The Kid Is Back

Submitted dissertation. Fired up and ready to go.

Consequences

The Economist's Greg Ip makes the case that things are bound to get better. Since voters seem to care about trends and not levels, and things will be getting better, odds are that the party that wins the election this year will win in four years, as well.

Blame Bush

It's sort of cliche to say, but the depth of the badness of the economy really is to a significant degree due to Bush's policies, and Romney's policies are more of the same.

"During the 2000 election, the growth of a budget surplus offered the country a major choice. Al Gore proposed to use most of the surplus to retire the national debt and the balance for public investment. George W. Bush proposed a large, regressive income tax that Gore warned would exacerbate inequality and jeopardize the soundness of the budget.

Then, as now, the Republican simply denied over and over that his plan would do what the Democrats said it would. Bush portrayed his plan as devoting just a small fraction of the surplus to tax cuts and described his tax cut itself as benefitting the poor far more than the rich. And you certainly could find circumstantial evidence to suggest that Bush might govern the way he portrayed himself, rather than the way his plan read. He had governed in a bipartisan way in Texas, he had explicitly denounced the conservative wing of the Congressional GOP, and he had surrounded himself with moderate advisers like Michael Gerson and Karen Hughes.

But Bush in fact followed through on what his plan actually did, which happened to be what Gore described it as, and not what Bush described it as. His promises to maintain the budget surplus and direct most of the tax cuts to lower-earners fell by the wayside. What mattered was the party, and the Republican Party was committed to a policy of regressive tax cuts."

Whoops

When is a tax cut not a tax cut? Trick question.

Spinners Gonna Spin

The media determines what we care about in debates.

Sports

It's just a game.

"We consider the relationship between collegiate-football success and non-athlete student performance. We find that the team's success significantly reduces male grades relative to female grades. This phenomenon is only present in fall quarters, which coincides with the football season. Using survey data, we find that males are more likely than females to increase alcohol consumption, decrease studying, and increase partying in response to the success of the team. Yet, females also report that their behavior is affected by athletic success, suggesting that their performance is likely impaired but that this effect is masked by the practice of grade curving."

Paul Ryan Thinks We're Suckers

The video is pretty funny.

Class Warfare

Remind me again: which side is winning? Something weird about saying people need rich people to create jobs but then decry labor as all on the government dole. Are they working in the jobs you create or are they welfare queens milking the government system?

"As a group we employ many millions of taxpaying people, pay their salaries, provide them with healthcare coverage, start new companies, found new industries, create new products, fill store shelves at Christmas, and keep the wheels of commerce and progress (and indeed of government, by generating the income whose taxation funds it) moving. To frame the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment...

The President, in Cooperman’s view, draws political support from those who are dependent on government. Last October, in a question-and-answer session at a Thomson Reuters event, Cooperman said, “Our problem, frankly, is as long as the President remains anti-wealth, anti-business, anti-energy, anti-private-aviation, he will never get the business community behind him. The problem and the complication is the forty or fifty per cent of the country on the dole that support him.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/08/121008fa_fact_freeland#ixzz283fmLNwe