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Media Infiltrations: Republicans and the Populist Temptation  Wall Street Journal February 9, 2010 Why Taxing Stock Trades Is a Really Bad Idea Wall Street Journal January 6, 2010
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Chronicle of the Conspiracy
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Friday, October 14, 2005
SICK STUFF Chicago attorney Stephen Diamond strikes a blow for taxation (and gets paid for it).Using a state whistle-blower law, Mr. Diamond since 2002 has filed about 95 suits in Cook County court here against retailers that failed to charge him taxes on Internet sales, alleging that they broke the law. In cases where the state of Illinois joins the suits and prevails, he is entitled to up to 25% of the financial damages, with the rest going to state coffers.Mr. Diamond's first eight suits were filed against such retailers as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Office Depot Inc. and KB Toys Inc. He has netted about a half-million dollars already, from some retailers. Because of settlement agreements between the retailers and the attorney general's office, the state's judges have agreed to keep the names of most of the retailers and the settlement amounts confidential. More than 80 suits are pending in Illinois, and Mr. Diamond has made forays into other states as well.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:31 AM |
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CALAME GETS AGGRESSIVE New York Times "public editor" Barney Calame clarifies his position on the Judith Miller matter. From his web journal:
Now Is the Time
The lifting of the contempt order against Judith Miller of The New York Times in connection with the Valerie Wilson leak investigation leaves no reason for the paper to avoid providing a full explanation of the situation. Now.
As public editor, I have been asking some basic questions of the key players at The Times since July 12. But they declined to fully respond to my fundamental questions because, they said, of the legal entanglements of Ms. Miller and the paper. With Ms. Miller in jail and the legal situation unclear, I felt it would be unfair to publicly castigate them for their caution.
At the same time, I decided my lack of information made it impossible to fairly evaluate for readers Ms. Miller’s refusal to identify confidential sources and how The Times was handling the matter. The absence of complete answers to my fundamental questions also prevented me from publicly rising to Ms. Miller’s defense, despite the initial burst of First Amendment fervor among some journalists supporting her.
But legal concerns should no longer rule the roost.
Now I look forward to assessing the full explanation that Bill Keller, the executive editor, has promised the paper will deliver to readers under the supervision of Jonathan Landman, the deputy managing editor. While a multitude of issues need to be addressed, I certainly will expect The Times’s explanation to address these fundamental questions that I first posed to the key players at the paper in July:
- Was Ms. Miller’s contact with the source she is protecting initiated and conducted in genuine pursuit of a news article for Times readers?
- Why didn’t she write an article?
- What kinds of notes are there and who has them?
- Why wasn’t she exploring a voluntary waiver from the source?
An important and obvious issue that has arisen in recent days, of course, is Ms. Miller’s seemingly belated discovery of notes from a June 2003 conversation that she had with I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Several hours after she testified before the grand jury yesterday about the notes, a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., lifted the contempt finding that had caused her to spend 85 days in jail.
I write this expecting The Times will publish its explanation as soon as possible. Unfortunately, even if it were published Friday or Saturday, deadlines wouldn’t allow me to assess The Times’s explanation in the public editor’s column space this Sunday. I must submit my column by Friday morning; the space Sunday will be devoted to reader letters about my two previous columns, as regularly scheduled.
So, assuming The Times publishes its explanation sometime in the next few days, I will be assessing it in my column on Sunday, Oct. 23. I will need time to do some reporting. A representative of Ms. Miller has indicated that she will talk to me at some point, and I would expect to have access to both Mr. Keller and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, if necessary.
It's not clear to me why "legal concerns should no longer rule the roost" simply because there has been a "lifting of the contempt order against" Miller. But nice to see Calame take this tone with the Times. Now if only he'd bother to mention somewhere that Paul Krugman's lies about the Florida 2000 presidential election still have not been corrected in the Times archives, almost two weeks after editorial page editor Gail Collins admitted that they were, indeed, lies.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:20 AM |
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Thursday, October 13, 2005
NOW WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THIS? Our friend Mike Cakora at the Columbia Record has an interesting game-theoretic take on the TimesSelect debacle:With the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' award of the 2005 Nobel Prize in economic sciences to professors Aumann and Schelling "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis," it is now abundantly clear that the New York Times failed to use their work in designing the TimesSelect pay-wall.The $50 per year for the whole op-ed staff might still be a fair price for some. But given the composition of that staff and the regard in which they are held, why did the Times not consider a $60 rate for all but MoDo, a $70 rate for all but MoDo and Rich, $80 by adding Herbert to the foregoing, and finally, the big Kahuna, $100 per year gets you everything but these three and the Krugster?
By so doing, the Times could take advantage of reasonable folks' opposition to the emotion, partisanship, venom, and just plain idiocy of that crew by making a couple of bucks from those of us with sense who are willing to put their money where their mouth, er, browser is.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:13 PM |
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AGAIN, THE TIMES IS NOT ABOVE THE LAW All the hand wringing among media critics about why the New York Times isn't doing more original reporting on the Judith Miller story strikes me as naive. As Miller's employer, the Times in deep legal doodoo. It has to be very circumspect about what it writes and when. To imagine that it is above the law, or above liability, in this matter is to assign it an extra-legal status that it simply doesn't have. And don't blame Barney Calame, the "public editor," for not writing about it. He's just another Times employee in the eyes of the law. So dismiss the ridiculous chest-pounding of Calame's forbear Dan Okrent, who never took a courageous position about anything during his entire tenure as "public editor." On Miller, Okrent dared to brag to Editor & Publisher that "If I were there, this is exactly the kind of issue I would want to get my teeth into. It is interesting stuff and it is important." Sorry, everybody. This one's in the hands of the lawyers. And that's how it should be.
Update [10/14/2005]... Good lord. Media Bistro's Fishbowl DC picks up the story and exclaims "Even their former public editor--Daniel Okrent--is staying mum." Even!? That's like saying "Even Marcel Marceau is staying mum."
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:22 AM |
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Wednesday, October 12, 2005
WHAT DIFFERENCES? EU Rota has more on the comparison between health care in the US and other industrialized nations. His first post, covered here, blew up the myth that the US government doesn't spend any money on health care (it spends more per capita than just about anyone else). Now we look at the myth that the results of US health care are so horrific. After reviewing tons of statistics, EU Rota says, sarcastically:Please spot the huge differences.Child mortality rates? Compare each country in conjunction with the fertility rate figure, more/less children being born may play a role. If you feel that is a wrong analysis, please explain why countries with lower fertility rates have an equal or higher number of deaths as do countries with higher fertility rates, as well as vice versa.
Life expectancy? Again where is the huge difference? 2 to 4 years, wow. Given media accounts of the number of Americans "uninsured" and how terrible life is in the US one would expect life expectancy to be in the 60's. There are many trade-offs in life. I for one would happily trade-off 2 years at the end of my life for the ability to provide for my family, upward economic mobility, or even the hopes of these things versus spending large stretches of my life (10+ years) dealing with economic stagnation/decline and the strain of double-digit unemployment, year after year after year after year.... (you know who you are)...
America's market-based healthcare system leaves citizens dead and dying from all causes. Perfect government-run healthcare systems seem to leave citizens dead and dying too, only at a higher rate from all causes.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:39 PM |
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ARE YOU SITTING DOWN? Heritage Foundation's Brian Reidl has a great new cheat-sheet on government spending. It starts out happily enough:
- Tax revenues strongly correlate with economic growth. With the help of recent tax relief, economic growth pushed 2005 tax revenues up by 15%.
- Spending increased by 8% in 2005 and is up 33% overall since 2001.
- The $317 billion budget deficit represents 2.6% of GDP. More importantly, the public-debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 38%, which is actually below the level at any point in the 1990s.
But then it gets ugly.
- Federal spending has grown twice as fast under President Bush as under President Clinton.
- Federal spending has increased by 33% since 2001, from $1,863 billion to $2,470 billion.
- In 2005, inflation-adjusted federal spending neared $22,000 per household, the highest level since World War II...
- The total cost of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is projected to leap from 8.4% of GDP in 2005 to 18.9% of GDP by 2050.
- Federal program spending is projected to reach 27.6% of GDP by 2050, while net interest spending will consume an additional 9% to 46% of GDP (depending on whether massive deficit spending increases interest rates).
- Unless Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are reformed, lawmakers
face three options:
- A) Raise taxes every year until taxes are 60 percent ($11,000 per household) higher than today.
- B) Eliminate every federal program except Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid by 2045; or
- C) Do nothing and watch the federal debt expand so much that even a
minor interest rate response would induce a
spiral of rising debt and interest rates, threatening the entire economy.
This is no scare story. This is real Reidl has all the facts and figures. Read the whole thing. If you have a strong stomach and a stiff drink.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 6:46 PM |
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COOL STATISTICS, BUT STILL DAMN LIES I hate to link to a leftist hate-blog as vile as the Daily Kos, but credit where credit is due. Reader E. M. Schulze notes that Kos has published a graph showing the declining number of blog mentions of New York Times columnists since the imposition last month of the TimesSelect pay-wall. Kos calls it "The waning influence of the NYT Times columnists." It appears that editorial page Gail Collins' policy to get the blogosphere off her back is working. Here's an updated version of Kos's chart, generated at BlogPulse.
But wait! Could this be just another case of the left using statistics to wrongly justify its a priori beliefs? Here's the same chart going back six months. Hard to see any difference at all between where we are today and where we've been much of the time. Lucky for Kos that one month ago just happened to be a nice peak from which to start his chart, and make today's number of mentions look small by comparison. In fact, that peak may have been the result of all the talk about TimesSelect in the first place!
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:01 AM |
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Tuesday, October 11, 2005
MEMO TO ANGRY BEAR Yes, Angry Bear, as you say, the New York Times "is not a government." And so (literal-mindedly speaking, as you seem to require), it cannot levy taxes. And yes, there is a "difference between market prices and taxes." But that doesn't change my point one bit, when I said that thanks to the imposition of the TimesSelect fee of $50 a year, "the scope of Krugman’s audience has collapsed. This is supply-side economics -- so obvious that even an Ivy League economics professor like Krugman should understand it: When you put a tax on readership, you get fewer readers." Changes in tax rates and changes in market prices are not literally the same thing. But analytically, taxes and price changes operate the same way when seen from the separate perspectives of suppliers and demanders of goods and services (because, obviously enough one would think, taxes change the after-tax prices paid by demanders and received by producers). Angry Bear may wish to brush up on this basic economic axiom by referring to page 102 of Paul Krugman's introductory textbook Microeconomics. Once Angry Bear grasps this beginner's concept, he will be in a position to move up the chain of insight and eventually understand supply-side economics.P.S. Hey, Angry Bear, why were you once so willing to accept that higher oil prices are the equivalent of a tax increase? When it comes to oil and oil alone, is there no "difference between market prices and taxes"? I guess it just depends on the expediency of the moment, and whom you are trying to attack. Sometimes it's me, sometimes it's Alan Greenspan. Oh well. Consistency is the hobgoblin of consistent minds.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:04 AM |
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OUTSOURCING THE NEWS Take a look at this Reuters story. Do you notice anything unusual? Standard day-in-day-out stock market reporting stuff -- earnings guidance changed at some little public company, it's all just robotically lifted from a press release. Snore. But look at the byline. At the end of the story, in parens:
(Reporting by Gurdeep Singh in Bangalore)Reader Jeff Lin noticed, and said,
...looks like they are starting to outsource news reporting to India. Fantastic. I love outsourcing. If there is a job that needs to be shaken up, journalism is it.I'd say especially for this kind of financial news, which involves virtually no reporting at all. In fact, why even do it in India?
Update... An anonymous reader notes:
The Reuters news staff in the US is unionized and is at war with management. They've been without a contract for something like two years and regularly hold rallies and demonstrations by the Times Square office, with giant inflatable rats and whatnot. Reuters is desperately trying to cut costs, and outsourcing the robotic tasks like market reporting is one of the ways they want to/have to do it. The unionized work force is killing them, as it is many newspapers. Having a union news staff is poisonous --and naturally the union perspective colors reporting of corporations and capitalism in general. The only way Reuters can get around the union is to outsource, so really the Guild is inviting its own ruin.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:11 AM |
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Monday, October 10, 2005
VERY COOL One of the winners of the Nobel Prize in economics yesterday turns out to have been the inspiration for my favorite movie of all time.[Thomas C. Schelling's] best-known work, "The Strategy of Conflict," published in 1960, reflected his government work. It argued that nations, companies or individuals bargain in the context of conflicting and common interests and they bargain most effectively when they take these into account. "It was my effort to cope with practical problems like arms control through a style of analysis that could be called game theory," he said.Sweet that Schelling won the prize, and sweet that Paul Krugman didn't. And sweet again that Schelling is just the kind of great man that Krugman knows he'd have to be to win, but isn't. Krugman once wrote wistfully and wishfully, "During the cold war, the U.S. government employed experts in game theory to analyze strategies of nuclear deterrence. Men with Ph.D.'s in economics..." Yes, "men" indeed. The Ph.D. in economics, alone, doesn't cut it.A magazine article he wrote in 1960 brought him attention. The theme was accidental war, and Mr. Schelling reviewed three fictional accounts of nuclear disaster, one of them the novel "Red Alert" by Peter George. The article caught Mr. Kubrick's eye and he turned "Red Alert" into "Dr. Strangelove."
In the movie, neither the Soviet premier nor the American president wanted a nuclear conflagration, but that happened because neither had full knowledge of the other's situation and intentions. The Soviets, for example, had an automated nuclear device, unbeknown to the Americans. "One obvious point in the Strangelove movie was that the Soviet doomsday thing was not a deterrent," Mr. Schelling said, "when the other side did not know in advance that it existed." That was the game theory insight.
"By the time the movie came out, there was a hot line in place between Moscow and Washington," Mr. Schelling added. "When 'Red Alert' was published, there was no hot line."
Update... Hoover Institution's David Henderson has a wonderful appreciation of Schelling in today's Journal.
Update... Interesting response from a reader on our letters page.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:27 PM |
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PARENTOCAPITALISTCIDE? IS THAT A WORD? KarmaBanque, which holds itself out as providing "Research and Advice for Anarchists, Activists and Hedge Funds" says "It's easy to get rich people to attack other rich people!" In fact, they even recommend that the children of rich people murder their rich parents. According to the managers of the Free Enterprise Action Fund, KarmaBanque "denounced the FEAF as an 'appeaser to global warming and climate change terrorists' and said, with respect to the principals of the FEAF, 'I think the kids, the children of these people, should knife them.'" Now FEAF is calling for the sponsors of a global investment conference to disinvite KarmaBanque from its speakers list. Sounds sensible to me. But I'm sure my brothers in the blogosphere will demonize FEAF for attempting to throttle free speech. Incitements to personal violence? No matter. Just grist for the scandal mill that keeps most blogs going. But don't you dare ever suggest that anyone ought to not be able to advocate violence against people they disagree with, or their families. That protest is something that cannot be uttered. That's not free speech!
Thanks to reader Chris Ciancio for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:06 AM |
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BUT OTHER THAN THAT, THE ECONOMISTS GOT IT PRETTY MUCH RIGHT An IMF paper by Nobel laureate Robert Fogel (author of must-read The Fourth Great Awakening):
At the close of World War II, the future of economic development was the subject of wide-ranging debates. Historical experience has since shown that these forecasts were uniformly too pessimistic. Expectations for the American economy focused on the likelihood of secular stagnation, which continued to be debated throughout the post-war period. Concerns raised during the late 1960s and early 1970s about rapid population growth smothering the potential for economic growth in developing countries were contradicted when, during the mid- and late-1970s, fertility rates began to decline rapidly. Predictions that food production would not keep up with population growth have also been proven wrong: between 1961 and 2000, calories per capita worldwide have increased by 24 percent, despite a doubling of the global population. The high rates of economic growth in East and Southeast Asia were also unforeseen by economists.Thanks to Bruce Bartlett for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:59 AM |
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JOKE OF THE DAY
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:30 AM |
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MORE FRENCH FAMILY VALUES They stink. It's now a proven scientific fact.
...a study yesterday revealed nine out of ten French people do NOT wash regularly... Shockingly, 2.5 million NEVER shower or bath [sic] while 1.8 million NEVER brush their teeth.Thanks to reader Jill Olson for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:23 AM |
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KRUGMAN IGNOBEL ONCE AGAIN Once again Paul Krugman has failed to win the Nobel Prize in economics. This year's winners are Robert J. Aumann and Thomas C. Schelling, "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis." Why them, and not Krugman? One clue is Aumann's academic affiliation. He is with the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Krugman isn't at the center of anything. And he has nothing to do with rationality.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 7:56 AM |
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US HEALTHCARE MYTHS AND REALITIES Awesome posting from EU Rota, highlighting a few amazing facts laying there for anyone with eyes to see in the new OECD Factbook. Bet you didn't know that the US government spends more per capita on health care than almost any European country. Bet you didn't know we do it with the lowest tax wedge. Read and learn.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:17 AM |
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