Personally, I think Bartlett's intellectual demise was caused by his irrelevance in Washington. He seems to feel as if he’s entitled to have his advice heeded, whereas I think most of us doing policy in D.C. just try to do our jobs every day without worrying about who does or doesn’t listen to us. He went after the Bush administration because nobody in it really cared what he thought about anything.

He did the same thing to us at the Joint Economic Committee (Bartlett was staff director there at one time) when I was over there – even going so far as to directly attack our work in a column and characterize us as “floundering”. If we were so awful, it’s odd that so many JEC alumni are in pretty high positions now (Donald Marron -- acting director of CBO; Gary Blank -- chief of staff at CEA, Natasha Moore -- senior advisor to the assistant secretary for economic policy at Treasury, Jeff Wrase -- chief economist at House Budget, Ike Brannon -- chief economist for Senator Hatch, etc.).

And look at his constant criticisms of Treasury over the past few years. It’s no coincidence that he attacks it now because he used to work there as well.

I think he has this weird “everything was better when I was in charge” attitude that causes him to constantly criticize anything that he’s not a part of.

Pardon my disagreement, Don, but I think the Republicans are the "far worse," as evidenced by this craven act.

Your comments in today's blog on your reasons for criticizing Bruce Bartlett were needed to explain your position and were well presented. I haven't read Bruce's book but I have read about it. It seems very clear that his cricisms of Bush are that Bush isn't conservative enough. How Krugman and other lefties can construe that as support for their view that Bush isn't enough of a leftist escapes me. Even if you disagree with Bartlett's motives, you have to agree that his specific criticisms are diametric to the criticisms that Krugman et al. level at Bush. It seems that Krugman et al. are trying to get an unwarranted free ride from Bartlett. Bartlett would have even stronger criticisms of the socialist policies Krugman and his fellow travelers advocate.

It would be nice if you actually read my book instead of just reacting to what others says about it.

Update 3 [3/11/2006]... When Bruce Bartlett faulted me for not having read his book, I asked him to send me a copy. His reply: "Forget it, cheapskate." I guess you have to be a member of the liberal mainstream media, in a position to aggrandize Bruce and his Bush-bashing, to get on the review copy list.

Update 4... Reader Matthew Mehan says,

I am not defending Bruce. I only want to say that your rhetorical question "Where else, except in Bartlett's fantasy life, did Bush ever claim to be another Reagan?" is a minor canard. The answer is that most of Bush's supporters believed he would live up to the Reagan legacy. It was a fantasy shared by the multitudes, a horror-striken left, and a hopeful right. The fault of the Bush supporters was their collective failure to push past the slogan of compassionate conservatism and demand substantive promises from Bush.

About 4,000 students who took the main SAT college entrance test in October received incorrectly low scores because of errors in scanning their answer sheets, the College Board said Wednesday... For individual students, the scoring discrepancies ranged from 10 to about 200 points on the 2,400-point exam, with most of the errors from 10 to 40 points, said Chiara Coletti, a board spokeswoman. She said the board this week has been notifying college admissions officials and high school counselors and Wednesday sent e-mails to the affected students... A very small number of students, not included in the 4,000, received incorrect scores that were too high, she said. Those scores will not be changed.

Update... Reader Alan Scanio adds:

Well, I don't know if this is changed, but this will REALLY piss off Mark Spahn (Mark is of course absolutely right to be angry). I was released from high school in '95. At the time, the practice was to dumb down the National Merit Scholar standards for states with awful public schools. I don't know if the SAT boneheads even considered private schools in these calculations. They convert your score to "selection index" points for some reason, and Mississippi (for example) requires fewer selection index points to become a national merit scholar than Texas. I don't know if this barbaric practice continues to this day, but it heavily favors private school kids in states with awful public schools.

Full diclosure: in my home state of Texas, I missed national merit scholar by One. Selection. Index. Point (I nearly aced the math, but got killed on the verbal. Something about overusing parentheses. ((That was a joke.)))

The environmental movement maintains that science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to produce a pesticide that is safe, or even to bake a loaf of bread that is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives. When it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that there is one area in which the environmental movement displays the most breathtaking confidence in the reliability of science and technology, an area in which, until recently, no one—not even the staunchest supporters of science and technology—had ever thought to assert very much confidence at all. The one thing, the environmental movement holds, that science and technology can do so well that we are entitled to have unlimited confidence in them is forecast the weather—for the next one hundred years!

It’s not so much that we don’t quite understand this fish-nor-fowl business of Bruce Bartlett’s work being billed on the Times homepage as though he’s an op-ed columnist when he’s more of a Suellentropian highbrow blogger. It’s not that he’s seemingly using the Times and this quasi-op-ed gig as little more than an ongoing plug for his new book, which his bio helpfully notes “has just been published by Doubleday.” It’s not even that his latest bit — the offering being flacked on the homepage — is just repeating the same stuff Paul Krugman has been saying for months.

The real problem with Barlett’s stint as a “guest columnist” is that the dude looks far too much like Frank Rich, at least when you quickly glance at that little thumbnail shot...

"The cost of 404 in the aggregate, from every single public company, is probably one ten-millionth of the cost of executive compensation. I don’t hear anybody saying we should get rid of executive compensation."

For Breeden’s statement to have been correct, annual compensation of company executives would have had to have been (get ready) -- $60,000,000,000,000,000[.] The number “60? followed by 15 zeroes is 60 quadrillion dollars, a figure that is about 5,000 times bigger than the United States’ Gross Domestic Product of roughly $12 trillion...

Update... Reader Josh Hendrickson points out a posting by Don Boudreaux, offering another critque of the same Krugman column:

He says that he doesn't want to stop outsourcing, but he admits that outsourcing has him feeling "conflicted." (While criticizing George Bush's answer to those Americans who lose jobs to greater international trade, Krugman keeps his readers in the dark about his solution to the apparent problem. Would he limit, if not stop, outsourcing? If so, how and by how much?)

Krugman wasn't conflicted nine years ago about expanding trade. He ended this superb 1997 Slate essay by saying that oppoents of trade "are not entitled to their self-righteousness. They have not thought the matter through. And when the hopes of hundreds of millions are at stake, thinking things through is not just good intellectual practice. It is a moral duty."

...perhaps, sometime in the past nine years the needle on Krugman's moral compass has shifted.

Update [3/7/2006]... Our DC "lawyer-lobbyist" friend, anonymously as usual, has ome observations:

Recall the Times's $400 million investment in About.com. Unhinged from the usual NYT philosophy, About.com brags about its deal with Wal-Mart. So, as they bash Wal-Mart with their newspaper, they rely on Wal-Mart for internet marketing deals.

A personal observation -- my friend Governor Ehrlich of Maryland has done an extraordinary job turning the state away from the New Jersey model of unions, corruption, high taxes and regulation towards his version of the Virginia model of growth. Result: Maryland is creating jobs faster than most states. The state's economic development agency, long a backwater for hacks and loafers, now runs like a well-equipped investment partner.

One political act of courage was Ehrlich's veto (overridden) of the bill mandating a minimum percentage of spending for healthcare by Wal-Mart. Want to bet that Wal-Mart barely lifts a finger to get its employees behind Bob's reelection? Meanwhile, they've endorsed a minimum wage increase (turning their backs on nearly every restaurant and smaller retailer) and are adding prominent Democrats to their board as fast as possible. Beware the idea of helping Wal-Mart. Count on them to ignore you when it's their turn to return the favor.