Let's run the numbers

What was Alan Greenspan thinking? Is he truly thinking that cutting Social Security benefits is a good idea? I've been pounding my head, trying to make it think like his, without success. [No, I don't think he's brain-damaged, the pounding was metaphorical.] But in the past week or so he's talked about limiting one program that has helped bring millions of people into the middle class (the Federal mortgage backers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), and another program that provides for the elderly when they cannot work (Social Security). What is he thinking? Here's Billmon's take on it: Whiskey Bar: The Two Faces of Alan Greenspan : Like the comic book villain, Chairman Al presents two distinct faces to the world --- two different personalities, really. One is the career civil servant who keeps watch over the economy -- raising or lowering interest rates as needed to keep both inflation and unemployment in check -- and regulates (along with the Comp...

Another Osama Bin Laden rumor You know, there were a few rumors before we "captured" Saddam Hussein too. One of the prevailing theories is that a local group had captured him first, and put him in that hole. Rather than negotiate with the them, the U.S. just sends in a team to find where they're keeping him and pull him out of the hole. Come to think of it, Saddam kept sending out tapes too. Either that shoots down the theory that some group had him, or the group saw some benefit to putting out the tapes. I cannot make the latter theory work well, though. I know, these rumors are one step away from conspiracy theories and tinfoil hats. I think it was Teresa Nielsen-Hayden who said "I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist." I don't trust the administration. I know they've lied to us about the war, the need for the war, the economy, and environmental issues, and did all this for partis...

I never cite Andrew Sullivan Except this time, and he's quoting the Simpsons. Remember the episode that parodied the Schoolhouse Rock "I'm Just a Bill"? www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish [Amendment] I'm not garbage I'm an amendment to be Yes, an amendment to be And I'm hoping that they'll ratify me There's a lot of flag-burners who have got too much freedom I want to make it legal for policemen to beat 'em 'Cause there's limits to our liberties At least, I hope and pray that there are 'Cause those liberal freaks go too far Oh, and he also links to this Mike Luckovich cartoon . You know, Bush thought he was just pandering to the right-wingnuts when he endorsed the anti-gay marriage amendment. Instead, he's going to lose more support from his moderates than he'll gain from his base. Only think I think Karl Rove was thinking is that the moderates will get over it before election day, while the hard...

A blogging break, or a restaurant review My favorite restaurant in DC's Chinatown reopened a few weeks ago. So, after giving the servers at Full Kee some time to settle in, me and Mrs. Datanerd went there for dinner. Its about a block up from Chinatown Garden, the restaurant that Greg Mankiew was at when he explained to the National Economists Club that he didn't mean his comments about outsourcing jobs, except he did and that it was ok. [Note to self: need to renew membership. If nothing else, I miss the long lunch breaks.] Full Kee closed for a month-long renovation 10 months ago. The place didn't look that much different, new paint inside, tile floor instead of uneven carpet that was both faded and stained, new ceiling tiles pristine and unstained. We shared a large bowl of shrimp dumpling soup to start. Yum. At minimum, the soup station in the front of the restaurant hadn't forgotten how to make good soup. Then, an order of stir-fried vegetables and ...

Oh, my aching head: Robert Samuelson edition I'm thinking of a recurring theme in my blog, specifically "Oh, my aching head", for writers, columnists, and pundits who torture economics and economists by oversimplifying economic theory. Today's "Oh, my aching head" is awarded to Robert Samuelson A Phony Jobs Debate (washingtonpost.com) : We are having a ferocious jobs debate, most of it fraudulent. If presidents could easily create jobs, the unemployment rate would rarely exceed 3.5 percent. But all they can usually do is influence the economy through taxes, spending and regulatory decisions -- and hope that job growth follows. In our market system, private employers play the pivotal role. They will add jobs only if: (a) demand justifies new workers; (b) labor costs aren't at unprofitable levels; and (c) they think healthy economic conditions will last. Why is this debate fraudulent? Specifically, why is it a fraud to discuss the policies t...

Billmon is onto something Billmon: "Base Instincts" : Monday, the Secretary of Education calls the National Education Association a 'terrorist organization.' Tuesday, President Bush endorses -- albeit in a vague, abstract sort of way -- a constitutional amendment to save the Republic from the looming threat of gay wedding receptions. What's teed up for Wednesday -- White House declares first Monday in March Jerry Falwell Day? Is somebody perchance feeling a little nervous about the social conservatives and their commitment to the greater glory of the Bush family? Maybe Shrub needs to get born a third time.

The Friday Dump Used to be, the president would release bad news late on a Friday, because fewer people are watching the news over the weekend. According to Dana Milbank's column in the Washington Post, the Friday dumps of bad news are losing their effectiveness, because they've become so common everyone expects them. For News Hounds, TGIF (washingtonpost.com) : Indeed, Friday has become a Bush favorite both for dropping bad news and for making announcements that appeal to the president's conservative base, not necessarily the general public. It was on a Friday, for example, that the administration disclosed its long-awaited decision that it would eliminate requirements that thousands of the nation's dirtiest coal-fired power plants and refineries make anti-pollution improvements as they upgrade facilities. On another Friday, the administration announced new rules giving new rights to fetuses. Yet another Friday brought an announcement virtually ensuring that...

Jonathan Weisman helps us on taxes and entrepreneurs Once again, the Republicans are stretching the truth on their tax cuts. I already knew this. My mother-in-law is one of those entrepreneurs, and I know that she doesn't pull in anything close to the top income tax brackets. I've known many other entrepreneurs, and I cannot think of any that were in the top income bracket. If they had that much money laying around, they were plowing it back into their business, investing, not squandering. This almost makes up for the article that Brad Delong chastised Mr. Weismanon. Making up for the nasty e-mail to Brad will take longer. Bush Assertion on Tax Cuts Is at Odds With IRS Data (washingtonpost.com) : By Jonathan Weisman Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, February 24, 2004; Page A04 President Bush defended his tax cuts yesterday as economic fuel for the small-business sector in response to mounting criticism from Democratic presidential candidates that t...

I remember when I had respect for Greg Mankiew He was brilliant. His macroeconomic theory articles were required reading for Econ grad students. He has sold out, and sold his soul and his academic reputation. I think he may think his reputation is repairable; I think otherwise now that he has shown willingness to misdirect, lie, and deceive the American people for the Bush administration. John Dingell gives us an example of the contempt he is held in. Read t his letter and see if you think his reputation is toast. (Via the Angry Bear )

The Payroll Survey vs. The Household Survey The payroll data is accurate, and the household survey isn't. Which is what most economists have been saying for months. But that doesn't stop the Conservative Lysenkos from saying that the household survey is the right one because it matches better with their idea that the economy is just fine. They'll continue to say it, but Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve just pulled the rug out from under them by saying that "...the gloomy payroll data is essentially accurate and that the household survey is probably off base." Economic View: Two Tales of American Jobs February 22, 2004 ECONOMIC VIEW Two Tales of American Jobs By EDMUND L. ANDREWS Washington FOR more than a year, Bush administration officials and Republicans in Congress have seized on an intriguing statistical puzzle to suggest that job creation in the United States may be much stronger than it appears at first glance. The puzzle...

Why, Ralphie, Why? It just doesn't make sense. He should be able to see what has happened to the country under Bush. Also, the Democratic candidates (Kerry and Edwards) are both much farther to the left than Al Gore was at this point. Why would he risk splitting the left-wing vote again? Yahoo! News - Nader Announces Another White House Run in 2004 : "Nader Announces Another White House Run in 2004 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ralph Nader (news - web sites), whose third-party White House bid in 2000 was blamed by some Democrats for helping elect President Bush (news - web sites), said on Sunday he will try again this year as an independent. Ignoring the pleas of Democrats to stay out of the race, the veteran consumer advocate said he wanted to challenge the stranglehold on the political process of the two main parties and fight their addiction to corporate interests. 'Washington is corporate-occupied territory, and the two parties are ferociously competing ...

We weren't all wrong I've been wanting to blog about this for a while. The whole talking point "We were all wrong about WMD in Iraq" is patently untrue. I wasn't wrong. I didn't believe Colin Powell, as I wrote about last May. I just couldn't figure out how best to express this. The Slacktivist has managed it. It's good, and explains why reasonable people were deceived by the media and deceived by the White House. Maybe it was my distrust of this administration, but I knew back then they were lying about the economy and tax cuts, so I wasn't all that surprised that they were lying about WMDs in Iraq. slacktivist: "Not Everyone Was Wrong" "We were all wrong," David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector told Congress on Jan. 29. Kay's statement sent the Bush administration scurrying for a response. That response, as it turns out, has been to try to minimize that last word -- "wrong" -- by ...

Reports of Osama Bin Laden sighting So sayeth the Sunday Express, a British tabloid. And as I highlight below, he won't be captured until Bush asks for him. But as many bloggers have already said, I think this won't give him more than a short blip in the polls. It might give him a hop, but then everybody will be back asking why there aren't any jobs. Sunday Telegraph - Bin Laden 'surrounded' [February 22, 2004] : A BRITISH Sunday newspaper is claiming Osama bin Laden has been found and is surrounded by US special forces in an area of land bordering north-west Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Sunday Express, known for its sometimes colourful scoops, claims the al-Qaeda leader has been 'sighted' for the first time since 2001 and is being monitored by satellite. The paper claims he is in a mountainous area to the north of the Pakistani city of Quetta. The region is said to be peopled with bin Laden supporters and the terrorist leader is estimate...

RIP, Spot CNN.com - Spot, spaniel born in first Bush White House, dies - Feb. 21, 2004 : Spot, an English springer spaniel with a White House pedigree who spent nearly 15 years with President Bush and his family, has died, the White House announced Saturday. An administration official told CNN that Spot was put to sleep Saturday around 1:30 p.m. after suffering a series of strokes. Her remains will be taken to the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Economic Patriotism Billmon has a good post up titled Patriot Games, in which he explores the current Republican coalition, and its tendency toward regarding any disagreement with its policies as treason. More importantly, thought, he also explores how Democrats could use issues such as jobs and trade to pull support from the Republicans in key midwestern states, by framing the issues as "Economic Patriotism". Go read it, it's good. Whiskey Bar: Patriot Games : To really crack the GOP coalition, though, economic populism has to be wrapped in something larger -- like the flag. I'm coming around to the view that the winning theme for the Democrats in this election -- the one that could really tear the bark off Bush (to borrow somebody else's phrase) is 'economic patriotism.' The Dems need a rhetorical and substantive program that ties the job/trade issue into a broader set of arguments about the privileges and obligations of citizenship, the rela...

Conservative Lysenkoism II Bush and his flunkies will do anything to get this recession moved away from them. Too bad that the truth isn't on their side. Recession's Timing Becomes An Issue By Mike Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, February 20, 2004; Page A04 Just as questions appeared to be dying down about his service in the National Guard, President Bush faced a third controversy yesterday over claims in an annual economic report that usually receives little attention. The new questions concern whether the recession began on Bush's watch or before he took office. Bush has asserted in speeches that he inherited the recession, and the report adopts that view. The charts and analyses in the 412-page "Economic Report of the President," issued last week, put the "start of the recession" in the fourth quarter of 2000 -- under President Bill Clinton. But the National Bureau of Economic Research, which dates business cycle...

Lysenkoism and the Bush Administration A crib sheet for my readers: Lysenkoism referrs to a period in the history of the Soviet Union where "[u]nder Lysenko's guidance, science was guided not by the most likely theories, backed by appropriately controlled experiments, but by the desired ideology. Science was practiced in the service of the State, or more precisely, in the service of ideology. The results were predictable: the steady deterioration of Soviet biology." For more on Soviet Lysenkoism, see the Skeptic's Dictionary . I like Calpundit using the term "Conservative Lysenkoism". This is an issue that has stuck in my craw for a long time, the administration perverting the scientific inquiry process, publishing the views of any half-wit it could find who would parrot the party line and call himself a scientist. Lord knows, I've blogged about the perversion of Economics that Larry Lindsey, Glenn Hubbard, and now Greg Mankiew have committed in ...

Done with Condo Duty My last condo board meeting was tonight. Now I'll have more time to blog again. I've missed it.

Democrats and Jobs The Post says the Democrats aren't sure what to do about jobs. If I may suggest, go read the post on The American Street about losing manufacturing jobs. Wage insurance suggested here would fill one of the gaps. Retraining programs would fill another, to get people back up to their old wages quicker. Improvements in education funding across the board would ensure we keep ahead of the curve. And we could pay for all of this by rolling back the tax cuts to the richest 2 percent. I think Jonathan Weisman is working with blinders on. He's only looking at it from the corporate side, rather than from the overarching policy side. Democrats Ponder What to Do About Jobs (washingtonpost.com) : "Democrats Ponder What to Do About Jobs By Jonathan Weisman Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page A01 Democratic presidential candidates have made the loss of U.S. jobs to international competition the centerpiece of their c...

Helen Thomas thinks Bush and Company are nervous What else would explain this exchange? Washingtonian: Washington BUZZ Scott McClellan finally lost it Friday, according to White House reporters. He doesn’t see it that way. The White House press secretary had kept his cool all week as reporters pounced on him about President George Bush’s 1970s service in the National Guard. Facing perhaps his toughest week as press secretary, McClellan got testy Tuesday under questioning by CBS correspondent John Roberts during the televised briefing. He then blew up at old pro Helen Thomas during the private “gaggle” for reporters on Friday. Thomas had gotten a tip that Bush might have been absent from duty in Alabama because he was performing court-ordered community service in Texas in 1972. She asked McClellan if that was accurate. According to reporters in the press room, McClellan got red-faced and became so angry, it looked to some as if he were ready to pounce. He characteriz...

Bill O'Reilley apologizes In sort of a half-hearted way, but he does apologize. SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Nation -- Conservative U.S. anchor now skeptical about Bush WASHINGTON – Conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly said Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The anchor of his own show on Fox News said he was sorry he gave the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's weapons program poised an imminent threat, the main reason cited for going to war. "I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America." But later in the article, he places all of the blame on George Tenet. To answer his question, why does George Tenet still have a job...

Yes, Clinton thought Hussein had WMD's And Clinton took care of them. See article below. The Art of Camouflage - David Kay comes clean, almost. By Fred Kaplan Iraq's weapons and facilities, he says, had been destroyed in three phases: by allied bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War; by U.N. inspectors in the half-decade after that war; and by President Clinton's 1998 bombing campaign. (Clinton's airstrikes, by now widely forgotten, were even at the time widely dismissed as a political diversion; they took place during the weekend when the House of Representatives voted for impeachment. But according to Kay, they destroyed Iraq's remaining infrastructure for building chemical weapons.) Don't even think of blaming Clinton for the Iraq war.

The truth shall rise again! I wish Al Gore had run again. Then again, he wouldn't get away with what he's saying now if he were a candidate. So, he serves a useful role in the Democratic party, speaking the truth without fear from a Republican smear campaign. What can they do now, steal more 2000 presidential votes away from him? (Also, Al Gore finally found his voice as a southern populist, which I think has influenced John Edwards.) Gore Says Bush Betrayed the U.S. by Using 9/11 as a Reason for War in Iraq ASHVILLE, Feb. 8 — In a withering critique of the Bush administration, former Vice President Al Gore on Sunday accused the president of betraying the country by using the Sept. 11 attacks as a justification for the invasion of Iraq. "He betrayed this country!" Mr. Gore shouted into the microphone at a rally of Tennessee Democrats here in a stuffy hotel ballroom. "He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure d...

Finally, some good news from Congress Except it's not actually Congress who's doing it. But its good that they're going to have a "short-order" science department again, even if it's just for terror and national security. Ten years ago, under the Gingrich revolution, the congressional Office of Technology Assessment was "de-funded", or as we would say, shut down. Just when we were entering the heyday of extreme advances in computing and communication, Congress didn't have anyone to help guide them. I know the Bush administration wouldn't want a nonpartisan scientific group going around issuing reports on pending legislation. Their attitude is "When science disagrees with policy, change the science." But maybe the next one will. Linking Lawmakers, Scientific Knowledge : Congress will get a new source for information on the science of terrorism and national security under a $2.25 million grant from the MacArthur Foun...

Back up and running Well, I wasn't able to salvage anything this time, but because this was the second hard drive crash in two months, I didn't lose anything important, because I had my two month ago copy of everything. Plug for Western Digital: They sent out a drive the same day I e-mailed them. Now, all I have to do is pack up the old drive in the box the new one came in, and send it back.

Computer Down Blankety-blank hard drive crashed Tuesday. Western Digital shipped out a new one yesterday, should be here tomorrow. That's why I buy hard drives from them, the support. Check back Saturday or Sunday.

Once again, business reporters are wrong Yahoo! News - Self-Employment May Mask U.S. Job Growth : "Self-Employment May Mask U.S. Job Growth Sat Jan 31, 8:39 AM ET By Andrea Hopkins WASHINGTON (Reuters) - According to the most widely accepted measure of U.S. employment, public-speaking coach and consultant LeeAundra Temescu was not among the 130 million Americans who had a job in 2003. But don't try telling her that. 'Was I working?' the Los Angeles resident said. 'In terms of speaking and writing and marketing and doing all that sort of stuff -- yeah, I was working.' Because she is one of more than 15 million self-employed workers in the United States, Temescu is on nobody's payroll -- and thus does not show up on the Labor Department (news - web sites)'s employer survey used each month to assess the strength of the job market." I wonder where they get the figure that there are 15 million self-employed workers. I'm loo...