Hate corporate power?

If we really hate corporate power, we'd probably want to look at the things that entrench it--like heavy regulatory burdens that are more easily borne by large, powerful companies.

Recyling

Mandatory household recycling is a money loser.

For materials with no natural markets for their reuse, the benefits of recycling are less than its costs – and, therefore, government efforts to promote such recycling waste resources.

Obama's faulty economics thinking

Peter Morici writes:

Regarding the financial crisis, the president assigns blame to the lack of regulation. The facts are banks got into trouble making loans on real estate assigned inflated values to borrowers who could not repay. Loans were bundled into bonds and sold to investors. When not enough unwitting fools bought bonds, the big Wall Street banks put unsold securities into offshore special investment vehicles whose potential losses were not supposed to be a claim on bank capital. Other firms, like AIG, sold insurance against potential losses on bonds without sufficient assets to back up that protection.

When the loans and bonds failed, it turned out those special investment vehicles were indeed a drain on bank capital, and Citibank, AIG and others needed bailouts to avoid the complete collapse of bank credit available to the economy.

All this was a massive accounting fraud, something big public accounting firms were supposed to catch in audits of banks but didn't — a failure Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, passed in 2002, were supposed to avert.
The solution imposed by the Dodd-Frank bill is to ban propriety securities trading by banks and impose burdensome lending regulations on surviving community and regional banks, which were more victims of the bubble than malefactors in the crisis.

Proprietary trading had little to do with instigating the mess, and profits from trading actually helped big banks rebuild balance sheets more quickly. And now onerous regulations have hamstrung community and regional banks and are forcing them to seek buyouts by larger Wall Street banks, which caused the crisis and have little interest in lending to small and medium sized businesses that create jobs.

When faced with resulting problems, the president explains he is saving the country from unstable growth of decades past. Yet, economists of all stripes refer to the 20 years prior to the crisis as the "Great Moderation," owing to exceptional stability in economic activity and employment not before experienced in U.S. history.

President Obama persistently preaches that solar, wind and other alternative technologies will make America energy independent and sustain economic superpower status. Yet, any reasonable reading of the prospective economic viability of these technologies, and any assessment of the likely transition of the automobile industry to hybrids and electrics, indicate the nation will remain significantly dependent on petroleum for at least the next two decades.

Yet, with oil above $100 a barrel handicapping the U.S. economy, the president imposes regulations that all but shut down deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and other offshore locations where the real potential for new American oil supplies lies. Instead, he plows money into projects like Solyndra that independent financial analysts predicted would likely fail.

Americans pay at least 50 percent more than Europeans for health care, often with less satisfactory outcomes, because the federal government pays for more than half of health care but does not impose price and access controls as effective as those in Europe.

Obamacare simply doesn't fix what's broke. Instead, it raises taxes to provide more subsidies and imposes more mandates on businesses. Any economist will tell you subsidies and mandates to purchase a product raise its price, and health care is no exception.

Somebody tell the OWS

California Teachers Association and other teachers unions are corporations.

Why Obama opposed SOPA and PIPA

Joel Kotkin: President Obama Courts Silicon Valley’s New Digital Aristocracy

Even when they’ve competed with and acted like more established power brokers, the digital ruling class are treated with kid gloves compared to other wealthy elites, rarely suffering the disdain aimed at amoral bankers and at Hollywood’s general venality. Instead, the creators of our iPhones, social networks and Twitter accounts are held up as tool makers and business titans....

The new plutocrats are unburdened by the obligations that come with existing large institutions; with no union presence, they don’t have to worry about anxious retirees or redundant older workers. Green pet causes that align with their financial interests buy more cover from the left, while conservatives, who rarely see anything wrong with extreme wealth, seem somewhat unconscious about the political orientation of the emerging new elite. Ninety-two percent of Facebook executive donations so far this year went to Democrats. This exceeds even the rock-solid support the Democrats enjoy among more established firms like Google and Apple, where support for Democrats runs to the high 80s.

The Obama administration’s opposition to the anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA came despite intense lobbying for the bill by his party’s long-time allies in Hollywood. Whatever the bills’ failings, their defeat also formally introduced the new power of the digerati moguls and their millions of followers....

In California, the alliance between progressive Democrats and high tech is palpable. The digital elite has been a consistent backer of Gov. Jerry Brown’s jihad on greenhouse gases, helping finance the campaign against a 2010 measure intended to reform state’s draconian and likely job-killing energy and land-use laws. Google has emerged both as a key backer of the state’s climate-change politics and sought to profit by investing nearly a billion dollars in renewable-energy companies. These firms in turn depend on the state’s strict mandates on utilities to use “green” electricity for their revenues. It’s no coincidence that prominent valley VCs have been particularly active in alternative-energy firms such as Solyndra.

Access Denied

That's the message I get when I try to access

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/02/climate-change-scepticism

The page adds: You are not authorized to access this page.

Here's a couple of screen caps:

Weird.

Oh, it's been updated.

Does Obama hate renters and people who live on interest earnings?

Does Obama hate renters? Or is this supposedly smart guy unaware of their existence?

I haven’t heard one word about the poor, struggling renters, the ones who scrimped and saved and put money away each month towards a down payment, who kept the credit cards paid off, stayed out of trouble, and lived modestly, and thought that maybe, just maybe, the fall in housing prices meant that they, finally, could afford a house — maybe one of those foreclosed units down the street. These people are Bastiat’s unseen. For them, Obama’s housing plan is a giant slap in the face. To hell with the prudent. Party on, profligate! Now that’s what I call moral hazard.

Does Obama hate people who live on interest earnings? Or is this supposedly smart guy unaware of their existence?

Romney & the Republicans

A party with irreconcilable goals:

The distinction between Romney’s support for properly managed stimulus and his criticism of the Obama plan as passed is murky enough to give even his advisers pause. Asked over the phone whether it would be fair to say that Romney supports stimulus spending as long as it’s the right kind of stimulus spending, Romney’s policy advisor starts to answer, then pauses for several seconds before responding hesitantly that he has the impression that’s true but will need to check further.

...

Romney’s insistence on having it both ways at every opportunity reveals not just his own incoherence but a party with irreconcilable goals: a leaner federal government that cuts no major programs, a balanced budget with a beefed-up defense budget, entitlements that are reformed and reduced but never cut or changed.

Making schools effective

Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City

We find that traditionally collected input measures--class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree--are not correlated with school effectiveness. In stark contrast, we show that an index of five policies suggested by over forty years of qualitative research--frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations--explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness.

The reason Tsai lost?

DPP reiterates denial of '92 consensus'

Taipei, Jan. 12 (CNA) The "1992 consensus" espoused by the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communist Party of China does not exist, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said at an international press conference in Taipei on Thursday.

Speaking on behalf of DPP Chairwoman and presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen who was on the campaign trail in Taoyuan County, Hsiao Bi-khim described the "92 consensus" as a term invented in 2000. No such consensus was reached with China in 1992, she told the reporters from over 30 countries around the world.

Supposedly that's the reason she lost: this talk infuriated the Communists and terrified Taiwanese businessmen came out to drum up support for the KMT.

What's odd is I only find mention of this "international press conference" on the gov't CNA website and on the pro-KMT China Post.

Update

Although this article (or editorial) dated August 22, 2011 pretty much follows the DPP line, and quotes guess who:

...Hsiao Bi-khim responded that the "so-called 92 consensus is a very weak foundation." There was no real consensus in 1992 between Taipei and Beijing, she argued, and "there is no domestically agreed to consensus." The only real consensus might be "between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party."

The crappy Taipei Times

Writing of the 2012 election, the Taipei Times shows its partisan character by speaking of the "Chinese" Nationalist Party.

I can't believe how anyone takes this rag seriously as anything other than a mouthpiece for DPP propaganda.

Numbers are hard

Americans Stumble on Math of Big Issues

Many Americans have strong opinions about policy issues shaping the presidential campaign, from immigration to Social Security. But their grasp of numbers that underlie those issues can be tenuous.

Here are some figures that I found:

• percentage of fellow residents who are foreign-born: 12.4% (37,049,464)
• percentage who are in the country illegally: 4% to 7% (interesting that most sources give sources as "millions" rather than percentages; could that be because that "millions" sounds like more?)
• percentage of federal spending on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: 0.01% ($430 million)
• percentage of U.S. families on welfare: 1.425% (4.4 million)

But I have to give up, as there's no explanation of the "welfare" figure. Apparently this doesn't include federal means-tested welfare programs (over 180!), like Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Food Stamps, other food programs for children or the elderly, federal housing assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), just to name a few!

Update
The U.S. Foreign-Born Population is 39,929,000, or 12.9%. Shall we say 13%?

Not Mildred Edith Brady

James M. Murphy's The man who started the sexual revolution gives the wrong name to Mildred Edie Brady, the journalist whose article led to Wilhelm Reich's downfall. Her daughter has a picture here.

Warning labels on lottery tickets

Obama ends habeas corpus

Obama ends habeas corpus, but it's no biggie.

毛澤東 Zombie

Mao Zedong never dies.

Donald J. Boudreaux has many good questions

Questions for liberals and conservatives both, starting with:

Why are the pundits and politicians who most fear the motives and the power of private corporations typically also the most strident advocates of higher tariffs to protect these corporations from competition?

Read more: And the answer is? - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Can I get both?

Come With Me to Taco Bell

Girl #1, dramatic: Would you rather be burned alive, or forced to eat human excrement?
Girl #2: Can I get both?

--Queens

via Overheard in New York, Dec 25, 2011

Bruce Schneier

On T.S.A. security theater:
“We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”