Is the investigation finished? It's not over...[V]ery rarely do you bring a charge in a case that's going to be tried in which you ever end a grand jury investigation.
The permanent revolution...is...a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only in complete liquidation.
So Fitzgerald investigates a crime, then investigates peoples' behavior during the investigation, then investigates that investigation, and so on.
The husband's name is forgettably bland. Joe Wilson? Then there is the aide to the vice president who answers to the call of "Snooker." Or is it Smoky? Or maybe Sunshine? In the typical movie about Washington, a character labeled as an aide to the vice president might just as well carry a sign saying, "I get killed off in the first five minutes." And yet Skipper, or Snappy, starts out as an obscure minor character and floats up steadily to the point where he is the central figure of the entire drama.
(Oh yes, and by the way, what kind of a name is that? Kinsley?)
Phil Donahue's talkshow was cancelled in February 2003--despite being the channel's highest-rated show at the time--explicitly for his left-of-center political views. An internal management memo worried that his program could become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda"...
But in a sign that oil companies are making more money than they can plow back into their business, Exxon returned $6.8 billion to shareholders either by buying back shares or paying dividends.
In an interview on Fox News 10 days ago, Lee R. Raymond, Exxon's chief executive, sought to quell some of the criticism. "Profit is not a dirty word," he said. "And it's absolutely required in our industry to have an adequate level of profit to be able to continue to invest."
Later in the program, when asked whether Exxon's profits were "obscene," he said: "No, I don't think they're obscene. I don't think they're obscene at all."
So what's with this earnest detective work -- looking for signs that oil companies are "making more money than they can plow back into their business?" That's what they are supposed to do.
Steve Chapman goes over the basics but bungles an important point:
Before they arrived, inflation was seen as the fault of undisciplined private markets. The idea was simple: Left to their own devices, workers demanded higher wages, and companies responded by raising prices, causing workers to demand still more, leading to even higher prices--in an endless upward spiral that forced consumers to pay more and more all the time. Only the restraining hand of a benevolent government could break this cycle, as it tried to do under President Richard Nixon's wage and price controls.
Those turned out to be about as successful as the Hindenburg, but the failure didn't stop President Gerald Ford from urging Americans to join in a campaign to "Whip Inflation Now" by doing things like carpooling--while vowing that the federal government would closely scrutinize all wage and price increases.
Nor did it dissuade President Jimmy Carter from maintaining price controls on oil and natural gas, which succeeded [in creating] shortages and chaos.
He is, of course, confusing federal regulatory policy with federal employment policy. They are and were quite distinct. During the years 1950-1970 the feds generally believed "undisciplined private markets" couldn't be trusted to maintain employment -- so thru Keynesian fiscal policy they repeatedly pushed employment beyond what's technically called the NAIRU level, creating an ongoing inflation problem. It was this problem that then came to be addressed by the 1970's re-establishment of ineffective WWII-style wage and price controls.
Regulation was never part of the Keynes "theory package," but American economic thought has puzzlingly and persistently confounded the two. Chapman continues in the tradition of this ongoing mistake.
UPDATE: This, despite the ease with which it can be misinterpreted, helps illustrate the situation prior to and after that magic year 1984 when so much seemed to change:
After 1984 producer and consumer prices came "unlinked." Wages and prices stopped chasing each other in lockstep fashion, and periods of Lucas supply came to be possible. This is often correctly (but incompletely) portrayed as the end of the tradeoff between unemployment and inflation.
Now please, don't let yourself get sidetracked by the growing discrepancy between the red line and blue. The world is not made up of producer capitalists and consumer workers, and the figure is not showing increasing victimization of households by capitalists (or at least I think it's not showing that).
Take the same diagram and normalize the two plots:
What you see is increasing variability of producer prices around consumer prices -- a world of higher competition and non-guaranteed profitability. Prior to the mid-80's unions and large employers reigned. After, we moved into the world of buyouts, downsizing, and the occasional victory of the smaller firm over the larger one. And yes, there was the new global economy. That happened too.
Though war may be diplomacy carried out by other means, it ought not to be acceptable that diplomacy is merely a war tactic.
Isn't it time for a basic and obvious UN reform, namely, limiting membership to only those states willing to grant full diplomatic recognition to all other members?
If we can't have a UN comprised of democracies, can't we at the very least have a United Nations consisting only of nations willing to acknowledge all other member nations' rights to exist?
USA Today has been caught doctoring a news photo to support its editorial view of the story.
I suppose the print media feels inferior to TV, which can easily pick and choose the precise news clip which subliminally (or openly) lends support to the narrative.
But press photos aren't supposed to be touched up -- right? They're supposed to be matters of fact, like, you know, a newspaper's own reported circulation?
Calling Geraldo Rivera...come in please...Calling Geraldo...
In his days before Fox News, it took Geraldo Rivera about three hours to decide Bill Clinton's false sworn testimony in front of a grand jury didn't constitute real perjury because, in his words, this was "all about sex" and nothing else.
Conservatives, including me, certainly did argue that perjury was a major offense during the Clinton Administration. We argued that it was an impeachable offense and that the Senate should remove President Clinton from office because of perjury and similar offenses.
But we lost the damn argument! The Senate and, more importantly, the American people clearly demonstrated that they did not believe perjury was a major crime. The Senate did not remove Clinton despite his clear guilt and the American people punished Republicans in the 1998 congressional elections for the impeachment. The American people have spoken: perjury isn't that big of a deal.
The recent strength of the U.S. economy makes it all too easy to forget how difficult the economic situation was just a few years ago. Between 2000 and 2002, the economy was hit by an extraordinary series of shocks, including an extended decline in stock prices (the S&P 500 index fell almost 50% from its peak in the spring of 2000), a recession, the 9/11 attacks, prosecuting the war on terrorism, and a string of corporate scandals. In March 2003, the Federal Reserve, citing "unusually large uncertainties," declared itself unable even to characterize the balance of risks to its goals of economic growth and price stability. U.S. businesses became extremely reluctant to make new investments or to hire new workers. GDP growth went negative in the third quarter of 2000 and averaged only 1.5% at an annual rate from mid-2000 to mid-2003. The unemployment rate reached 6.3% in June 2003.
Fortunately, good economic policies helped to turn the situation around. President Bush's tax cuts provided much needed and remarkably well-timed stimulus. Reducing tax rates on work and saving and providing incentives to companies to make new investments also set the stage for ongoing economic growth. The Federal Reserve cut short-term interest rates sharply and kept them low. Together, these policies jump-started the U.S. economic engine. While growth varied from quarter to quarter, real GDP grew at a strong 4.4% annual rate from mid-2003 through the first quarter of this year. Since May 2003, the economy has created 3.7 million payroll jobs, despite a marked rise in energy prices and diminishing monetary and fiscal stimulus in the past few quarters. For comparison, over the same periods, the euro-zone economies and Japan have grown at rates of 1.7% and 2.4% respectively and created, between them, only about 2.3 million jobs. America's economy is growing faster than that of any major industrialized country in the world.
In class last night we tried to run a FAIRMODEL-simulated budget balancing exercise starting in 2000, in order to see implications of policies alternate to the Bush Tax Cuts.
FAIRMODEL simply blew up in my face. It didn't work. (Noctural econometric gremlins flitting around the internet, whatever.) A student reports better results of an early morning run, so we'll try to publish the results later today.
Paul Krugman, NYT, 1/25/05 (and reproduced for free -- for now -- here):
...The last name one often hears is Ben Bernanke, currently a member of the Fed's Board of Governors...If Mr. Bernanke were appointed directly from his current Fed position to the chairmanship, there would be general acclaim. But he may soon move to the Council of Economic Advisers. Why?...I hope I'm wrong, but my guess is that what's intended for Mr. Bernanke is a form of hazing: he will be expected to prove his loyalty by defending the indefensible and saying things he knows aren't true.
That might seem a tolerable price to pay for the Fed chairmanship - but a year of it might well make Mr. Bernanke damaged goods from the point of view of the markets... (Emphasis added)
Wall Street staged an impressive rally Monday after the nomination of top White House economist Ben Bernanke as the next Federal Reserve chief, with the Dow Jones industrial average soaring nearly 180 points. Strong quarterly earnings from drugmakers and lower oil prices bolstered the gains.
Stocks were already advancing when news came that President Bush picked Bernanke, chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, to succeed Chairman Alan Greenspan when he retires in January. Bernanke was widely seen as likely to continue Greenspan's policy of fighting inflation. (Emphasis added)
Oh well, don't fret too much. Maybe tomorrow there will be a big selloff...
Along the way, he's emerged as the most articulate spokesman for the view, which I hear all the time now, that Bush has betrayed conservatism. Bush, the argument goes, has radically increased spending on housing, community development, farm subsidies and a raft of big government programs. He's federalized the American education system. He's failed to seal the borders against illegal immigration. He's created a huge new entitlement program and exploded the deficits. He's increased government regulation and hasn't even nominated a true conservative for the Supreme Court.
It's a coherent case, but it's wrong. Bush hasn't abandoned conservatism; he's modernized and saved it. If we're going to have one of our periodic conservative crackups - which, in case you haven't noticed, is what we are in the middle of - let's at least learn the right lessons from the past 10 years.
Let's start by remembering where conservatism was before Bush came on the scene. In the late 1990's, after the failure of the government shutdown, conservatism was adrift and bereft of ideas.
Voters preferred Democratic ideas on issue after issue by 20-point margins. The G.O.P.'s foreign policy views were veering toward isolationism, its immigration policy was veering toward nativism, its social conservatism had crossed into censoriousness, and after it became clear that voters didn't want to slash government, its domestic policy had hit a dead end.
Almost single-handedly, Bush reconnected with the positive and idealistic instincts of middle-class Americans. He did it by recasting conservatism more significantly than anyone had since Ronald Reagan. He rejected the prejudice that the private sector is good and the public sector is bad, and he tried to use government to encourage responsible citizenship and community service. He sought to mobilize government so the children of prisoners can build their lives, so parents can get data to measure their school's performance, so millions of AIDS victims in Africa can live another day, so people around the world can dream of freedom.
"Government should help people improve their lives, not run their lives," Bush said. This is not the Government-Is-the-Problem philosophy of the mid-'90s, but the philosophy of a governing majority party in a country where people look to government to play a positive but not overbearing role in their lives.
In part because of Bush's shift, the G.O.P. has become the party of the middle class. Bush beat Kerry among whites earning between $30,000 and $75,000 a year by 22 percentage points.
This is not to say that Bush's approach to government is fully coherent. The tragedy of the Bush administration is that it never matched its unorthodox governing philosophy with an unorthodox political strategy... With his policies, Bush could have built a broad coalition across the right and center of American life. Unfortunately, his political strategy was a base strategy, which led him to reinforce the orthodox divisions between the parties.
Despite all the mistakes that have been made, it is nonetheless true that Bush has ennobled and saved American conservatism. As the G.O.P. moves forward, its leaders will break into two camps, post-Bush and pre-Bush. The post-Bush conservatives will build on the changes Bush introduced and refine his vision of using government positively to give people the tools to run their own lives. The pre-Bush conservatives will try to go back to the libertarianism and social conservatism of 1995.
The future belongs to post-Bush conservatives. If you want a glimpse of that future, read the speech David Cameron gave earlier this month, which electrified the British Conservative Party conference. Cameron has learned the essential lessons of Bushism. He offered a positive, governing conservatism. He talked about helping moms afford child care and helping the people of Darfur survive. "A modern, compassionate conservatism is right for our times," he declared.
He's right. In some ways future conservatives will be different from President Bush. But they will not succeed unless they absorb the essential lessons that are George Bush's best legacy.
The U.S. prison population continued to grow last year even though reports of violent crime during 2004 were at the lowest level since the government began compiling statistics 32 years ago, according to a government report released in September.
UPDATE: For the politically-learning-disabled (and I count myself among you): the issue here is exactly how your brain is clouded.
If you live among the left, this paragraph proves the unjust and, uh, punitive nature of the criminal justice system. (We're putting more people in jail even though it's not necessary -- something like that. We're bad. We're mean spirited.)
If you live among the right you think crime rates are going down not in spite of the fact but rather because of the fact that prison populations are growing.
UPDATE II: Kevin Brancato sends this email upbraiding me for ignoring certain colleagues:
If you live among the libertarians, you think crime rates going down is partly attributable to a decent economy, partly to other social factors, and partly to keeping violent offenders locked up. But you still think that putting people in prison for smoking and selling weed is really, really dumb.
Cart before horse? Not really. It's more like slaughtering the horse and jailing his driver because the cart's vehicle registration was expired.
For reasons I just don't understand I lost touch with the best journalist-writing-about-economics, Robert J. Samuelson. Now that the most annoying economist-trying-to-be-a-journalist is safely sequestered behind online user fees, I think it is time to start reading Samuelson again regularly.
UPDATE: By my latest count, the gap between average- and median-income households tallied using PSID weights prior to the 2000 election was a whopping 14%. And they voted, exactly, how...?
You might ask an important question: What drives me to broach these matters while we are in the din of war and the challenges of killing and combat?
My answer is, firstly: Things may develop faster than we imagine. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam-and how they ran and left their agents-is noteworthy. Because of that, we must be ready starting now, before events overtake us, and before we are surprised by the conspiracies of the Americans and the United Nations and their plans to fill the void behind them. We must take the initiative and impose a fait accompli upon our enemies, instead of the enemy imposing one on us, wherein our lot would be to merely resist their schemes.
Second: This is the most vital part. This authority, or the Sharia amirate that is necessary, requires fieldwork starting now, alongside the combat and war. It would be a political endeavor in which the mujahedeen would be a nucleus around which would gather the tribes and their elders, and the people in positions, and scientists, and merchants, and people of opinion, and all the distinguished ones who were not sullied by appeasing the occupation and those who defended Islam.
We don't want to repeat the mistake of the Taliban, who restricted participation in governance to the students and the people of Qandahar alone. They did not have any representation for the Afghan people in their ruling regime, so the result was that the Afghan people disengaged themselves from them. Even devout ones took the stance of the spectator and, when the invasion came, the amirate collapsed in days, because the people were either passive or hostile. Even the students themselves had a stronger affiliation to their tribes and their villages than their affiliation to the Islamic amirate or the Taliban movement or the responsible party in charge of each one of them in his place. Each of them retreated to his village and his tribe, where his affiliation was stronger!!
The comparison between the fall of Kabul and the resistance of Fallujah, Ramadi, and Al Qaim and their fearless sisters shows a clear distinction, by God's grace and His kindness. It is the matter towards which we must strive, that we must support and strengthen.
Therefore, I stress again to you and to all your brothers the need to direct the political action equally with the military action, by the alliance, cooperation and gathering of all leaders of opinion and influence in the Iraqi arena. I can't define for you a specific means of action. You are more knowledgeable about the field conditions. But you and your brothers must strive to have around you circles of support, assistance, and cooperation, and through them, to advance until you become a consensus, entity, organization, or association that represents all the honorable people and the loyal folks in Iraq. I repeat the warning against separating from the masses, whatever the danger.
There exists a genre of economic discourse which retells stories of natural-resource-based economic expansions as tragedy. The story is always the same. Ruined lives, destroyed natural environments, polution, disease, exploitation, disruption -- everything but plague and famine (and sometimes these are included as well) -- all in aid of showing had only the expansion been planned all this could have been avoided.
The story varies from example to example, but its intent is always the same: to campaign against the very market mechanism itself.
As stories like this one and this continue to unfold, keep track of how each advertises, with varying degrees of subtlety, the supposed nobility of social control versus the assumed destructive nature of market forces.
In all the fuss about this little tiff between myself, Paul Krugman, and Brad DeLong, we never actually took the final step of calculating average weeks unemployed under Brad DeLong's adjustment for a constant 6% unemployment rate. And we never tried to improve his "adjustment" by adding additional relevant information.
Now, thanks to my Monday night Econometrics seminar, we have a re-creation and interpretation of Brad's adjusted series. Here's the original time series and the same series adjusted, as proposed by DeLong, for a constant unemployment rate of 6%:
As was ingeniously pointed out by one of my students, DeLong's adjustment damps the 20-week mid-80's peak in average weeks unemployed, this converting the series to an ever-upward-sawtooth pattern showing increasing job search time for the US unemployed with each passing year. The law of increasing misery revisited, no?
Well, maybe not. In class we steadfastly continued and ajusted the same series not only for a constant unemployment rate of 6%, but also for a constant unemployment insurance benefits package. Here are the results: Oopsies! Had unemployment benefits stayed constant, average weeks unemployed would have gone dramatically down, not up!
Looks like Krugman and DeLong left something out, doesn't it? (Technical note: One might easily argue that while the "DeLong adjustment" is strictly mechanical and therefore nonproblematic, the "Antler adjustment" includes implicit behavioral content -- implicitly (and incorrectly) assuming correlation means causality, in other words.)
UPDATE II: As a means of energizing my 6pm Monday night pro-DeLong adoring-of-Krugman seminar students I've done this work using nominal rather than real unemployment insurance benefits. This gives them the option of showing how a more-modest adjustment using real benefits (which because of inflation have risen more slowly than nominal benefits) would produce a less dramatic result.
I will publish their findings in this blog next week, so keep tuning in for the latest results from Chicago -- America's capital city for late-nite econometrics!
Okay, I've got it now. If you get a regression equation of, roughly, AVERAGE WEEKS UNEMPLOYED=3.5+.03*TREND + 113*UNEMPL RATE, build Brad's "cyclically adjusted" series by adding to the regression equation's residual the sum of .03*trend+6.
It should have read:
Okay, I've got it now. If you get a regression equation of, roughly, AVERAGE WEEKS UNEMPLOYED=3.5+.03*TREND + 113*UNEMPL RATE, build Brad's "cyclically adjusted" series by adding to the regression equation's residual the sum of 3.5 + .03*trend + 113*6.
Will someone who knows how to search these things seriously find out how commonplace these "urban mysterious smell" stories are? Do they crop up all the time? Do they come in waves?
Or (most disturbing or all) are they very rare and strangely abundant only during the past month?
