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Deadweight Loss
Can somebody send this link to Wikipedia’s entry on deadweight loss to the Obama campaign (and the McCain campaign too)? This is one of the reasons why there is no such thing as a magic energy pony that is going to allow us to “end our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.” And please spare me the complete bravo sierra about creating millions of “new” jobs. The Obama Concert
I share James’ view that the first part of the speech could have been delivered by any previous candidate. About the only place the speech differed is that Obama is clearly a more gifted public speaker than Kerry or even Gore. The speech is the same old stuff we’ve heard before. There are more people unemployed, income is down, more people don’t have health care than before Bush, and elect me and I’ll make the economy dance like a puppeteer makes a marionette dance. And since you are part of the economy I’ll make you dance too. Meh. No thanks. And I’m getting so sick of hearing this magic energy pony (using James’ term). If it was the case that these technologies could generate profits right now then firms would be entering these new markets. Even if, as Dave Schuler pointed out, that firms are holding back in the expectation that the government will subsidize initial investments, this only points out the perversion of government involvement in the economy. The government has to subsidize even profitable industries? And what is this nonsense that a firm has a responsibility to employ people. I’m sorry, but a firm exists for the purpose of generating profits. No profits, no firm and no employment. And what exactly are the “rules of the road” for a firm? To sacrifice profitability for workers welfare? Do that long enough and soon there wont be a firm to employ the workers. And what about the responsibility of people to fend for themselves, make the right decisions and not expect government to bail them out? I guess that is too much to ask. If you keep bailing people out, then you will keep having people make bad decisions. After all the downside has been reduced or even eliminated. Have too many kids, no problem we’ll increase taxes on those who didn’t. Can’t afford or decide not to have health care? No problem we’ll increase taxes on those who can? And what is it with this “each of us has the freedom to make of our lives what we will…” baloney? If I make the right decision and don’t treat my house like an ATM machine getting home equity loan after home equity loan to fund trips and large ticket purchases. If I don’t try to get a house that is beyond my means to afford and also made sure to lock in at a good interest rate why should I be punished if some other bonehead down the street doesn’t? How come I have to stop making of my life what I will to help the fool? Yes it is nice to be compassionate and help out others, but just because I made smart decisions doesn’t mean I am in a position to help others. But here comes Barack Obama telling me I have to help these people whether I can afford to or not. This is the same old mealy-mouthed crap we’ve gotten in the past. Do Democrats understand the problems of incentives? I’m pretty sure they do which makes all of this kind of blather rather cynical and manipulative. Oh, and yeah 43 minutes? Get that man an editor! Obama’s Speech
arack Obama’s speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination was . . . long. Too long. The last fifteen or twenty minutes of it, when he went into preacher mode and talked of unity and reconciliation and change and such, were uplifting and solid political theater. Whether it’ll meet the ridiculously high expectations that he had coming in — and which he amplified by moving it to a sporting arena rather than staying in the convention hall — we’ll see.
The irony of the speech, though, is that the talk of a new politics followed forty minutes or more of a speech that, with some minor biographical edits and obligatory references to current events, could have been delivered by any Democratic presidential nominee in my memory. I’ve watched all of them since Jimmy Carter’s 1980 convention and they’ve all, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996, had the same theme: the country’s going to hell in a handbasket but, don’t worry, I’ll fix everything that ails you — even if it’s not remotely within the scope of federal authority — and pay for it by taxes on the top 5 percent, greedy corporations, and ending trade with foreign countries. Oh, and the magic energy pony will end our dependence on foreign oil, too! Not the time for small plans, indeed. Photo credit: Stephen Crowley/New York Times Show comments here »OTB Latenight - INXS
For obvious reasons: The first rock concert I ever went to was Men At Work in August, 1983. INXS opened up for them. I enjoyed the whole show, of course, but I don’t need to tell you which band was objectively better. I saw them again on the post-TV show tour a couple of years ago. They were still fun, but it just wasn’t the same. Show comment here »McCain ‘Well Done’ Ad
The McCain team spent the day touting a commerical spot that they’ll be running during and around Barack Obama’s acceptance speech tonight. The ad, named “Convention Night,” turns out to be a nice one:
A gracious gesture. Show comments here »Caption Contest Winners
The I Can Has CheezWheel Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over.
Obama Gets ‘Big Bounce’ in Gallup Poll
In the first poll since the start of the Democratic convention, Gallup gives Barack Obama what RealClearPolitics calls “a big bounce,” taking a six point lead over his rival, John McCain.
Another way of looking at the same data is that the race continues to be a tie fluctuating within the range of normal sampling error:
Indeed, the only other national poll conducted during this period, Rasmussen’s, shows Obama and McCain tied 47-47. And, unlike Gallup, Rasmussen samples likely voters rather than mere registered voters. Now, I fully expect Obama to get a bounce here, probably in the range of 4-5 percent. Thus far, though, there’s no evidence that it’s happened. Show comments here »Supreme Court Justice Nominations
My colleague Tom Traina is looking ahead to the fall and scoping out some potential Supreme Court nominees for both Obama and McCain. He also points out that, as kind of a nature of the beast, you can’t always predict what kind of Justice a nominee will turn into: Frequently, the appointment of justices is an attempt to fix a current political problem that just winds up resulting in three more political problems over the next couple of decades. Perhaps there is no better example of this than Richard Nixon’s attempts to overturn the “liberal” Warren Court through the appointments of Justices Burger, Blackmun, Powell, and Rehnquist. Most of the hallmark opinions of the Warren Court are still good law today, and it was the Burger court that decided the controversial case Roe v. Wade. In this sense, Nixon’s appointments were a failure. I think that’s right and it’s always something to keep in mind when it comes to Supreme Court nominees. Personally, I’m pretty sure that I would not have strong opinions about either John McCain’s or Barack Obama’s nominees, so it’s not a particularly big difference to worry about when it comes to the candidates. Which is not to say its unimportant who they choose, it’s just that I am not sure it makes a difference from my own peculiar ideas of jurisprudence. Show comments here »McCain Grumpy, Guarded
Now, he’s changed strategies and the people who he once called “his base” are fighting back. See, for example, “McCain’s Prickly TIME Interview.”
Now, this might just have been a bad day. Perhaps he’s usually much more cheerful and forthcoming than this, or perhaps Carney and Scherer did something to set him off, or whatever. But there’s not much doubt that McCain — and Obama, too, for that matter — have succumbed to run of the mill campaign strategies after winning their nomination processes by being something other than that. For example, McCain had numerous conference calls with bloggers where all comers were allowed to ask anything they wanted with essentially unlimited follow-ups. I myself have been priviledged to engage McCain in back-and-forth banter lasting several minutes on more than one occasion. This had the same effect on skeptical bloggers as it did the mainstream press: humanizing the candidate and making us more forgiving of the occasional gaffe and policy disagreement. Now, I never expected that would continue once he became the nominee. The man’s too busy now and has to focus his attention on swing voters, battleground states, and all that. He just can’t spare an hour every couple of weeks to talk to bloggers. At the same time, though, I never thought he’d go into bunker mode, either. The questions in the TIME interview above — and, again, I don’t know the full context here — are softballs. He should have been knocking those out of the park rather than getting indignant. “Read my books”? Seriously? He’s built up a lot of capital with the national press corps. (Many Democrats are annoyed by this but, as I’ve noted many times, there’s nothing stopping Obama and company from giving comparable access.) But, as McCain himself has noted, suddenly withdrawing that access after having gotten the media accustomed to it would be unwise. Indeed, the TIME piece uses that famous quote:
A much more famous quote, popular a quarter century ago, was “Let Reagan be Reagan.” If John McCain is going to win this thing, he’s going to have to do it as John McCain. Show comments here »Russia Not Feeling the Love
Russia hasn’t received the support it had hoped for from the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization:
and the EU continues to be unamused by the situation in Georgia:
More than one of the members of the SCO has their own potentially separatist provinces so they tend to take the issue of support for separatist movements seriously. Also, some Central Asian countries have benefited from Western FDI and are cautious about taking steps that could chill the investment environment or make them potential targets for sanctions. This would seem to answer the question that Nikolas Gvosdev expressed last week:
The SCO has produced no retroactive endorsement and Russia has become further internationally isolated. Show comment here » |
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