Politics and the US Economy

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Republicans call themselves conservatives and they implement mostly conservative policy. They run for office as conservatives and conservatives vote for them. Therefore they're most accurately described by the term "conservative". Calling them independents of liberals doesn't make much sense, does it?

He's just twisting meanings around trying to confuse and once again making a big deal out of a meaningless "side trail".

Democrats engage in irresponsible spending and have spent too much in the last four and five years (since gaining control of Congress) that they've precipitated this deficit crisis we're in. I liked the quote from the debate, saying that the tea party is responsible for this financial crisis we're in is like saying the Betty Ford Clinic is responsible for alcholism.

Another example of "it means what I want it to mean at the moment" which is pretty much what they do when they wish to switch the socialist label...

I'd like the names of these conservatives, because as we saw with my firespin chats, most of the time, the adherents of Mises' "Middle-Way" are defined as "conservatives" but when the term conservative is used in this light, it is being used to impugn Libertarians and dismiss their comments based solely on the actions of the Middle-Way crowd and their proclivity to compromise to the uncompromising left in the hope that they will escape the foul cries of evil, greedy, mean, and "uncompassionate," which, of course, as we see year-after-year, is something that is never going to occur because the polity of "fairness" is the polity of spoiled children and greedy blackmailers...

 

[RightField]

It should say "Why Americans Hate Liberal Economics".

Why Americans Hate Economics
In university classrooms—and especially the Obama White House—fancy theories of macroeconomics defy basic common sense.
By STEPHEN MOORE
Wall Street Journal - Today.

Christina Romer, the University of California at Berkeley economics professor and President Obama's first chief economist, once relayed the old joke that "there are two kinds of students: those who hate economics and those who really hate economics." She doesn't believe that, but it's true. I'm surprised how many students tell me economics is their least favorite subject. Why? Because too often economic theories defy common sense. Alas, the policies of this administration haven't boosted the profession's reputation.

Consider what happened last week when Laura Meckler of this newspaper dared to ask White House Press Secretary Jay Carney how increasing unemployment insurance "creates jobs." She received this slap down: "I would expect a reporter from The Wall Street Journal would know this as part of the entrance exam just to get on the paper."

Mr. Carney explained that unemployment insurance "is one of the most direct ways to infuse money into the economy because people who are unemployed and obviously aren't earning a paycheck are going to spend the money that they get . . . and that creates growth and income for businesses that then lead them to making decisions about jobs—more hiring."

That's a perfect Keynesian answer, and also perfectly nonsensical. What the White House is telling us is that the more unemployed people we can pay for not working, the more people will work. Only someone with a Ph.D. in economics from an elite university would believe this.

I have two teenage sons. One worked all summer and the other sat on his duff. To stimulate the economy, the White House wants to take more money from the son who works and give it to the one who doesn't work. I can say with 100% certainty as a parent that in the Moore household this will lead to less work.
.
Economic bimboism is rampant in Washington. The Center for American Progress held a forum earlier this summer arguing that raising the minimum wage would create more jobs. For this to be true, you have to believe that the more it costs a business to hire a worker, the more workers companies will want to hire.

A few months ago Mr. Obama blamed high unemployment on businesses becoming "more efficient with a lot fewer workers," and he mentioned ATMs and airport kiosks. The Luddites are back raging against the machine. If Mr. Obama really wants to get to full employment, why not ban farm equipment?

Or consider the biggest whopper: Mr. Obama's thoroughly discredited $830 billion stimulus bill. We were promised $1.50 or even up to $3 of economic benefit—the mythical "multiplier"—from every dollar the government spent. There was never any acknowledgment that for the government to spend a dollar, it has to take it from the private economy that is then supposed to create jobs. The multiplier theory only works if you believe there's a fairy passing out free dollars.

How did modern economics fly off the rails? The answer is that the "invisible hand" of the free enterprise system, first explained in 1776 by Adam Smith, got tossed aside for the new "macroeconomics," a witchcraft that began to flourish in the 1930s during the rise of Keynes. Macroeconomics simply took basic laws of economics we know to be true for the firm or family—i.e., that demand curves are downward sloping; that when you tax something, you get less of it; that debts have to be repaid—and turned them on their head as national policy.

As Donald Boudreaux, professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the invaluable blog Cafe Hayek, puts it: "Macroeconomics was nothing more than a dismissal of the rules of economics." Over the years, this has led to some horrific blunders, such as the New Deal decision to pay farmers to burn crops and slaughter livestock to keep food prices high: To encourage food production, destroy it.

The grand pursuit of economics is to overcome scarcity and increase the production of goods and services. Keynesians believe that the economic problem is abundance: too much production and goods on the shelf and too few consumers. Consumers lined up for blocks to buy things in empty stores in communist Russia, but that never sparked production. In macroeconomics today, there is a fatal disregard for the heroes of the economy: the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the one who innovates and creates the things we want to buy. "All economic problems are about removing impediments to supply, not demand," Arthur Laffer reminds us.

So here we are, three years of mostly impotent stimulus experiments and the economy still hobbled. Keynesians would be expected to be second-guessing the wisdom of their theories. Instead, Prof. Romer recently complained that the political system will not allow Mr. Obama to "go back and ask for more" stimulus.

And that is why Americans hate economics.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

If you ask me, I think what we're experiencing isn't in fact closer to a "growthless" recovery than to a jobless one. Because GDP started to grow more than a year and a half ago, but with the exception of just a couple of quarters, growth has not been noticeably above its trend rate of about 2-1/2 percent a year. I don't rejoice at the news that we added 216,000 jobs in March. About a hundred thousand of that 216,000 is needed every month just to keep up with the growth in the labor force. At this rate of job growth, it would take most of the decade to replace the eight 8-1/2 million jobs that were lost in the recession.
Christina Romer
Chairwoman of Obama's White House Council of Economic Advisors

__________________
"We own the economy. We own the beginning of the turnaround and we want to make sure that we continue that pace of recovery, not go back to the policies of the past under the Bush administration that put us in the ditch in the first place."
Debbie Wasserman Schultz

 

[eyer]

42 days until the start of fiscal year 2012...

Congress and the President on vacation...

No budget for fiscal year 2012 yet...

It's okay...

We'll wait.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

There have been budgets, but the Democrats just said no, they preferred a downgrade to take the House...







... then they can apply for a fourth mortgage and new credit cards.

 

[RightField]

The Texas Jobs Panic
Liberals try to discredit the Lone Star State's economic success..
Wall Street Journal
August 19, 2011


Rick Perry is not the subtlest politician, but he looks like Pericles next to the liberals falling over themselves to discredit job creation in Texas. We'd have thought any new jobs would be a blessing when 25 million Americans are looking for full-time work, but apparently new jobs aren't valuable jobs if they're created in a state that rejects Obamanomics.

Let's dissect the Texas record. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas reported this summer that Texas created 37% of all net new American jobs since the recovery began in June 2009. Texas by far outpaced every other state, including those with large populations like New York and California and those with faster-growing economies, like North Dakota. Other states have lower unemployment rates than Texas's 8.2%, though that is below the national average and the state is also adding jobs faster than any other.

In today's Opinion Journal video: Editorial writer Joe Rago on Texas Gov. Rick Perry's jobs record; and editorial writer Mary Kissel on Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren's potential challenge to Massachusetts GOP Senator Scott Brown.

Texas is also among the three states and the District of Columbia that are home to more jobs today than when the recession began in December 2007. Without the Texas gains, according to the Dallas Fed, annual U.S. job growth would have been 0.97% instead of 1.17%. Over the past five years, Texas has added more net new jobs than all other states combined.

The critics claim demography is destiny, and of course jobs and population tend to rise and fall in tandem. The number of Texans is booming: According to the Census Bureau, the population grew 20.6% between 2000 and 2010, behind only Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Arizona. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the seasonally adjusted size of the Texas labor force has increased by 5% since December 2007, faster than any state other than North Carolina at 5.4%, though the Tar Heel State has declined 0.4% over the last year. The labor force has shrunk in 28 states since December 2007.

Some of this Texas growth is due to high birth rates, some to immigration. But it also reflects the flight of people from other states. People and capital are mobile and move where the opportunities are greatest. Texas is attractive to workers and employers alike because of its low costs of living and doing business. The government in Austin is small, taxes are low, regulation is stable, and the litigation system is more predictable after Mr. Perry's tort reforms—all of which is a magnet for private investment and hiring.

As for the critics, well, one of their explanations is that Americans are moving to Texas because of the nice weather. The temperature in Fort Worth this week reached 108 degrees.

The critics also claim that Texas's new jobs somehow don't count because the wages are supposedly low and the benefits stingy. Yet BLS pegs the median hourly wage in Texas at $15.14, 93% of the national average, and wages have increased at a good clip: in fact, the 10th fastest state in 2010 at 3.4%.

The Texas skeptics often invoke high energy prices, as if Texas were some sheikdom next to Mexico. But according to the Dallas Fed study, energy jobs accounted for only 10.6% of the new positions. The state economy today is far more broadly based than it was before the early-1980s oil-and-gas bust. For the last nine years, Texas has led the states in exports.

To put a finer point on it, the energy industry isn't expanding merely because of rising oil prices or new natural resources. Technological innovation is also driving the business, such as the horizontal drilling that has enabled shale oil and gas fracking. New ideas are how an economy expands.

Nearly 31% of the new Texas jobs are in health care, many of which are no doubt the product of federal entitlements that go to every state. But the state is also making progress filling in historical access gaps in west and south Texas and the panhandle, where Mr. Perry's 2003 malpractice caps have led to an influx of doctors, especially high-risk specialists. The Texas Public Policy Foundation estimates that the state has netted 26,000 new physicians in the wake of reform, most from out of state.

Liberals do have a point that Texas avoided the worst of the housing boom and bust, in part because of regulations imposed in the S&L backwash that limit mortgage borrowing to 80% of the appraised value of a home. But isn't this smart regulation? These same liberals promoted rules that kept down payments much lower than 20% at federal agencies, and they're now encouraging the Administration to prop up housing to prevent foreclosures and thus prevent the market from finding a bottom.

Mr. Perry's Texas record is far from perfect, as Charles Dameron recently showed on these pages with his reporting on the Governor's politicized venture-capital fund. But the larger story is that Mr. Perry inherited a well-functioning economy and has managed it well, mainly by avoiding the kind of policy disruptions that his liberal critics favor in the name of this or that social or political goal. This achievement may not earn a Nobel prize in economics, but it does help explain why Texas is outperforming the nation.

 

[unregistered]

 

[richard_daily]

So "conservatives' are against job growth in the public sector....

Unless it's done under republican watch.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

So "conservatives' are against job growth in the public sector....

Unless it's done under republican watch.

So, 'liberals' are for failure, as long as it's in the public sector...

*snicker*

... done under Democrat watch.

 

[mercury14]

Another example of "it means what I want it to mean at the moment" which is pretty much what they do when they wish to switch the socialist label...

I'd like the names of these conservatives, because as we saw with my firespin chats, most of the time, the adherents of Mises' "Middle-Way" are defined as "conservatives" but when the term conservative is used in this light, it is being used to impugn Libertarians and dismiss their comments based solely on the actions of the Middle-Way crowd and their proclivity to compromise to the uncompromising left in the hope that they will escape the foul cries of evil, greedy, mean, and "uncompassionate," which, of course, as we see year-after-year, is something that is never going to occur because the polity of "fairness" is the polity of spoiled children and greedy blackmailers...

I love this denial. There haven't been conservatives in power in god knows how long. Therefore it's literally impossible to criticize conservativism.

 

[unregistered]

 

[mercury14]

So "conservatives' are against job growth in the public sector....

Unless it's done under republican watch.

This is correct. Growth in military of Homeland Security jobs was highly desirable under Bush and the Republicans. Watch how quickly they attack Obama for doing the exact same thing on a much smaller scale though.

 

[mercury14]

Name 'em.

Name conservatives who have been in power over the last 20 years? Really?

Then you say, oh they were all moderates. Fun game.

 

[NeverEndingMe]

Name conservatives who have been in power over the last 20 years? Really?

Then you say, oh they were all moderates. Fun game.

with obama having destroyed the economy, people are itching for a change

 

[RightField]

Top Ten Obama Excuses for the Failing Economy
by Keith Koffler on August 8, 2011, 9:32 am

Last week, the White House said the Japanese tsunami was partially to blame for the sorry state of the U.S. economy. While this provoked a certain amount of laughter, it is perhaps not quite as funny as several other reasons for the continuing downturn that appear on a secret White House list of excuses.

White House Dossier has obtained a copy of the list, and below is publishing several of them – for the first time anywhere! – for your perusal.

The top ten secret White House excuses for the poorly performing economy:

1. Loch Ness Monster threatening to make an appearance in Lake Superior.

2. Economy still reeling from failed 1980s introduction of New Coke.

3. Bo ate my economic plan.

4. Bernanke hooked again on Afghani hashish.

5. Economic time bomb planted by Richard Nixon finally going off.

6. Thousands unable to work after being injured trying to learn the Macarena.

7. Evil spell cast on the country by Dick Cheney has yet to wear off.

8. Obama never should have listened when Bush said, “Obama, wreck the economy.”

9. Lady Gaga accidentally allowed to provide economic advice during first year of Obama’s presidency.

10. Obama not getting in enough golf.

 

[RightField]

How Long Will It Take Keynes to Die?
You won't find out by reading America's newspaper of record.
Tim Cavanaugh | August 17, 2011

It’s been many years since I’ve read The New York Times. Like most readers, I got discouraged by the shrinking page size, the self-confident erroneousness that becomes apparent whenever America's newspaper of record covers a topic I’m familiar with, and the lack of a comics page. Sure there are occasions when you can’t avoid it—usually when enough people are complaining about an article or when somebody I know is in the paper—but on a daily basis I follow the golden rule that life is just too short for The New York Times.

So imagine my surprise the other day when, challenged by a third-world Internet connection and enticed by an old-school six-column page width, I picked up a $2.65 copy of the International Herald Tribune, which partially reprints The New York Times, only to discover that the paper a) no longer bundles that day’s edition of the Beirut Daily Star (my actual purpose in buying it), b) has jettisoned the last memory of its fabled Big Apple namesake by calling itself “The Global Edition of The New York Times” and c) features the kind of groupthink rarely seen outside a French parochial school.

While the rest of hyperconnected, interweb-powered planet Earth has now seen Keynesian economic intervention tested in real time and discredited beyond any intelligent doubt, the Times, I quickly learned, is a walled garden where the ideas of John Maynard Keynes remain not only viable but so evidently true as to require no factual support.

You may know Keynes as the brilliant mid-20th century economist whose general theory of employment was said to have undergone a revival in 2008, though in fact it had never gone away. You won’t know Keynes very well from reading the Times, but only in the sense that you won’t know Christianity very well if you never meet any non-Christians. Economic intervention is the air the Grey Lady breathes. In the opinion pages of the edition I looked at, perennially perturbed Nobel laureate Paul Krugman decries the “so-called urgent need to reduce deficits” and asserts without documentation that a “real response” to the global correction must involve precisely the medicine that has so far proven ineffective: stimulus for infrastructure and government schools, taxpayer-funded payoffs for mortgage deadbeats, and an “all-out effort” by the wildly popular Federal Reserve.

In a business column, It’s a Wonderful Life star James Stewart compares 2011 with 1938, briefly debating whether Depression-era stimulus saved the economy or would have saved the economy if it were larger. Stewart ultimately decides that Franklin Roosevelt’s spending cuts (prompted, naturally, by “strident calls” from Republican dead-enders) doomed a nascent recovery. Humorously, Stewart quotes disgraced former CEA head Christina Romer’s two-year-old warning against “the urge to declare victory”—leaving readers to puzzle over what economic policy from 2009 could possibly have been considered a victory.

In another opinion page column on “outrage,” somebody named Roger Cohen laments the plunging stock markets’ effect on Europe’s August vacation schedule while chastising Germany for growing “tired of others’ problems” and turning “parochial at the very moment its leadership is needed.” Cohen accounts for Germany's relatively strong economic position by noting that the country has “invested in a highly educated workforce” and also “fostered cooperation between labor unions and employers and between industrialists and the government in defense of German jobs.” Missing from this equation is Germany’s longstanding aversion to inflation, which has frequently placed communist-educated Chancellor Angela Merkel to the right of the American president on economic matters.

And in a front-page “News Analysis” (praise Allah we can still count on those!), reporter Jackie Calmes warns that despite the “boasts of Republicans” who may or may not have mildly slowed the growth of federal spending during the debt-ceiling compromise, “well-known economists, financial analysts and corporate leaders, including some Republicans…are expressing increasing alarm about Washington’s new austerity.” Not to be outdone by Stewart’s citation of the career-dead Romer, Calmes brings in an actual corpse: cadaverous former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, whose panicked, catastrophic response to 2008’s years-overdue financial correction should have disqualified him from commenting on anything more complicated than the Peterson Field Guide to Birds.

Even in the truncated version of the Times available in the IHT, there’s plenty more like that, including this extended metaphor from Pimco’s Bill Gross: “An anti-Keynesian, budget-balancing immediacy imparts a constrictive noose around whatever demand remains alive and kicking.” Nowhere in the percentage of the paper I finished (unlike the stingy Times, IHT carries the Jumble) was there any room for the anti-Keynesian sentiments the paper’s news and opinion sections continually referred to without ever engaging. At no point did anybody ask the questions the rest of us have had to contend with for more than three years now:

Is it possible that the choice between budget-balancing and job creation is a false choice?

Does government actually create jobs?

Is there any reason to believe at least $2 trillion in fiscal stimulus and $2.9 trillion in monetary stimulus since 2008 have made a positive difference in the economy—especially considering that most economic indicators are worse than the worst-case scenarios that were made public when those spending decisions were approved?

How does a deal that contains no actual cuts, adds to an existing $14 trillion pile of public debt, and preserves spending for cowboy poetry qualify as an “austerity” budget?

And how many times can the Keynesian consensus fail the test of outcomes before it goes away for good?

Outside the airless chambers of the Times’ fancy new headquarters (half of which the company had to sell at a fire-sale price just two years ago after completing the building), these questions have been active for some time now. I’ve been documenting the advent of the “true Keynesian” argument, in which acolytes claim the problem is not with the First Baron’s theories but with a reality that doesn't fit them. Krugman, the doctor, attempted something like this the other day in this blog post accusing anti-Keynesians of misstating the master’s theories.

That’s a fair complaint, and Keynesian theory is considerably more nuanced than the cartoon version favored by both contemporary followers (who among other things ignore the admonition to reduce deficits during economic booms) and detractors (who tend to believe any waste of public money qualifies as Keynesian stimulus).

But even here Krugman’s compulsion to ignore facts shows up in his description of “an economic model under which temporary increases in government spending can, under certain circumstances, help reduce unemployment.” Whatever you want to call the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), or TARP, or the GM bailout, or whatever monsters the debt-ceiling compromise has created, they are all increases in public spending. In the case of ARRA the increase was arguably designed around and inarguably advertised as job creation. (Must we really go through the whole “saved/created/funded” dance again? That one stopped being funny two years ago.)

This is the kind of laziness that sets in when you never have to entertain a serious challenge to your ideas. It’s remarkable given that the ballyhooed and short-lived return of Keynes was not merely rhetorical. These ideas were put into action, at a cost of trillions of dollars that will someday have to be paid back. The result was either a recovery too microscopic to notice or no recovery at all. Everywhere except the Times, people have noticed. The rise of the Tea Party, the three-fourths majority in favor of a federal spending cap, and the midterm election results were all evidence that Keynesian intervention is no longer a marketable idea.

There are few things less relevant than a newspaper, but many people, possibly hundreds, still take The New York Times seriously, and they’re being disserved when the paper misses an important shift in economic theory. The long-defunct economist was brought out for a final bow—a courtesy the Muscular Dystrophy Association won’t even extend to Jerry Lewis—and the result left audiences cold the world over. Keynesian mysticism—with its fancy equations, its cramped vocabulary of “liquidity traps” and “irreducible uncertainty,” and its pre-Copernican belief that a group of wise men in a central office can decide what “aggregate demand” should be among hundreds of millions of people—is over. At this rate the borough of Milton Keynes could be renamed Milton Friedman by the end of the year. To ignore that story is a serious dereliction by a publication that, with its tiny and nearly-square pages, has already failed in the most serious duty of any newspaper: providing material to make paper boats.

 

[mercury14]

How Long Will It Take Keynes to Die?

Dunno. Whenever we elect Republicans or Democrats they take up Keynsian policies. So probably a while.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Dunno. Whenever we elect Republicans or Democrats they take up Keynsian policies. So probably a while.

When don't we elect politicians that take up Keynsian policies? From where I'm sitting it's long since been agreed by everybody that Keynes was right. There are just he folks who say Keynes was right and apply debatably half of his policies and the half that say they don't and apply the other half.

 

[RightField]

Keynes was not right. We need to put that thought away.

 

[RightField]

More notes on Keynes included here.

August 21, 2011
Rick Perry Keeps It Simple
By David Warren

Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, made waves this week, upon entering the Republican presidential fray, by suggesting that Ben Bernanke, of the Federal Reserve, would be treacherous if he continued to "print money" to grease the government's way out of the solvency crisis. Perry's colourfully frank Texas language got him into big trouble with all the smooth people who routinely refer to politicians like him as "terrorists."

That language may have been rather cleverly chosen, for the splash it created had two immediate political consequences, beyond persuading people who would never vote for Perry that they must never vote for Perry. First, it elbowed Ron Paul and others aside, by making Perry the "don't print money" candidate. His Republican rivals on the tea party side are now moaning about his theft of their thunder.

Second, it puts Bernanke on the spot. For after the sympathy has evaporated for a man who has been verbally abused, he cannot go ahead with what in fact amounts to printing money, without totally identifying himself with President Barack Obama and the "stimulus" establishment. Perry has made Bernanke's job impossible, and in present circumstances that might just be a good thing.

For generations now, governments not only in the United States have eased their way out of solvency crises by stoking inflation, and by some plausible mixture of cosmetic budget cuts and real tax increases. To do otherwise, as even the Economist now says, is to display "economic illiteracy." Sophisticated people play with all the dials, on the economy machine, and those who refuse to touch certain dials are unsophisticated.

Observe, where all this sophistication has got us.

There are some issues that are too simple for intelligent people to understand. Most moral issues are like that. The problem isn't distinguishing between right and wrong. That is not always as plain as day, but usually it is. The problem is finding a way to justify doing the wrong thing. And once you think you have found it, the people still arguing for doing the right thing may be dismissed as "simplistic."

On the grand economic questions, "simplisme" has long been decried. John Maynard Keynes, a truly brilliant man, and an entertaining one with wide cultural interests, made wonderfully entertaining arguments for doing the wrong thing, many of them ingeniously counter-intuitive. "Public economists" (on the analogy of "public intellectuals") such as John Kenneth Galbraith in the last generation, and Paul Krugman in this, stand in direct succession to him: same attitudes, same habits.

Lord Keynes' great rival, Friedrich Hayek, exploded many of the economic fallacies upon which Keynes depended, along with many of the facts which Keynes massaged to fit his own passing needs. But Hayek's strongest criticism is too lightly passed over. He said that Keynes was interested in economic theory only as a means to influence current policy. He had not, in fact, the "intellectual chastity" to examine anything on its own terms.

I am cumbering my column with these assertions, because they are necessary to hear. Observers are easily distracted, even intimidated, by intellectual fireworks. They are awed into a silent refusal to think things through for themselves.

Often common sense alone will guide us past intellectual impostures. But when it doesn't, we need to know that the weight of economic literature is there; that "Keynesian economics" was exposed from the start.

So let us return to simplisme. If what we want is a functioning, even flourishing economy, and therefore jobs, jobs, jobs, then the policies of Texas make sense. They are, as Rick Perry says, low taxes, minimal regulation, the avoidance of debt, and business-friendly attitudes. It is a political culture which at least tries to focus on the political questions (law, order, and so forth), and leave economic questions to the free market (with its inevitable bulls and bears).

If what we want instead is a dysfunctional and stagnant or shrinking economy, and therefore spreading unemployment, then California's policies are just the ticket. They are: high taxes, maximal regulation, and excruciating debt. Also, a political culture that belittles and despises business, almost as much as it belittles and despises law and order; one not merely addicted to "fine tuning" things utterly beyond anyone's comprehension, but earnestly trying to replace the free market with a "political market" for goods and services - whenever opportunity calls. ("Never waste a crisis.")

I'm not saying the generation of wealth should be the sole purpose of human existence. I am saying it is one of the purposes, and further, that by politicizing economic activity we actually mire ourselves much deeper in materialism than we would ever do by just going out and earning a living.

The Texas model works, and the California model fails. Quite apart from whether anyone in the States should vote for Rick Perry, they must choose between these models.

 

[Karen Kraft]

Economics, for the most part, is intellectual masturbation. It works great when the model has fewer than a dozen variables. When it has to face the real world, it's little more than caveats and corrections.

 

[Karen Kraft]

http://www.monex.com/images/charts/GBX_LINE_3650DAY_BIG.PNG

 

[RightField]

Economics, for the most part, is intellectual masturbation. It works great when the model has fewer than a dozen variables. When it has to face the real world, it's little more than caveats and corrections.

Good morning Karen, how are you today?

 

[Karen Kraft]

Good morning Karen, how are you today?

Horny.

How are you?