4/29/13: A Lousy Night for the Umpires in Atlanta

Okay, I’m a Washington Nationals fan, and I’m a seamhead, and the umpires in Atlanta for tonight’s Nats-Braves games missed just about every call, and the game went to the Braves when it could just as easily have gone to the Nats. If you’re not a baseball person, you’re excused.

The “Which President’s Debt” Question Again!

From Twitter, I found this article by Cato senior fellow and Johns Hopkins econ professor Steve Hanke. Hanke conlcudes that since 1980, Bill Clinton has been the president who cut spending the most.  Now, this is fairly familiar territory for me, and the piece caught my eye because of this chart:

Massive Infrastructure Spending is a Win-Win-Win-Win-Win (redux)

This was right when I wrote it a year and a half ago, and it’s still good.

In Pennsylvania, it would take 15 years for the state to pay for current bridge repair needs, $600 per year.  But if the federal government was the intermediary, selling Treasuries to fund all $8.7 billion of work in the next few years, all the work would be done in the near-term, employing tens of thousands of workers idled by the private sector.  Paying off the debt could be accomplished by a combination of taxes collected on the construction projects, reduced unemployment benefits, and Pennsylvania’s annual bridge budget, which would pay off the debt in 15 years or less.

Here’s what’s changed since I wrote this:

Jeffrey Sachs Joins Team Scarborough (and Team Deception)

Okay, there’s lots here, but I have to start somewhere.

Joe Scarborough’s been tilting against Paul Krugman, despite basically arguing the same things, for months now. Plainly Scarborough knows that conflict sells, so he blatantly and continually misrepresents what Krugman said on his show. But this short post isn’t about that. It’s about the obviously misleading critiques of the 2009 stimulus.

Krugman v. Scarborough – The Missing Piece

Princeton economist Paul Krugman was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” for about 20 minutes on Monday, talking macro stuff. Later that day, host and former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough published this post mortem: Paul Krugman vs. The World.  If you listen to the Krugman segment and then read Scarborough’s treatment of it, you’ll find that Joe consistently misrepresented what Krugman said. But I’m not going to go point-by-point on this. I just want to highlight the key point in Krugman’s argument that everybody else on the panel missed.

When pols talk about entitlement reform, they’re talking largely about Social Security and Medicare.  And nobody, on either side, is willing to cut benefits that go to today’s seniors.  The result of this political cowardice is that we’re not talking about cutting any spending today. We’re talking about making cuts to future benefits, to the spending of these programs 10+ years out.

Clinton: What difference does it make?

Here’s S.E. Cupp on Hillary Clinton’s testimony yesterday:

Firstly, and I want to say this not a condemnation of everything that Secretary Clinton said today, but I was incredibly offended by her reaction to what I thought was a very valid question from you and I think we all know what difference it makes whether the attacks were spontaneous or terrorism. [emphasis added]

This was in reaction to Clinton’s much-noted response to questioning from Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), who was asking not for information about the attacks themselves, but about the administration’s public statements in the days after the Benghazi attacks. It was a very contentious sequence, and I encourage you to read this part of the transcript yourself.  Here’s the specific question and Clinton’s response that so offended Cupp:

Obama Would Just Disregard Debt Ceiling

UPDATE: My ideas on the debt ceiling and the trillion dollar coin are similar to those in earlier articles by Neil H. Buchanan and Michael C. Dorf and Eric Posner. Read them too.

Okay, following up on what I wrote here about the Trillion Dollar Coin, some thoughts about how I see the debt ceiling fight going.

First, recall that I have faith that the Obama administration wouldn’t have given up on not just the Coin, but also the 14th Amendment gambit, without having a better idea in play.  If the administration thinks a debt ceiling-induced spending freeze would significantly damage the economy (I think they do), and if it thinks there’s any likelihood that the Republicans actually would fail to raise the debt ceiling (I also think they do), not having a way out would be extremely irresponsible. Which, call me fool, I don’t think the Obama administration is.

The only way Obama specifically removes two promising options is because they already have a better path. Which I think is to disregard the debt ceiling law.

Here’s how it goes down.