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Wednesday, June 30, 2004
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Who is anonymous? |
| Well, I'm not! Two theories (via Bruce Bartlett). |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:28 PM |
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DeLong on Hillary |
Given recent speculation regarding Hillary Clinton as possible VP candidate, the opinions of those who have worked with or around her are of particular interest.
On June 8, 2003, when I was so new to the business of blogging I posted stuff (for my classes, primarily) using Microsoft Frontpage, I linked to this comment from Brad DeLong's blog:
My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.
So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation's health-care system...[sic]
Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch--the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.
UPDATE: Ben White comments:
...Matt Drudge's post strikes me as bogus...Kerry considers the nomination "his turn". He will not stand for someone else to upstage him at every turn.
Also, Hillary does not bolster Kerry where he is weak...[Rather, she] emphasizes the problems with the Kerry platform. They are unified [only] in their hatred of the military (there go the votes of the military and their families and friends) [and in their favoring of] increased taxes (ask Mondale how that worked out)... It is true that in the past 50 years there have been times when two rivals have come together on the same ticket: JFK/LBJ and Reagan/Bush. But a Kerry/Clinton ticket would be so disharmonious from a personal and political perspective it is hard to see it happening.
EconoPundit's two cents: remember I voted for her because the Clintons took up the Tsongas health-care challenge -- and she lost my vote (and all my once-strong allegiance to the Democratic Party) when she disavowed responsibility for all those pesky undercapitalized small businesses soon to be plowed under by her gleaming new health plan. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 12:29 PM |
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New Slogan? The "Success Tax" |
A reliable source sends us the following abstract of this paper -- William M. Gentry and R. Glenn Hubbard, Success Taxes, Entrepreneurial Entry, and Innovation
We found robust results that progressive marginal tax rates discourage entry into self-employment and business ownership. Those effects are large: The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which raised the top marginal individual income tax rate, was estimated to have reduced the probability of entry into self employment for upper middle income households by as much as 20 percent. Moreover, those estimated effects were robust to controlling for differences in family structure, spousal income, and measures of transitory income. The paper is available from NBER, which wants $5 for a download. To me this seems kinda steep for what is, after all, a discussion paper -- you write them to generate response and discussion, don't you? -- so I poked around the web and found this, which is either someone's free posting of the paper or an April 2004 (free) draft of same.
The paper is as credible as these things get, but in this era of supercomputer global warming models high R-squares and so on are no longer guaranteed persuaders of anything. The paper's true historical contribution may be its use of the term "success tax," which, like the expression "death tax," seems to communicate the essence of the argument in two widely understood words.
UPDATE: An alert reader points out Mrs. Clinton's recent words:
Many of you are well enough off that...the tax cuts may have helped you...We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. should be noted in this context. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:54 AM |
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Iraq War's purpose was re-election? |
EconPundit has argued the red/blue state differential regarding personal connection with the armed services may decide the election. (In the blue states, it is highly unlikely any one individual either has a relative in the armed forces, knows someone in the armed forces, or knows someone with a relative in the armed forces. In the red states the situation is exactly reversed.) When you think about it, the charge the Iraq war was somehow cooked up in Texas for political purposes is simply one way of recognizing this fact.
Jed Babbin states eloquently one thing the upcoming election will test:
By teaching the world that the United States would spend the lives of its soldiers pursuing the UN's interests -- not its own -- Clinton told our soldiers that their lives were of less value to him than the empty praise he received from Kofi Annan and the UN. He thus broke the bond that American warriors hold most sacred: a commander in chief's commitment to hold his soldiers' lives in trust. How the troops feel about their current commander in chief will be well known to their families, and their families' friends, by November. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:37 AM |
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Passion Revisited |
Remember how The Passion of The Christ became a box office hit, how it just swept the nation, how it set records, and how the whole thing was debunked by those pointing out the whole thing was organized by church groups with their own agenda. It was just a propaganda event, right? Remember?
Well now, it turns out... |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 6:00 AM |
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International class struggle... |
The give and take between judiciary and military, it turns out, may be global.
Good thing I'm not ideological about these things.
UPDATE: Reader Timothy, who is an arch-conservative college kid, sends the following comment:
I might be an arch-conservative college kid, but it seems to me that if Git-Mo prisoners aren't US Citizens, the Constitution simply doesn't apply to their case. That might be heartless, and it might be bad PR, and it certainly isn't carte blanche to abuse them, but I think it is something to consider.
EconPundit's two cents: Well, there's something heroic about the idea of universal values, no?
UPDATE II: More here. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 5:31 AM |
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
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yup... |
According to The Daily Times:
Internet muckraker Matt Drudge is quoting one senior Kerry source as saying, "I would argue, adamantly, the records should remain sealed -- and out of the hands of John's political enemies." I guess you could say Drudge did indeed rake up some muck there. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:14 AM |
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Rising interest rates as the gong of doom... |
This one isn't too bad, but you should expect many more, mostly alarmist, gloomy, and troubled.
There's nothing to worry about so long as the dollar's movements -- up or down -- remain orderly. The Marxist in me keeps brooding about housing bubble possibilities, but, heck, that's just Marx babbling (I hope).
You should remember most material pertaining to the economy and appearing in newspapers is written by journalists, not economists. The best of this writing (e.g. Robert Samuelson) benefits from all journalism's training offers. However most -- perhaps 95% -- merely retells the story of troubled, unstable equilibrium, the tale that "we may feel secure this week, but actually the economy is teetering on the brink of economic disaster."
Disaster, of course, sells papers. And the US intellectual elite long ago issued a decree denouncing the tale of the invisible hand as boring, false, and ethically incorrect.
UPDATE: Enough already with the philosophy... Here's the JEC's new report on interest rates.
So what did you think -- they would maybe go down to zero and stay there forever? |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:09 AM |
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Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen... |
Today's NYT:
Lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the 14 Guantanamo prisoners in the Supreme Court case and scores of others detained there, said they would soon try to meet with their clients and file further petitions, perhaps in the form of a class action. The center of legal activity in the case will almost certainly continue to be the Federal District Court in Washington, where the original petitions were filed.
This flood of litigation, perhaps accompanied by a series of evidentiary hearings attended by the individual detainees, alarmed some of the justices.
"Each detainee undoubtedly has complaints - real or contrived," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent in the Guantanamo case, joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas. "The court's unheralded expansion of federal-court jurisdiction is not even mitigated by a comforting assurance that the legion of ensuing claims will be easily resolved on the merits." |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 6:37 AM |
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Antler Dowdifies Reynolds! |
Here's Instapundit's take on a subject I've discussed many times with EconoPundit's active email correspondents -- the question of installing the weblog "comments" feature:
"...yeah, I really want to give you a platform, buddy..." (Italics added.) Unfair! That's not the whole quote! This was taken out of context!
So out of respect to Instapundit we'll relax the normal rules of Dowdification and reproduce a bit more of the paragraph:
I GOT AN EMAIL THE OTHER DAY slamming me for not having comments on my site. I get those occasionally, and they're usually nasty enough that they're self-refuting -- yeah, I really want to give you a platform, buddy. . . .
But...the worst part isn't the flaming by people who don't agree with you, it's the nasty comments by people who generally agree with you...
The other problem [is that] bloggers can be captured by their commenters. It's immediate feedback, and it's interesting (it's about you!) and I can imagine it could become addictive. My impression is that often, instead of serving as a corrective to errors, comment sections tend to lure bloggers farther in the direction they already lean...
And since anybody can start a blog, I don't feel that the absence of a comment section on InstaPundit is doing much to choke off free speech.
Read the whole thing.
I have to say virtually all my EconoPundit-related email is constructive, friendly, intelligent, worthy of posting, and (indeed) some of it is posted by me from time to time. But following Glenn, I think we can say the entire blogosphere is one big "Comments Section" for all the weblogs without comments enabled. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 6:09 AM |
Monday, June 28, 2004
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A puzzle... |
Bill Clinton hee-haws stuff like this:
[T]he new Republicans...never saw a tax cut they didn't like. They basically don't care what happens to all these poor people because they think the only thing that really matters is to concentrate as much power and wealth in the hands of the good guys as possible, people who share their values... And I wonder why the Republicans can't seem to produce anyone equally articulate to speak for people like this man and his wife -- not to mention the people they employ.
Via Newmark's Door. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:03 PM |
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What did they expect? |
Here is James Taranto's view on the "Coalition of the Wild-Eyed" ad (You may have to scroll down):
Kerry had the opportunity for a Sister Souljah-like moment here. He could have said: "I categorically reject any comparison of the president to Hitler, and MoveOn was wrong to disseminate these ads. But two wrongs don't make a right. I call on President Bush to withdraw his ad." Instead, he tacitly approved of his backers' Hitler analogies, thereby validating the substance of the Bush ad, if not its choice of images.
For a guy who served in Vietnam (didja hear?), John Kerry sure lacks courage. I want to add one more consideration to this discussion.
Aside from "evil" and killing Jews, what is Hitler most remembered for?
The answer, simply, is loud, angry, gravel-voiced grating speeches. Play the ad video again, and ask yourself how anyone might have expected otherwise? |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 4:05 PM |
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Beginning of the end... |
My first reaction may be over the top, but I feel by this decision the U.S. judiciary has begun claiming for itself the most basic powers of the executive branch.
UPDATE: Not everyone agrees. (If "comments" were enabled you'd find the following from Brock Cusick there):
Most simply put, the job of the Executive is to 'do stuff', while the job of the Judiciary is to 'resolve disputes.'
The Executive and the prisoners at Gunatanamo and elsewhere have a dispute (obviously), and therefore it is the job of the Judiciary to resolve it.
I wouldn't worry. The Judiciary has a long history of bending over backwards to allow the Executive to do his job - especially in military and national security affairs. I wouldn't be surprised if 599 of the 600 are sent right back to Git-mo.
Be that as it may, our country also has a long tradition of going to great lengths to see justice done. We're willing to bear the cost of these trials (probably as a class, or expedited in some other way) to make sure that innocents are not locked up by accident.
If we did not have trials such as this in the past, I believe it was merely a cost/ benefit tradeoff that worked against them. There's nothing anti-American about this decision. It squares firmly with the US Constitution, and our own sense of doing things the right way. Even if the other guy doesn't deserve it, we owe it to ourselves to hold ourselves to the higher standard. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 10:22 AM |
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Calling the blogosphere |
Might as well help spread the rumor. Glenn Reynolds got an email from a reader:
My Arabic isn't too good, but the local radio in Iraq is stating that Zarqawi has been captured by Iraqi intelligence. All our laborers are chattering about it and seem extremely pleased (most are Kurdish). The post indicates the U.S. military is denying the story, but it is unclear whether this is Glenn's addition or part of the original email.
We're going to keep watching the Bush reelection contract all day to see how good news -- if anything more is confirmed -- influences the price. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:33 AM |
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The earth moved... |
| But we didn't feel it. No damage to report. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:26 AM |
Sunday, June 27, 2004
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Letter to Jonah Goldberg |
From The Corner:
Last week Slate ran an "explainer" detailing the compelling legal reasons for the the unsealing of Jack Ryan's divorce file. As I recall, John Kerry's divorce from his first wife was also not "friendly" and the record of these proceedings is still under court seal. Question: When will the Chicago Tribune be petitioning the Massachusetts court for release of the Kerry file? Here's the referenced Slate article.
UPDATE: This is now the lead story at Drudge, who quotes Judge Schnider:
[In] a public court system...protection from embarrassment cannot be a basis for keeping from the public what's put in public courts...The openness of court files must be maintained, so that the public ... can be assured that there is no favoritism shown to the rich and powerful. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 5:24 PM |
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WMD? |
| I posted one link possibly connected with this yesterday, but this is important enough to move up in case more develops. One source is reporting a mustard gas attack in Iraq. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:56 AM |
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Market forces and rent seeking behavior... |
File this under the subheading "No Monopoly is Forever."
(If you're puzzled about the "rent seeking" aspect, just ask yourself why lay-filing of legal papers has become such a profitable little growth industry?) |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:16 AM |
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Someone has to say it... |
Glenn Reynolds has a nice set of links showing the new hostility between the Nader camp and Michael Moore.
Moore used to be Nader's pal -- now he isn't. As Nader puts it:
A few weeks ago, Michael, I sent you a message...It simply asked you to come back to your progressive constituency and take on the two-party monopoly of our rigged election system -- to challenge the pro-warlike, corporate party with two heads, wearing different makeup when it comes to playing toady for Big Business. These are the giant multinationals who have no allegiance to our country or to communities like Flint except to control, deplete or abandon them. It is not that your views have changed, with an exception or two. It is that your circles have changed. Too much Clinton, not enough Camejo. There's an obvious point that needs to be made here.
Nader is wrong. Michael Moore has not sold out. Rather, the Democratic Party has thoughtlessly blundered leftward to a degree not yet recognized nor understood.
Demonization of the military, of business, and especially of those "giant multinationals who have no allegiance to our country" is now mainstream Democratic Party, not far-left-wing. Consider this non-Moore documentary, which last year languished unreleased on the shelf but is now preparing for a tour of indie and art houses throughout the country.
The Democratic Party claims "the middle," but words don't make reality. It is rather a weak alliance implicitly based on the mutual victimhood of its participating groups, but explicitly based on no core set of beliefs other than sneering disdain for Red America and its institutions. And, by default, Chomsky and Negri have come to occupy the ideological core of the Democratic Party. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 6:24 AM |
Saturday, June 26, 2004
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Precautions... |
Hope this is just a rumor:
DEBKAfile's military sources report: US troops in Iraq ordered to start carrying gas masks this week and stay within reach of centers distributing anti-contamination suits. This week's NATO summit and sovereignty transfer in Iraq believed high danger points. UPDATE: This, via Petrified Truth, may start explaining what's happening. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:05 PM |
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Just theory, but... |
Here's the "Coalition of the Wild-Eyed" Bush '04 video. It's really quite good.
Yesterday the Bush reelection contract jumped upward dramatically mid-day. I'd credit the "...Wild-Eyed" video, or perhaps this, or perhaps this, or maybe some combination of same.
A reasonable working hypothesis is Bush/Cheney '04 are perceived as holding most of their strength in reserve, which means every time they "let go" even in trivial ways (like swearing at Pat Leahy) the betting public sees their chances increasing significantly.
Remember the basics of market theory -- all available information (including the reality of what strong-preference big players like George Soros are doing) is "crystallized" in that single magic datum: the current prevailing price. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:56 AM |
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Don't read if you are squeamish... |
Out on my factory floor yesterday at about 10 am, violating all my posted safety rules I used a machine inappropriately and crushed my left ring finger. The machine's safety circuits worked properly, so all I got was a split fingernail -- painful but ultimately threatening to no more than touch typing and excess blogging.
At the emergency room they reassembled my fingernail with what looked like some antiseptic-medical version of duct tape. Duct tape! What a wonderful invention. It certainly has changed the world. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 5:55 AM |
Friday, June 25, 2004
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The most sincere form of flattery... |
From Command Post:
In a one-minute speech on the House floor Wednesday, Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Penn.) noted that the Vietnamese government has weighed in on the Iraqi prison scandal.
"But the official communist Vietnamese news agency isn't citing the Geneva Convention or the U.N.," Pitts said. "It's citing testimony given by John Kerry in 1971." EconoPundit's theorem #14a, you may recall, is rest-of-world criticism of the US is never anything more than recycled sound bytes originating with the US left. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:43 AM |
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Ryan and Clinton |
Jonah Goldberg:
...Bill Clinton swore in a "60 Minutes" interview that his problems with women were behind him and implying that were it to happen again it would be a major issue (why else insist that they were behind him?). Hillary Clinton said that if the Lewinsky thing were true it would be a major issue, as did much of the press and Congress at first. Bill Clinton ran for office promising "two for the price of one," and made his wife and marriage central components of his presidency -- including giving his signature policy proposal to her. Bill Clinton was in office and hit on an intern which -- when feminists cared about disproportionate power relationships and all that -- was a pretty big deal. Clinton tried to brand Lewinsky as a stalker. Clinton created new executive privileges. He was the chief enforcer of America's federal sexual harassment laws. Meanwhile Ryan was a pig with his wife. Wasn't in office. Isn't married to his wife. Isn't planning on making her an equal partner. Didn't lie under oath. And, as far as I understand it, didn't even lie at all -- he kept secret court records secret.
Now, as I said yesterday I think Ryan should go. But if the hypocrisy card is going to be played, let's play it both ways. Why aren't Democrats defending Ryan if they think the comparison is even remotely apt? |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:33 AM |
Thursday, June 24, 2004
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Guess this means... |
This just came in the email:
The Progress for America Voter Fund (PFA-VF), the leading conservative 527 political organization, today launched a million dollar television advertising campaign in New Mexico and Nevada.
PFA-VF's new 30-second television commercial...is entitled "What If..."
As an opinion leader, we thought you might like to preview a copy of our new ad. Please feel free to post it on your website as a service to your readers.
You and your readers can find out more about PFA-VF on our website at www.pfavoterfund.org. Heck, who would have thought. Me...an opinion leader. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 2:08 PM |
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What they're saying at home... |
Why do they hate us? Maybe because of this:
As part of MEMRI's TV Monitoring Project, Saudi government controlled television channels including TV1, TV2 and satellite channels such as Iqraa TV, are continually monitored.(1) These channels include shows with leading Saudi religious figures, professors, members of the royal family, government leaders and intellectuals. Constant themes within Saudi television shows include: calls for the annihilation of Christians and Jews, rampant anti-Americanism and antisemitism, support for Jihad, incitement against U.S. troops in Iraq, and the coming Islamic conquest of the U.S. Segments from these TV shows can be found at www.memriTV.org...
Just an example:
The Coming Islamic Takeover of the U.S.
Saudis often discuss the issue of the U.S. becoming a Muslim state in the future. On a March 17 broadcast on Iqraa TV, Saudi preacher Sheik Said Al-Qahtani discussed this issue, as well as the cases in which Muslims are permitted to declare a defensive Jihad: "... We did not occupy the U.S., with 8 million Muslims, using bombings. Had we been patient, and let time take its course, instead of the 8 million, there could have been 80 million [Muslims] and 50 years later perhaps all the US would have become Muslim... What should a Muslim do if he is attacked in his country, on his land? In this case, there is no choice besides defense, self-sacrifice, and what religious scholars call - Defensive Jihad... We attacked their country, and this caused them to wake the dormant enmity in their hearts... Especially since there is global Zionism, the enemy of Islam, and Judaism, and fundamentalist Crusaders... They interpret this whole incident as only the beginning and thus there is no choice but a preemptive strike." |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 2:00 PM |
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At a complete loss... |
Okay, I have commented out the banner ad as well as the Intrade Box (both separately and together). I have reduced the size of all graphics I think may slow things down. I have cut the history down to fifteen days, then down to the absolutely minimal number of five posts displayed.
Slow loading in all cases. I am at a stopping point; I've totally exhausted my knowledge of these things. Time to change hosting service? Time to move EconoPundit aaarrrggghhhhhh!!!!! |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 12:04 PM |
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Sa-ha-llllowwww... |
Ever since last night whenever I log onto EconoPundit to savor my own wonderful writing I experience extremely slow loading. It feels like forever, staring at the little specimen banner ad at the top waiting for something else to happen.
Is this just me or is everyone having trouble?
My email is now fixed. Please let me know. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:00 AM |
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Communication lines are down... |
| As anyone who's tried to get thru has noticed, my email server crashed in flames last night at roughly 7:30. Hopefully powers that be will fix it some time today. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:16 AM |
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
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Conflict of interest? |
DAVID A. LIEB, Associated Press:
A Democratic group crucial to John Kerry's presidential campaign has paid felons - some convicted of sex offenses, assault and burglary - to conduct door-to-door voter registration drives in at least three election swing states.
America Coming Together, contending that convicted criminals deserve a second chance in society, employs felons as voter canvassers in major metropolitan areas in Missouri, Florida, Ohio and perhaps in other states among the 17 it is targeting in its drive. Some lived in halfway houses, and at least four returned to prison.
ACT canvassers ask residents which issues are important to them and, if they are not registered, sign them up as voters. They gather telephone numbers and other personal information, such as driver's license numbers or partial Social Security numbers, depending on what a state requires for voter registration.
Felons on probation or parole are ineligible to vote in many states. Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, which represents election officials, said he is unaware of any laws against felons registering others to vote. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:55 PM |
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When is a bubble? When is not a bubble? |
Marginal Revolution considers whether we're in a housing bubble. Bubbles are real but hard to define? Try this one: you know you're bubbling outward when, in addition to everything else and outweighed by everything else prices are rising because they are rising. Substitute "inward" and "falling" and you have the rest of the definition.
UPDATE: More at QandO, with links and price info.
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| Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:03 AM |
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Teaching tonight... |
Follow the red arrow to Roosevelt University's historic Auditorium Building.
 |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:57 AM |
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
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From the retail trenches... |
Find this over at Instapundit -- after you scroll down (you may have to click one of those nifty "read more" icons):
[P]lease solicit input from others to broaden your enquiries as I have often believed, and I may be biased but I've had my beliefs confirmed by others in the know, that advertising people are the most overpaid and overrated professional workforce I have encountered...I firmly believe...the entire advertising industry is a huge scam...perpetrated upon the ad buyers and the public...
This was the reason for the resistance to Internet advertising -- not because of the ineffectiveness of the medium (reach, media effectiveness, quality of impressions, etc.) or the lack of interest from buyers, it was because it was so accountable relative to other media. Think about it: since when did they attach as much demands from radio listening or tv viewership (Nielsons, GRPs, basic demos) as they did to Internet advertising measurement (1:1 consumption not survey sampling, click through rates, cost per action, refined demo's)? ...
Finally, although I have often questioned the circulation figures at daily newspapers, radio and television (yes, there are cooked), the circulation scandal is much more prominent and outrageous for magazines...
If you wish to carry this forward and invite your readership to add to this thread, I think it would be greatly beneficial to your readership, business people, as well as consumers as a whole. Either way, I am confident that there are plenty of other "scandals" to be discovered in this highly dubious industry.
Okay, EconoPundit is more than willing to carry this forward with two lesser-known facts about retail display advertising in major urban newspapers retailers.
First, published rates are about as complicated as the US tax code. Aside from astronomical one-insertion rates for nonlocal business there are multitudes of repeat rates, contract rates, discount builder rates, etc, etc, etc, and it all boils down to this: most of the time a regular advertiser's ongoing rates are negotiated between himself and his ad representative.
Second, for anything less than full page ads in the first five pages, position of one's ad in the newspaper has more to do with its effectiveness than anything else. A right page placement above the fold -- preferably top of page -- generates more than twice as many responses as left page, below fold, bottom. A well-positioned ad is a different product than a poorly-positioned one.
Genuine transparency would price the product according to position, allowing the advertiser to pay for what he is getting. With a few notable exceptions in some cities, newspapers doggedly refuse to price advertising on this basis.
My business has advertised in the Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune since before I was born. Some of my earliest memories are of my Dad's musing over whether this full page ad was worth it, whether a quarter page would have done the trick just as well, whether this layout or copy was better than than that, and so on.
Each year advertising rates have gone up as the demonstrable effectiveness of display advertising has gone down.
I look forward eagerly to the day we can kiss newspaper display advertising goodby permanently, and devote our full advertising budget to the internet. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 1:53 PM |
|
It was a dark and stormy night. I mean, last night it was a dark and stormy night but now, actually,... |
"Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana."
I know just how he felt. In one draft it was sunny, clear, full of calm repose suggesting future greatness. In next draft it was pathetic fallacy, a stormy controversial life starting as nature rages outside. He just couldn't decide. So... |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 11:33 AM |
|
Capital account wags the current account? |
If there were one economy in the world that over-all tended to grow faster, whose rule of law and general transparency created a reliable and stable currency, and whose borders therefore represented a most-secure haven for international profits and savings, this economy might experience a chronic surplus on its foreign trade capital account.
Its residents, if prone to non-economic folktales in the form of traditional Protestant household morality, might mistake this chronic surplus on capital account as having somehow been caused by too-little saving and investment -- by "living beyond one's means," that is, by supposedly purchasing too many consumer goods from foreign producers.
This is the upshot of what I argued yesterday. Now, reader Mike Lion sends us to a new study which tentatively supports this conclusion. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 10:37 AM |
|
Just in from Jim Geraghty |
LOOKING AT THE WASHINGTON POST POLL [06/21 09:31 PM]
The ABC News/Washington Post's latest poll was posted at 5:45 Eastern Standard Time. By 7:11 EST, some of my favorite liberal readers were e-mailing in, stating that the "Reagan bounce" had evaporated, now that the Post poll showed Kerry leading Bush 48 percent to 44 percent among registered voters, with 6 percent currently supporting independent candidate Ralph Nader.
The sample's pretty big — 1,201 randomly selected adults, including 1,015 self-described registered voters, interviewed June 17-20. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
You'll recall the brouhaha over the L.A. Times poll, where the sample included 38 percent Democrats and 25 percent Republicans. This poll isn't quite as bad, but it still seems to be not quite reflective of the electorate (or turnout) as a whole. Among registered voters in this poll, 38 percent describe themselves as Democrats, 30 percent as Republicans and 28 percent as independents.
How about this for a headline: Kerry underperforming; holds four point lead in poll with eight percent more Democrats than Republicans?
There's nothing wrong with random samples containing more Democrats than Republicans. However -- and this is a big however -- there's no way the public won't see these as attempts to rig the results. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:01 AM |
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Orientalism |
A word which Edward Said and his followers successfully redefined as "racism" may be staging a comeback:
If Arab scholarly institutions had an inkling of sense, there would be serious contacts and efforts to translate [into Arabic] many of the impressive volumes in the field of Islamic and [Arabic] literature studies. Unfortunately, however, this is prevented by the religious oppression on the part of the Ministries of Awqaf [i.e., religious endowments] and religious associations and institutions that prevent the translation of many impressive scholarly studies.
In short, we are talking to the ignoramus graduates of religious educational institutions or Arab universities that are devoid of learning - those [graduates] who cover up their ignorance by accusing Orientalism of conspiring against Islam or distorting its image. [We are telling these ignoramuses] that had it not been for the efforts of a group of Orientalists in religious, literary, and historical studies, we would never have known much of the heritage in which we take pride - and without making any effort to discover it. Nay, it has come to us readymade, on a silver platter, thanks to the efforts of those Orientalists. We don't have to look far for an example.
Let us ask ourselves: How much effort have the Arabs expended in deciphering the Pharaonic Rosetta Stone, and how much effort have the Orientalists expended on this? Were it not for the efforts of those Orientalists who were fascinated by Pharaonic civilization, the world would never have known how to read hieroglyphics.
The problem of the Arabs is that they suffer from a compounded ignorance - namely, they are ignorant of their own ignorance.
In a world in which religious thought rules, the efforts of the Orientalist scholars cannot possibly revive the civilization of this dead Orient. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:45 AM |
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When things are best kept to one's self... |
Each one of us is the star of his or her own life.
If we're lucky that life adds up to moments, decisions, sometimes-haphazard circumstances, all pointing to a meaningful endpoint -- the present -- that feels significant and hopeful. All this is personal however. Rarely does it communicate well. Meaningful though it may be to our treasured inner selves, more often than not it has about as much interest to others as our bathroom habits.
This simple truth is painfully underlined by reviews like the following:
[We] read about people like Mauria Jackson, with whom he attended his senior class party in high school: "Since Mauria and I were both unattached at the time and had been in grade school together at St. John's, it seemed like a good idea, and it was."
That's it. Nothing more about Mauria Jackson, except that she showed up in New Hampshire to campaign for him in 1992, along with hordes of other Friends of Bill.
Jackson is not the only person who makes a cameo appearance in "My Life." There are multitudes of them, each of them no doubt treasured by the former president but many of them completely irrelevant to the rest of us.
None of them comes alive, not even the main characters of this badly conceived, flatly written, poorly edited book. Not Hillary Rodham Clinton, who comes off as a cardboard saint who is said to be smart and tough and good. Not special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, the book's villain, who comes off as pure evil -- not really a human being at all, more of an incubus. Genuine personal integrity is less involved with sharing than with privacy. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:09 AM |
Monday, June 21, 2004
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Because they don't tell the truth? |
The scandal spreads. As someone whose small business had to lay out a major chunk for display advertising this week in one of the papers involved, I can only say it stinks.
UPDATE: Not that Glenn Reynolds needs me to link to him, but this is important. He remembered something that's so far eluded me, an idea flitting around here and there just outside those boundaries of bloggerthinking. When you compose a blog everyone knows how many people have read what you have written and are reading what you are writing -- down to the last hour, sometimes down to the last person.
When it comes to circulation figures the blogosphere is the very embodiment of transparency.
UPDATE: A reader sends this nuanced reply:
Steve,
I am a long-time reader and a huge and dedicated fan of yours (and of
Instapundit, to whom I've sent a similar email).
However, I must point out that your statement on transparency in blog media is not really correct ("...When you compose a blog everyone knows how many people have read what you have written and are reading what you are writing -- down to the last hour, sometimes down to the last person.").
The sitemeters that are used at many blog sites, while useful, are just acounting system. They do not inherently follow industry standards of filtering out traffic from robots, spiders, or (god forbid) misleading usage (no fans of political blogs would ever create false traffic to increase the perception of a following for a particular point of view would they? Of course not).
In any event, true transparency (or at least the most open relationship with readers, advertisers, and investors) comes from having a third party audit, from an auditing firm trained to catch and remove those kinds of manipulations from traffic statements.
As recent events have shown (both in print and in financial auditing) audits are not inherently perfect, and if someone goes far enough they may be able to cheat for awhile, but overall third party verification is used in print (and in finance) because it adds a tremendous amount of trust to a transaction.
Best Regards,
David Barlin
Note - Not surprisingly, I am the VP of Marketing for just such an auditing firm, www.ipro.com.
EconoPundit's two cents -- I'm a fan of symmetric information. I'm for as much widely-available, inexpensive information as possible. Inexpensive. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 10:04 PM |
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Minimum Wage Workers and Minimum Profit Companies |
I can't stop fuming over this Kerryism:
If we can have trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the wealthiest people, we can fight for a raise in the minimum wage... Does he really think this is some kind of a master/servant problem? All those fabulously wealthy tax-cut-enjoying-cheapskates paying their yacht help minimum wage?
The Bush tax may (or may not) have favored the wealthy -- the final numbers just aren't in yet. But the impact of changes in the minimum wage is settled science. We know it exerts a negative impact on workers' incomes and employment, at the same time placing a disproportionate burden on the small, minimum profit companies employing a disproportionate share of the minimum wage workforce. Consider this, from Carolyn Looff and Associates, "Distribution of Low-Wage Workers by Firm Size in the United States," (U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, 1999), pp. 85, 92:
...The minimum wage does have adverse effects for workers at both small and large firms. [There] was less wage growth among low wage workers at small firms during the period when the minimum wage increased. Among low-wage workers at large firms, the probability of not being employed more than doubled during the period when the minimum wage increased....
There are at least three main findings of the study. First, small businesses continue to employ a greater share of minimum-wage workers than do large businesses. Second, differences in the effects of the minimum wage across demographic groups are small. Third, the adverse effects that do occur appear to affect both small and large businesses. But because small firms hire the majority of minimum-wage workers, it is likely that small firms and their workers shoulder a greater share of any adverse effects of minimum wages than do larger firms and their workers. Check out the study yourself, read the tables, and find out exactly who might be helped or hurt by Kerry's minimum wage plan.
I am sick of polished politicans (and their hired help) so far removed from real life of real workers and business they obviously can't imagine life in the real world as lived by real people -- except perhaps as some cartoon with "rich" and "poor" and everything else all blurry.
Like Paul Krugman when he rambles on about how he can't see how poor American workers face the day-to-day insecurities they must endure. Like Al Gore when he whines about all those "good jobs" everyone used to have.
Real life. It's called real life. What we live -- outside Washington D.C. and off campus. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:40 AM |
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Professor Antler -- why do we always sneer whenever we say the word "bourgeois?" |
| That's a good question! Here's the answer. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 4:56 AM |
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Clay feet of the colossus... |
Niall Ferguson:
The U.S. suffers from at least three structural deficits that will limit the effectiveness and duration of its crypto-imperial role in the world. The first is the nation's growing dependence on foreign capital to finance excessive private and public consumption. It is difficult to recall any empire that has long endured after becoming so dependent on lending from abroad. The second deficit relates to manpower: The U.S. is a net importer of people and cannot therefore underpin its hegemonic aspirations with real colonization; at the same time, its relatively small volunteer army is already spread very thin as a result of recent military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Finally, the U.S. is afflicted by what is best called an attention deficit. Its republican institutions make it difficult to establish a consensus for long-term "nation-building" projects. Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Reader Adrian Nicolici sends the following comment:
What do Nial Ferguson and Warren Buffet have in common? They both believe that the rest of the world is somehow independent of the US when it comes to trade and its consequences. If Americans are the world's consumers and Asians and Europeans are the world's producers (at least in terms of trade imbalances), then if either the US stops buying their goods or if they stop funding our 'trade deficit' through the capital account, then I'm afraid it will not only be the US that suffers. If the US has a $40+ billion/month trade deficit with the rest of the world, then when that stops (for whatever reason - Buffet's trade scheme or Ferguson's closing of the foreign capital tap) it will means $40+ billion/month worth of foreign jobs that will be eliminated due to the end of trade with the US - losses that will directly impact foreign economies and send them into a recessionary tailspin. It will also mean that those who hold dollars (everybody) will suffer huge losses, whether they keep them or try to sell them during the ensuing crash.
If the US is the world's consumer and is dependant on foreigners for capital infusions, then foreigners are the world's producers who are dependant on the US for its sales. Neither can live without the other!
That's the pessimistic outlook. The more realistic and more optimistic outlook is that the rest of the world fuels the US's growth which in turn fuels their own growth and everybody wins.
EconoPundit's additional two cents -- I've started wondering which is the tail and which the dog -- the capital or current account? We've been trained to think about these as some kind of moral story, consumption "beyond our means" being "financed" by sale of assets to nonresidents, foreign investment, loans from abroad, whatever. The problem is, it works in both directions. An initiating surplus on capital account can finance imports of consumer goods. Maybe the strength of the US "investment economy" actually generates the deficit on current account? |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 4:46 AM |
Sunday, June 20, 2004
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Sorry but I just don't get it... |
On increasing the minimum wage:
Kerry...portrayed an increase [in the minimum wage] as economic justice. "If we can have trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the wealthiest people, we can fight for a raise in the minimum wage," he said in Alexandria. Let's simply stipulate (for the moment and without prejudice) the tax code is now somewhat less progressive. And let's assume (unrealistically) no decrease in employment when the minumum wage goes up.
Exactly how does the redistribution of income from business owners to workers ethically counterbalance a decrease in the progressivity of the income tax? What am I missing? How do John Kerry and his economic advisors think the economy works? |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:11 AM |
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As time goes by... |
| My barber is retiring. Sal, EconoPundit wishes you all the best! |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:49 AM |
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"European Rent-Seeking Politicians Suck Oxygen Out of Economic Growth"? (uh,...bad headline...bad...) |
OpinionJournal comments on the Timbro EU vs USA study (we talked about it and linked to it here):
But what about equality? Well, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line has dropped to 12% from 22% since 1959. In 1999, 25% of American households were considered "low income," meaning they had an annual income of less than $25,000. If Sweden...were judged by the same standard, about 40% of its households would be considered low-income.
In other words poverty is relative, and in the U.S. a large 45.9% of the "poor" own their homes, 72.8% have a car and almost 77% have air conditioning, which remains a luxury in most of Western Europe. The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.
So what is Europe's problem? "The expansion of the public sector into overripe welfare states in large parts of Europe is and remains the best guess as to why our continent cannot measure up to our neighbor in the west," the authors write. In 1999, average EU tax revenues were more than 40% of GDP, and in some countries above 50%, compared with less than 30% for most of the U.S.
We don't report this with any nationalist glee. The world needs a prosperous, growing Europe, and its relative economic decline is one reason for growing EU-American tension. A poorer Europe lacks the wealth to invest in defense, a fact that in turn affects the willingness of Europeans to join America in confronting global security threats. But at least all of this is a warning to U.S. politicians who want this country to go down the same welfare-state road to decline. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 7:35 AM |
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Private temper goes public... |
Drudge has the story but no links yet, so I thought I'd help out and talk about Bill Clinton melting down on the BBC. More here, here, and here:
He is visibly angry with Dimbleby's line of questioning and some of that anger gets directed at Dimbleby himself. As outbursts go, it is not just some flash that is over in an instant. It is something substantial and sustained," the BBC executive said.
"It is memorable television which will give the public a different insight into the president's character. It will leave them wondering whether he is as contrite as he says he is about past events. Dimbleby manages to remain calm and order is eventually restored," he added. UPDATE: Finally, from Drudge, this. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 6:52 AM |
Saturday, June 19, 2004
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Major indicator of change? |
Here's an item I saw in the newscrawl at MEMRI.ORG:
THE HANDS OF THE TERRORIST WHO CARRIED OUT A CAR BOMB IN BAGHDAD YESTERDAY WERE TIED TO THE STEERING WHEEL. (AL-SHARQ AL-AWSAT, LONDON, 6/18/04) (Emphasis mine) If this is true it may indicate reliable sucide bombers are, uh, getting a little harder to find in Iraq? |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 1:27 PM |
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Unlike the opposition... |
This may be revolutionary:
"Because of the hard work of so many Americans, and because of the good policies in Washington, D.C., our economy is strong, and it is getting stronger," the president said in remarks taped while he was in Washington state. Do you get the subtlety? Here's an American politician who sounds like he actually knows GDP is produced by the private sector! |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 11:29 AM |
Friday, June 18, 2004
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Don't want to hear anything more about Abu Ghraib for awhile... |
| Check out The Command Post for details and links on Paul Johnson's beheading. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 2:44 PM |
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Been there? Done that? |
| I know the issue is kind of delicate, but does John Kerry have a position on this? |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 12:27 PM |
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Russia Gave Bush Iraq Intelligence |
I think this new story will go a long way toward legitimizing the Iraq War for anyone who can still change his or her mind:
ASTANA, Kazakhstan - Russia gave the Bush administration intelligence after the September 11 attacks that suggested Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq was preparing attacks in the United States, President Vladimir Putin said Friday...
"After Sept. 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, the Russian special services, the intelligence service, received information that officials from Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States and outside it against the U.S. military and other interests," Putin said. (Emphasis added) If I'm right about the upcoming impact of this story, you can expect a sharp increase in the Bush reelection contract for the remainder of today and perhaps even longer.
UPDATE: More via Drudge. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:56 AM |
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Paul Krugman, eat your heart out! |
Bruce Bartlett has linked to an important study showing the impact of varying taxation rates on state-to-state migration. The study points to the possibility there may be an economic basis for the long-term US "tax-cutting" trend.
Back in my Marxist days I looked for "economic origins" of virtually everything, and to be honest some of these origins were really kinda far-fetched. But in this new "tax-cutting" case I have to admit my mind is racing. Some of the basic links are here:
In the long run, population growth -- or lack thereof -- plays a tremendous role in the apportionment of congressional power...Declining state populations [also] create a variety of economic and political problems, including a decline in the tax base and a loss of better-educated citizens to other states. Communities with declining populations can find themselves saddled with the task of maintaining an infrastructure of roads, hospitals, schools, and universities no longer appropriate for their size. Prolonged population decline can lead to political pressure to increase tax rates, which in turn can prompt even more to leave. If politicans are truly members of a rent-seeking "political class," though tax increases may yield short run benefits, rational long-run behavior in competitive tax situations consists of cutting taxes. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:31 AM |
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McDonalds as Orwellian Victory Gin |
A new iron law of weight: just eliminate inequality and obesity will vanish.
The problem is, these examples could just as easily have been used by the welfare state's critics, who see its static, risk-free security generating normless intergenerational despair and its attendant self-destructive behavior. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 6:26 AM |
Thursday, June 17, 2004
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Shameless. Just Shameless. |
| Patrick Hynes, of Crushkerry.com, has been named a "Rising Star in American Politics" by Campaigns & Elections Magazine. In a shameless act of self promotion he has posted the article. |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:53 AM |
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9/11 Commission Statement #15 |
Here's Andrew C. McCarthy on the two mystery operatives:
In light of the number of elementary things the commission staff tells us its investigation has been unable to clarify (for example, in the very next sentence after the Iraq paragraph, the staff explains that the question whether al Qaeda had any connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or the 1995 plot to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky "remains a matter of substantial uncertainty"), it is fair to conclude that these two senior bin Laden associates may not be the most cooperative, reliable fellows in town regarding what bin Laden was actually up to. Moreover, we know from press reports and the administration's own statements about the many al Qaeda operatives it has captured since 9/11 that the government is talking to more than just two of bin Laden's top operatives. That begs the questions: Have we really only asked two of them about Iraq? If not, what did the other detainees say? UPDATE: Debkafile weighs in:
[The] US commission based its findings on the testimony of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed now in US custody after being captured in Karachi.
Many senior counter-terror officials...have long come to the conclusion that he and others let themselves be seized for the sake of advancing a wider al Qaeda disinformation plot. Their mission is to plant red herrings in the path of US intelligence and lead its investigators away from the organization's real operations, especially during reorganizations of the group's command structure and terror networks.
...The designated sacrifice is discovered after tip-offs lead pursuers to his hideout. Under questioning, he spills the tales he has been briefed to reveal -- usually about past operations -- and withholds anything of real value about al Qaeda’s current activities. His interrogation is meant to divert US intelligence from noticing preparations for the terrorist organization's next moves. Being thrown to the Americans for such missions is just as much an honor as dying in combat or a suicide terrorist attack.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed should have been expected, say the experts, to throw sand in American eyes. Instead, he found a way to link Sharon to the 9/11 attacks and get the link accepted in an official report -- just as his masters in their broadcast tapes matter-of-factly tie Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Spain into a single package. This tie-in fits the gospel drummed into every al Qaeda member, from the chiefs to the lowliest courier, that the two enemies of Islam are the Crusaders and the Jews.
By falling into the Sharon trap, the compilers of the report cast doubt on their other conclusions, although their final report due next week may make some necessary corrections.
The obvious point here is if the Israeli motivation was so important in the chain of events leading up to September 11, why did bin Laden decide to attack America and not Israel? Or why not both? |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 9:20 AM |
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Just in... |
| The UN LIED !!!!!! |
| Link posted by Steve Antler : 8:24 AM |
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The New Deal's Two Traditions... | | |