Since Janet Jackson exposed her nipple jewelry on national television, radio stations have been clamoring for technology that delays broadcast feeds for up to 40 seconds, giving hosts and producers a chance to bleep out naughty words...But the technology isn't cheap for small stations, which also face a risk of hefty fines just like their huge commercial counterparts in metropolises like New York City and Los Angeles.

The financial risk to the radio industry of even a single four-letter word is hardly trivial. The Senate recently passed a bill boosting the maximum fine per incident of obscenity to $275,000 from $27,500; the House went up to $500,000.

Update...Reader Michael Pollard writes,

You criticize "Religious-right moralizers who insist on imposing their views on everyone ..." as though this were per se an offensive practice. But all laws involve the lawmaker's (or, by extension, voters') imposition of his views on everyone. That is what laws do. Btw, I'm a libertarian-leaning agnostic.

One thing I don't understand, is that all those Democrats who call for higher taxes can immediately put their money where their mouths are. They should simply take whatever higher tax rate they advocate, calculate their own taxes as if that rate were in effect, and request from their employer that this higher amount be withheld from their pay. Come next April, when the IRS tries to refund them the difference, they can simply make a donation to the Federal Government.

They don't need to wait until a law is passed -- they can take matters into their own hands and act now for higher taxes! Why aren't they doing this already? Mr. Krugman? Could it be h-y-p-o-c-r-i-s-y? After all, if higher taxes truly are what's just and moral, aren't they being immoral by not voluntarily contributing the higher amounts right now?

I always confront people who tell me we would roll back the tax cut. I reply that , as a CPA, I have the tax software going back over a decade and would be happy to do their return by based on any pre-tax cut year they want. No one ever takes me up. In 23 years of doing returns I have NEVER had someone tell me they wanted to pay more taxes! Just as there all no atheists in foxholes I can assure you there are no Liberals on April 15th.

Much of the partisan angst and philosophical conflict that marked the original passage dissipated as the law sharply shrank welfare rolls by 60 percent and guided millions of recipients from the dole to low-income employment and career opportunities. In keeping with the law's emphasis, states and localities began exercising creative authority to tailor federal block grants to the particular child care, transportation and education needs of welfare recipients and the working poor. Renewal, with some moderate tinkering, seemed a no-brainer.

Renewal of welfare reform is a no-brainer, huh?

But back in 1996, the welfare reform bill was a "draconian" means of "punishment" that would throw "a million children into poverty." Not only that, it was "atrocious," "harsh," "extreme," "devastating," "not humane," "punitive," "odious," "shocking," and "arrogan[t]." If that wasn't enough, it was not "acceptable."

Thanks to LEXIS, here's what the New York Times said then...

"I looked at DeLong's vita. Reading it quickly leads to MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) because he lists everything he has ever published in one big category, making no distinctions between, at one extreme, a four-paragraph piece prepared for delivery on a TV program and, at the other extreme, original research in refereed journals. Ferreting out the scientific contributions consequently takes a bit of patience.

"DeLong published quite a bit up to 1993, when he got tenure. After that, his scientific contributions fell almost to zero, and overall the vita is embarrassingly weak for someone at a big time department like Berkeley. There are almost no papers in refereed journals over the past 10 years, and almost all of those are comments, surveys, introductions to conferences, or such; original research since 1994 is virtually non-existent. DeLong appears to have largely ceased doing serious work; perhaps he has taken Krugman as his model in that regard.

"There also is the 1992 scientific article listed twice, once in Italian and once in English. It caught my eye because I speak Italian. The Italian title translates to the English title, and the name of the journal and the publication date are the same for the two articles. Clearly, it is the same article. Listing it twice is simply lying."
 

For several decades it was a given that by the time we got down to 5.6 % unemployment we would expect to be seeing wage inflation. That's where we are now and as is rightly pointed out we don't have that inflation. So what happened, has there been some structural change in the economy since the last recession, something that would change the relationship between unemployment rates and income gains? Well, yes, there has been: welfare reform.

Thanks to globe-traveling reader James Bennett for the link.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:35 AM | link  

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:26 AM | link  

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:12 AM | link  

Monday, July 05, 2004