Last Video for a While: Jon Stewart Rips Federal Budgeting
Jon Stewart conducts the best interviews. He’s funny but asks significant questions. Here he is interviewing the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag. (The interview was back in April.)
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Peter Orszag Pt. 1 | ||||
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How Can Any of You Take Voting Seriously At This Point?
Jon Stewart nails it: The Democrats not only control the White House and both houses of Congress, they have a supermajority and they still aren’t doing anything that American voters thought they were signing up for in 2006 and 2008.
(And don’t gloat, Republicans: Remember when you blamed the Reagan deficits on those dastardly Democrats in Congress who “left him no choice”? Well, what happened during the George W. Bush years?)
Here’s my theory, folks: SUCCESSFUL POLITICIANS ARE LIARS. The parties have rigged the system so that no decent candidates will ever win powerful positions. Rather than focusing your efforts on getting Awesome Candidate X on the ballot in 2010, I suggest that you promote liberty through more satisfying–and more potent–methods. Example: Work overtime at your job instead of gathering signatures, and use the extra money to send copies of my books to every school in your city. Now that’s a promising idea!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Democratic Super Majority | ||||
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Evangelicals Don’t Want Obama Messing With Their Kids!
It’s not a matter of politics, it’s because they really don’t want the kids to view the president of the United States as some kind of supreme leader, the way they do in totalitarian countries. (Video HT2LRC)
This video disgusts me as both an American citizen and as a born-again Christian.
It’s Only Money
Krugman has left cap and trade for the moment to deal with government budget deficits. The man is fearless; look at his nonchalance in this post when he writes: “Finding 1 percent of GDP in higher taxes and/or spending cuts shouldn’t be that hard — and won’t be, if America has a sane political scene by 2019.”
Let’s not even use the 2019 numbers since the economy will be bigger and it might be unfair to Krugman. Using the 2008 numbers, 1% of GDP works out to $142 billion. Krugman is saying that a permanent mix of spending cuts and/or tax hikes on an annual basis of $142 billion “shouldn’t be that hard”? And forget the currently “insane” political scene–when would that kind of budget cutting and/or tax hiking have been not-that-hard?
Remember kids, this is an annual figure. When you see stuff talking about the cost of health reform etc., those are usually ten-year projections. So to reduce the budget deficit by a percentage point of GDP, without altering spending, would imply a “$1.4 trillion tax hike over ten years” in the way these things are usually scored, even if the economy didn’t grow. Once you allow for its growth, the number obviously would be that much bigger.
It really is amazing how desensitized we’ve all become to these gargantuan numbers.
The Coming Marijuana Legalization
Of all the predictions I’ve fired off on this blog in its short life, the one I’m most comfortable with–in terms of the risk/reward tradeoff in terms of geeconosphere reputation–is that the Obama administration will greatly liberalize the marijuana market. You’ve got hit shows about a white, upper middle class mom who sells pot, and now CNBC is running stories with lame pot jokes.
Curse Those Subprime Loans!
I was getting my car fixed up for the road trip to Greenville, SC tomorrow (Mises Circle on Saturday), and I was the only customer near the TV. So I flipped through the channels and decided CNBC was the least of 46 evils.
They kept giving snippets of Bernanke’s testimony to some Congressional committee. The funniest assertion I saw was some guy telling Bernanke (paraphrasing): “I am curious how you see the role of the Fed in the future growing, to regulate the financial markets and prevent the sort of excesses that contributed to our current situation. I know in my district, there were many people who obtained subprime loans, when what they really needed were prime loans. As a consequence they are now in default, many have lost their homes, and we have vacant homes pushing down housing prices.”
Now there is a grain of truth in that someone who had an adjustable rate mortgage might end up buying too big a house and then defaulting, when a more conventional mortgage would have prevented the foolish purchase.
But that doesn’t seem to be what the Congressman was getting at. No, he seems to think that deregulation caused banks to charge more in interest rates from safe borrowers than they should, and then this higher rate caused the borrowers to default. So the housing bubble was caused by lenders being too cautious in their evaluation of the riskiness of borrowers, and charging them too high of an interest rate. (!)
Flu Vaccine Bask
Once again I ask (not beg) Free Advice readers for their help: What are the best websites giving pro and con arguments for the H1N1 vaccine? I was on a plane recently next to a woman who oversaw emergency planning for hospitals in San Diego (I think), and she was telling me matter-of-factly that I should get my 4-year-old vaccinated. (We ended up getting into a dispute over the term “inoculation.” She was complaining that the government was wasting tons of money making all the hospital staff use one-shot ventilators when treating swine flu cases, and I asked, “If you guys have all been inoculated, why do you need the ventilators?” And she thought I was using the word incorrectly, that I had to use vaccinated instead. Thoughts?)
The problem–as my wife pointed out–is that most of the “go ahead and do it, there’s no real danger you moron” websites are all run by the government. On the other hand, there are some anti-vaccine things that I’ve seen which seem like they might care more about criticizing the government, than they do about my kid’s health.
UPDATE: By the way, unless you have actual medical qualifications, please don’t tell me what to do in the comments. I understand the general arguments pro and con, but like I said, I haven’t seen sources that I trust yet. So especially if you’re an anonymous commenter on my blog, your assertions aren’t going to make me have someone stick a needle in my kid’s arm (after taking him into a waiting room full of sick kids).
Ron Paul on The Daily Show
I was literally taking planes, trains, and automobiles today. There was a Fox Business Live spot for me to discuss a new IER study, so I canceled my outbound flight from Baltimore, caught the MARC train down to DC, did the interview, then a private car took me back to Baltimore for a later flight. Strangers would think I was important.
Anyway I’m back in Nashville and just now watched Ron Paul’s appearance on The Daily Show. It went really well. Jon Stewart gave a very fair interview. He obviously was not totally sold on ending the Fed, but you can see he took Paul seriously, unlike some people.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Ron Paul | ||||
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BTW I don’t know if it will be on the above video, but the “moment of Zen” afterward was pretty funny.
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