Haiti or Bust, v2
Thanks again for everyone who chimed in (both in email and on the blog) in response to my earlier post about Haiti. Believe it or not, there are so many people volunteering to go to Haiti–and their infrastructure is still so compromised–that you have to basically apply for the job.
I am still waiting to hear back from some churches; there was one place that had an opening but it coincided perfectly with a conference at which I had already agreed to teach.
At this point I have blocked out two separate weeks on my calendar and registered with this (secular) group. I have never felt like such a privileged American slob as when filling out the form to convince them they should pick me. A sample (paraphrased for humor and brevity):
List your medical training? Band-Aid technician; cleaned up son’s puke and poop.
List your construction skills? Opened bathroom door the other day that had been locked from the inside.
Previous volunteer work. Setup chairs with the janitor every week at my old church, and was assistant coach to a junior high basketball team. (That’s actually the real answer I put!!)
Other skills. I’m not actually a certified CPA, but I might be able to help with bookkeeping if you need that. I am a good writer but I’m not doing grant proposals to governments.
Why should we pick you? I have a blog and I bet I could get you guys more donations than some other skill-less clown. So if it comes down to a dozen skill-less clowns and you have one spot, pick me.
Two Cheers for the Wall Street Journal
Whenever I see a particularly anti-capitalist Wall Street Journal op ed or editorial I complain, since “they ought to know better.” So I should give positive reinforcement when they get it right. Thursday’s paper contained two op eds that surprised me in how much they differed from the typical debates.
First was Michael Barone’s piece titled “A Short History of American Populism.” The cartoon accompanying the article featured a wistful Barack Obama looking at a bust of Andrew Jackson. I looked at the bio and saw Barone was a fellow at AEI. The title, cartoon, and bio all together made me think, “Oh great, let me guess, this guy’s gonna complain about Obama taking on the banks, and then say Andrew Jackson exhibited the same hostility to commerce when he shut down the central bank.”
But no, I was dead wrong. Barone’s point was that Obama’s populust rhetoric is not like the righteous Jacksonian movement:
So it is with populism. Ask anyone reasonably well versed in American history to name our most populist-minded president, and you’ll likely hear the name of Andrew Jackson. He was the son of Scots-Irish immigrants, raised on the frontier, and he ran the first democratic (and Democratic) campaign. A gang of Jackson’s roughneck supporters, so the legend goes, rushed to the White House after his inauguration and tore the place apart.
But Jackson was not a “spread the wealth” populist. On the contrary, he opposed the American System of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay to have the government build roads and canals and other public works. He killed the central bank and paid off the national debt.
Jackson argued that government interference in the economy would inevitably favor the well-entrenched and well-connected. It would take money away from the little people and give it to the elites.
That view seems to be shared today in what I have called the Jacksonian belt, the broad swath of America settled by the Scots-Irish from the Appalachian chains in Virginia southwest to Texas. The Obama administration argues that Democratic big government and health-care programs will help the little guys. Jacksonians today, as in the 1830s, don’t agree.
Jackson’s arguments were not ill-founded. The Republican Party that fought and won the Civil War sponsored aid for railroads and favored corporations—and got caught up in messy scandals.
Then below Barone’s piece we have Andy Kessler’s call for Bernanke to eliminate fractional reserve banking! An excerpt:
To sum up, the Fed creates a monetary base and the banks can create $10 for every $1 of monetary base. Wall Street firms created $20 for every Fed $1. In other words, the Fed only seeds the market. Beyond crude instruments like interest-rate policy, it has little control over how much actual money supply exists. In good times banks lend too much. And in bad times, such as today, they don’t create enough money because they lend too little.
Perhaps the lesson Mr. Bernanke drew from 2008-09 is not that we need more regulation but that financial firms should not be allowed to generate money out of thin air to write soon-to-be-bad loans. To seal his legacy, it is fractional reserve banking that he can rein in. Limit leverage and you take away the hot air from these bubbles.
Free marketers blanch at the idea of more regulation. But banking isn’t a normal market. Banks create money when it did not previously exist. We’ve built a regulatory structure around this sleight-of-hand and each time are astonished that banks still fail. I doubt we will ever get to no leverage, a dollar loan backed by a dollar of capital, but I think Mr. Bernanke could be headed in that direction. One potential target is a 5 to 1 leverage limit—he could increase reserve requirements by 1% per year until it hits 20% by 2020. With credit dear, perhaps banks will do a better job of deciding what is a “sure thing.”
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if these were articles by Tom DiLorenzo and Tom Woods. But c’mon, that’s not too shabby.
The World Is Not a Meritocracy
Two examples:
(1) Herman’s Hermits had more chart-toppers than The Hollies. (I think that’s the stat; it’s something along those lines.)
(2) Andy Dick charges more for appearances than Louie CK. (Although Louis CK–same guy, different head shot–asks you to contact his agent. Weird. Is that because corporate suits would naturally look up “Louis” whereas the club owners remember him from his HBO show? Is this a goof or price discrimination?)
And if you’re thinking, “I’ve heard of Andy Dick, but who’s Louis CK?” well thanks for proving my point. (Try this, but watch out for naughty language.)
Yglesias on Conservatives and the "Justice" System
I actually really like reading Matt Yglesias. Maybe I’m naive, but I think he is pretty sincere. It’s too bad he just has a horrible theory of how the economy works.
Anyway, Yglesias has been on fire lately with the conservative pundits’ horror over letting the courts deal with an (alleged) bad guy. Try this:
[W]hen discussing this whole subject it’s important to note that to the best of my knowledge, the conservative view is that the criminal justice system isn’t the appropriate way to deal with any sort of criminal. Conservatives didn’t like the Miranda ruling or any of the Warren Court’s other famous criminal procedure rulings. And since the Supreme Court became more conservative, right-wing justices have consistently sought to narrow the exclusionary rule, make it more difficult for convicted felons to get hearings for new evidence, etc. For all the “tea party” talk of freedom, and the right’s general blather about “limited government,” unrestricted violence by the agents of the state is a core priority for the right-wing. The view is that ideally you just detain people indefinitely. If forced, they get a military commission. If you have to have a civilian court, the accused shouldn’t have any rights. People should be tortured as a routine investigative technique. Wars should be routinely against foreign countries that haven’t attacked us. It’s a worldview soaked in violence and authoritarianism, and the relatively narrow question of what venue you try terrorism suspects in is just a small part of it.
Sure, he paints with a broad brush, but there are a heck of a lot of people to whom that applies perfectly.
Arnold Kling Makes Me Chuckle
In a quite reasonable post, he offers this judgment which struck me as ironic:
3. Does the state have necessary functions?
I believe that it does, but I am not sure. I am strongly inclined to believe that unless we agree to have an ultimate arbiter of disputes, the equilibrium is what North, Weingast, and Wallis call “the natural state,” in which a coalition of violent gangs extorts from the general public and shares the loot.
In case you don’t see the irony, try this.
The Shilo-Diamond Paradox
When I’m doing the household budget, I put on the Neil Diamond Channel from Pandora in the background. (I used to listen to the Daily Show, but it was too distracting. My forecasts ended up looking like a CBO product.) But the Neil Diamond Channel features classic rock stuff that isn’t too hard. It’s not just Neil Diamond, but also such favorites as the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.” Basically cheese with a little bit o’ soul.
Anyway, today I had “Shilo” stuck in my head. These lyrics struck me:
Shilo, when I was young
I used to call your name.
When no one else would come
Shilo, you always came
And we’d play.
Is that really surprising, Neil? If you used to call out “Mary” and just this one particular girl responded, OK that might be worth putting in a song. But there aren’t too many Shilos walking around.
Putting the Federal Debt in Perspective
[UPDATE below.]
If the Congress doesn’t act (the Senate has already done it and we’re just waiting on the House), the federal government will hit its debt limit by the end of February. The current limit is some walking-around money, specifically $12.4 trillion.
Now a lot of people say that’s no big deal, because the US economy is so big. They throw around figures of the debt-to-GDP ratio being something like 60 percent. So two things:
(1) Just check the math. The federal debt will be $12.4 trillion in a few weeks, and 2009 GDP was $14.3 trillion. So that means a debt-to-GDP ratio of 87%. I think what’s going on here is that the Federal Government & Friends own a lot of the outstanding Treasurys, so that the lower ~55% figure refers to the net debt (held by the public). For example, the Federal Reserve owns a lot of Treasury debt, and I think the way the books are cook– setup, the Social Security “trust fund” consists of a pile of IOUs issued by the Treasury.
(2) More important, why is the denominator the US economy? That implies that the federal government owns the whole economy, so that every penny earned in principle is income to the feds who could use it to service their debt. But that’s not what a household does. I don’t say, “Honey sure our credit debt is high in absolute numbers, but compared to the neighborhood’s total output this year, it’s nothing.” If we instead compare the US government’s debt to its “income” (i.e. tax revenue) in FY 2009, then we see the debt-to-“income” ratio is more like ($12.4 trillion / $2.1 trillion) = 590% of income.
Obama has compared the government to a household in these tough times. So how many of you could get fresh loans right now, if you were carrying a[n unsecured] debt load 5.9 times higher than your annual income?
UPDATE: The anal von Pepe points out that plenty of households have debt-to-income ratios higher than 5.9. I should have clarified, I meant unsecured debt. It’s not as if new creditors can repo the USS Kennedy if the Treasury defaults on its bonds. (Despite my sarcasm, I am acknowledging that von Pepe is right; my original post was unclear.)
I Want to Quit, But I Need a Support Group
OK so after ordering a new battery for my Toshiba laptop (which has never really worked properly), I’m sitting on my couch with the indicator saying I’ve got about 65% or so left, when BAM the whole computer shuts down. No warning about low battery or anything.
I’m tempted to be mad at the battery, but it might not be the manufacturer’s fault. Even when this thing was about two weeks old, the computer would just randomly shut off for no reason. Good thing I don’t run traffic light control programs from it.
Oh since I’m complaining, the power cord is new too because the original one literally started shooting out sparks one time.
Anyway, my wife switched to Mac a few years ago and has no regrets. The one thing holding me back is that I actually know my way around Microsoft Office fairly well, at least Word and Excel. When I’ve tried to use the Mac versions, they make me go cross-eyed.
Do I just need to adjust, or are Word and Excel really inferior on Macs? If it matters, I’m just getting a laptop.
Recent Comments