going to cut?’ And then what they say is, ‘Well, we’ll cut education by 20 percent. We’ll eliminate 200,000 children from early childhood education programs like Head Start. We’ll cut financial aid for 8 million college students.
At a time when the education of our country’s citizens is probably the best predictor of that country’s economic success, they think it’s more important to give another tax break to folks who are on the Forbes 400 list.
Now, I want to ask my Republican friends: Do you think China is cutting back on education? Do you think South Korea is making it harder for its citizens to get a college education? These countries aren’t playing for second place. And guess what. The United States doesn’t play for second place. We play for first place.
Barack Obama, finally playing for first place himself.
Twilight of the Bombs
How much did the Cold War cost everyone from 1948 to 1991, and how much of that was for nuclear weapons? The total cost has been estimated at $18.5 trillion, with $7.8 trillion for nuclear. At the peak the Soviet Union had 95,000 weapons and the US had 20 to 40,000. America’s current seriously degraded infrastructure would cost about $2.2 trillion to fix—all the gas lines and water lines and schools and bridges. We spent that money on bombs we never intended to use—all of the Cold War players, major and minor […]. Much of the nuclear expansion was for domestic consumption: one must appear “ahead,” even though numbers past a couple dozen warheads were functionally meaningless.
The Awlaki case speaks to something even more fundamental than law: Decent nations do not permit their governments to assassinate their own citizens. I am willing to give the intelligence community, the covert-operations guys, and the military proper a pretty free hand when it comes to dealing with dispersed terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But citizenship, even when applied to a Grade-A certified rat like Awlaki, presents an important demarcation, a bright-line distinction in our politics.
If Awlaki were to be killed on a battlefield, I’d shed no tears. But ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in Yemen or Pakistan is no different from ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in New York or Washington or Topeka — American citizens are American citizens, wherever they go. I’m an old-fashioned limited-government guy, and I am not willing to grant Washington the power to assassinate U.S. citizens, even rotten ones.
Kevin D. Williamson, writing for The National Review Online.
Yes, that’s right: I just gave the NRO a yep. That’s where we are. It is beyond belief that Obama, who the NRO folk would very likely identify as “Barack Hussein Obama, lately of Kenya: prove he’s not!!!,” is to the right of the very same NRO on this issue, and is making them uncomfortable with his administration’s aggressive stance on extra-judicial powers of the President. This is who we are. Unbelievable.
(via Peter Daou)
Yes, that’s right: I just gave the NRO a yep. That’s where we are. It is beyond belief that Obama, who the NRO folk would very likely identify as “Barack Hussein Obama, lately of Kenya: prove he’s not!!!,” is to the right of the very same NRO on this issue, and is making them uncomfortable with his administration’s aggressive stance on extra-judicial powers of the President. This is who we are. Unbelievable.
(via Peter Daou)
Lemkin 