Tea party this Friday in DC

Feb. 27 (Friday)
Washington DC Tea Party -
12:00pm - 2:00 pm- Washington Monument

Sponsors:
* Americans for Prosperity
* Americans for Tax Reform
* Young Conservatives Coalition
* The Heartland Institute

Over $400,000 per family

Steny HOYER?

h/t NRO Corner

Steny Hoyer, a few minutes ago on the House floor:

I would hope that every member on this floor, of whatever party, of whatever ideological persuasion, would pray that this bill works. Not for political purposes, because if this bill works we will create those three and a half million jobs. Am I absolutely sure that it will? I am not. I regret that I am not.

Deficits/Surplus as a share of GDP

Greg Mankiw of Harvard. Please note that the chart borrowed form the WSJ does NOT include the structural deficit from -- ready? -- intergenerational transfers, which add between 50 and 80 Trillion bucks and creates a chart that make sensible people want to gargle with Cognac.

I supppose I should say something about Dr Mankiw's failure to publicly jump ugly with the 43rd president on the subject of spending -- GWB was supposed to be a cheapskate republican, after all -- but I won't.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/budget-balance.html

The one, The only Virginia Postrel

You can't make life safe for people who live, on the great coordinate plane of life, too close to the point where the learning curve crosses the mortality rate. [I should, I guess, point out that I'm paraphrasing from Reason Magazine back in the 80s.]

"They Don't Suck Their Socks"

A priceless Headmistress post on the CPSIA's insanity:

One concern is that the age limits themselves are unreasonable. It is ridiculous and completely unreasonable to treat bikes ridden by 8-12 year olds as though they pose the same risks as teething rings owned by 1 year olds. The CPSC cannot change that, as it would require commonsense changes at the foundational level of the law.

As we see more and more products pushed out of the market by the CPSIA, products which have never caused lead poisoning, it becomes clear that the law itself, which requires that all components of all products intended for the use of children 12 and under have the same lead limits, is unreasonable. 10 year olds do not chew their bike tires, lick their brakes, or suck on their tire valves.

They don't suck their socks.

They do not eat their books, not even books published before 1989. No book has ever been associated with elevated lead levels in the blood, yet as this law is written, those who do not wish to see books banned must first prove a negative- something that can only be fixed by the law.

Banning zippers and snaps is unreasonable, there is no evidence a child has ever been harmed by sucking his zipper pulls and snaps (no evidence that this is even something tiny babies are interested in doing, either), yet, the zipper company must first prove a negative, and this can only be fixed within the law itself, not by the Commission.

Read the whole thing.

If they're really concerned about zipper-licking 10-year-olds, they might consider all those kids (like me) who wore adult sizes when they were 10. Why stop with products "primarily" for kids? Why not test everything a kid might encounter, from sofa cushions to bathroom mirrors?

But maybe I shouldn't say that. Public Citizen might get ideas.

Too little too late

If history is a guide -- and it mayn't be -- the approaching 'stimulus' will be passed just as the economy emerges from recession by itself.

Here's a link from the NYT

I couldn't have made this up if I'd tried!

POTUS Pile-on

My bruddah-in-law points out that POTUS44 has been aboard for three weeks. It is, therefore, not fair to start on the clearly-he's-not-ready-for-the-deep-end-of-the-pool comments yet. EXCEPT... some of his advisers (specifically the advisers which had me thinking [relatively] good thoughts about a lawyer from the Chicago Machine) are going miles out of their way to hide behind "the President believes..." instead of answering the question: "Is this a good idea".

This -- "the President believes" -- is the kind of statement that's as good a way of stirring up policy geeks as any I can think of, bar waving a red flag (*joke).

And one of the first to be stirred up is the ever-readable Dr David Henderson of, inter alia(har!), the Naval Postgraduate School:

Have you noticed that we haven't heard any strong endorsement of the bill by Summers? The standard way a political appointee deals with the situation when he/she doesn't like what his/her boss is doing is to be quiet or, if asked his/her opinion, to say, "the President believes."

And because Dr Summers is both entertaining and worth reading, the link is here

If this is piling on, Fiat Voluntuas Dei!

"We are ruled by people who have achieved the remarkable distinction of being both dull and frivolous."

As Samizdata notes, the question is: should be ruled at all?

Deidre McClosky

I cannot say this better, take it away, Dr McClosky:

...when your intellectual range is from M-N you think you are being open minded when you look at M and you look at N, but you certainly don't see A or Z.

Saturday Night Live Lampoons Reid Pelosi On Stimulus Plan

Saturday Night Live Lampoons Reid Pelosi On Stimulus Plan

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Stimulus, because all economies have performance issues

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEDIyztZGBA&eurl=http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/&feature=player_embedded

Amazon's Customer service number

I didn't know there was one, but it's
1-800-201-7575

Go dogs go!

Conservative Democrats in the House are pushing back against their leaders’ economic stimulus plan even as President Obama steps up his push for the spending package.

To paraphrase my BIL -- who won't like this post -- "Do it like a Blue Dog!"

How Amazon.com is thriving in a horrendous retail climate.

If you and your housemates buy more than two items a month from Amazon, you should consider subscribing. Be warned, though, that Prime membership will alter how you think about shopping. These days, whenever I become cognizant of some need that would ordinarily require an unplanned trip to the store—when I want a bathroom hook, a shelving system for my closet, a new wireless router, or a discount pack of kitchen sponges—I check Amazon first. It's usually faster to order the item there and get it shipped for free than to add the thing to my shopping list. With Prime, you don't really need a shopping list.

Prime membership sure will. One click and your book/item shows up two days later. How to develop bad habits.

Instapundit: stimulus bill harmful over long term

the Congressional Budget Office says the stimulus bill will be harmful over the long term: “President Obama’s economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.” I don’t think there’s much long-term thinking going on in Congress or the White House, though . . .

Here's the CBO report itself:
http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/96xx/doc9619/Gregg.pdf

Less Keynes, More Hayek

Something everyone from Scott Allen to Sarah Palin can agree with!

Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek gets more ink in the Wall Street Journal today than he has in a long time in an op-ed on the “stimulus” bill being debated in Congress. And rightfully so, considering his arch rival John Maynard Keynes is getting more air time than he has since the last time politicians sought cover for a massive power and wealth grab.

Hayek and Keynes had a famous (well, famous for economists) debate over Keynes’ theories. FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey returns to his previous career as an economics professor and provides a lesson everyone on Capitol Hill should read.

Armey notes:

Keynes’s thinking was a decisive departure from classical economics, because arbitrary “macro” constructs like aggregate demand had no basis in the microeconomic science of human action. As Hayek observed, “some of the most orthodox disciples of Keynes appear consistently to have thrown overboard all the traditional theory of price determination and of distribution, all that used to be the backbone of economic theory, and in consequence, in my opinion, to have ceased to understand any economics.”

Professor Armey also reminds us of one of the central insights from the Public Choice school or economics:

A father of public choice economics, Nobel laureate James Buchanan, argues that the great flaw in Keynesianism is that it ignores the obvious, self-interested incentives of government actors implementing fiscal policy and creates intellectual cover for what would otherwise be viewed as self-serving and irresponsible behavior by politicians.

Armey continues:

It’s clear why Keynes’s popularity endures in Congress. Intellectual cover for a spending spree will always be appreciated there. But it’s harder to see any justification for the perverse form of fiscal child abuse that heaps massive debts on future generations.

Which leads to the conclusion:

The charade of the current stimulus package, chockablock with earmarks to favored pet constituencies and virtually devoid of national policy considerations, is the logical consequence of Keynesianism in action. It is about politics and power, not sound economics, and I believe that the American people will reject it.

The Washington Post toda reports “Senate Lacks Votes to Pass Stimulus.”

The 1,000-plus FreedomWorks activists who called Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on 1-866-928-0525 asking him to oppose the stimulus had something to do with that.

Were you one of them?

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Daschle

"Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter." --then-Sen. Tom Daschle on 7 May 1998

I got nuthin. Absoflippinlutely nothing.

Will the 'stimulus' work

No, I'm not being obnoxious. Well, I'm not only being obnoxious; the 'stimulus', at least initially, is mostly going to preserve jobs, not stimulate new ones.

Ah, but here's Megan McArdle:
There are really two quite separate debates going on over the stimulus, but they're being jumbled together into one gigantic ad hominem. My take on both--pardon for being perhaps a tad obvious, but I think the debate has had a tendency to wander off into the weeds, so it's useful to be a little general from time to time:

Question #1 Will a fiscal stimulus work?

Define "work". If the question is "Can borrowing money and spending it increase our measured GDP figure?" then yes, it is trivially true that stimulus "works". So why don't we borrow a zillion dollars and spend all of it? We could quadruple our standard of living overnight?

Y'all can read the rest here:http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/01/dissecting_the_stimulus_debate.php

Ben Stein via the American Spectator

A Bleak Day

By Ben Stein on 1.29.09 @ 9:31AM

I love this. The new kind of politics of hope. Eight hours of debate in the HR to pass a bill spending $820 billion, or roughly $102 billion per hour of debate.
He's a-talkin' about the stimulus, Mr. Stein is.
Only ten per cent of the "stimulus" to be spent on 2009.
Which still bids fair to light off a really hard to control inflation at a time when we're blessed with an administration which is likely to think that price controls are the way to fix inflation.
Close to half goes to entities that sponsor or employ or both members of the Service Employees International Union, federal, state, and municipal employee unions, or other Democrat-controlled unions.
I realize you're reaching for modifiers, Mr Stein, but "Democrat-controlled unions" is a trifle redundant.
This bill is sent to Congress after Obama has been in office for seven days. It is 680 pages long. According to my calculations, not one member of Congress read the entire bill before this vote. Obviously, it would have been impossible, given his schedule, for President Obama to have read the entire bill.
Yep, there's a read the bills act which has been proposed for -- ye gods! -- over a decade now. RTB is good advice for alcon, the 43rd and 44th POTUS' not least, but honored of them all!
For the amount spent we could have given every unemployed person in the United States roughly $75,000.

We could give every person who had lost a job and is now passing through long-term unemployment of six months or longer roughly $300,000.
Both actions would have avoided major bonuses -- they're actually closer to commissions, did you know that? -- and released cash into the economy, probably through necessities: groceries, rent, things like that. Waaayyyy to sensible an idea.

--snip--
How long until the debt incurred under this program is so immense that it causes a downgrade in the sovereign debt of the USA? What happens to us then?
Outstanding questions, Mr. Stein. We have a structural, unfunded deficit of over $50 Trillion (trillion, with a T). If we can't borrow money to delay the day of reckoning, we can -- lessee-- reduce benefits or raise taxes. OOORRRRR, we could just print up $50 trillion and dump the greenbacks into the economy. Can you say 'hyperinflation'? I knew you could.
This has been a punch in the solar plexus to the kind of responsible, far-seeing, mature government processes that are needed to protect America. This is more than the pork barrel. This is a coup for the constituencies of the party in power and against the idea of a responsible government itself. A bleak day.

Unfortunately, it is only the latest in a long series of such days stretching across decades of rule by both parties, to the point where truly responsible government is only a distant echo of our forgotten ancestors.
Amen, Brother Stein. Amen

Hyperinflation & the Stimulus Package

Dr Peter Boettke makes a point that really needs to be made about the inflationary effects of dumping almost a trillion bucks into the economy:

Government can raise revenue in one of three ways: (1) tax, (2) borrow and (3) inflate. The natural proclivity of democratic governments is to pursue public policies which concentrate benefits on the well-organized and well-informed, and disperse the costs on the unorganized and ill-informed. And there are strong reasons why this bias in policy making will also be biased toward shortsightedness --- pay out the benefits now, and worry about the costs down the road. Thus, the natural tendency for elected government officials is to borrow (rather than tax) and then inflate (rather than tax). Deficit financing, accumulating public debt, and monetization of the debt.

Now a lot of individuals have been claiming that economics as a scientific discipline has been rocked by our current crisis, both due to our failure to "predict" it and our inability to "fix" it with a consensus on the right public policy. And anyone not deeply read in the history of our discipline, or who received their university education in economics in the second half of the 20th century can be excused for such a reading of the situation. This would be the most logical interpretation one could arrive at --- especially if you not only listen to President Obama say that we must work past the dead ideologies of the past and the "do nothing" arguments (as if that argument has been actively pursued since Grover Cleveland).

Read the rest here (you can also click on the post's title):
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2009/01/some-basic-economics-of-public-policy.html

Yep, the D president that last rocked my world was ol' Grover. The next D was Wilson who's on my list -- near the top too -- as Presidents who weren't ready for the deep end of the pool.