The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Big Ugly Deal Faces Senate Vote

Generally speaking, “widespread support” is D.C. code for “loaded up with enough pork and welfare giveaways that a majority will hold their noses and vote for it.” Which is the basic story of the tax compromise: Senators get their first chance Monday to vote on the tax-cut deal struck by President Barack Obama and Republicans […]

Ruh-Roh: Bernanke Says Unemployment Won’t Be Back to ‘Normal’ for Five Years

On “60 Minutes” last night: The nation’s unemployment rate, which has been over 9 percent for a record 19 months, is not likely to return to “a more normal unemployment rate” of about 5 percent or 6 percent for four or five years, the Federal Reserve chairman said in an interview with the CBS News […]

Everything You Need to Know
About ‘Tax Cuts for the Rich’ . . .

. . . was written more than 200 years ago: “The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal. The great masses therefore which excite envy, and tempt rapacity, must be put out of the possibility of danger. Then they form a natural rampart about […]

Good News! Unemployment Hits 9.8%

It’s the most wonderful time of the year isn’t it? New York Times: In a jolting surprise to the economic recovery and market expectations, the United States economy added just 39,000 jobs in November, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, according to the Department of Labor. Did somebody say “surprise”? Yes! Which can […]

As a Freelance Independent Blogger Consultant, I Have Enormous Sympathy …

. . . for those pathetic slobs who are merely “long-term unemployed“: The longer people stay out of work, the more trouble they have finding new work. . . . This country has some of the highest levels of long-term unemployment — or joblessness lasting more than six months — ever recorded. . . . […]

Economic Growth Causes Consumer Spending, Not the Other Way Around

Regarding Keynesian economics as self-evidently false, I seldom bother explaining in detail what’s wrong with it, preferring instead to mock it, e.g., “Aggregate Demand! Aggregate Demand!” It is nice, however, when economists provide us with the detailed analysis of specific errors of Keynesianism, in this case a five-minute video examining the relationship between consumer spending […]

Shorter Obama: ‘In This False Dilemma, America Must Make a Manichean Choice Between My Indisputably Wise Policies and My Tendentious Straw-Man Caricature of Republican Policies’

Of course, that description fits just about anything Obama says, not just today’s speech justifying a two-year freeze on federal civilian employee pay. It goes to show how, even when arguing in favor of a good policy, the president’s rhetoric is predictably crammed with invalid logic, counterfactual assertions, and — always — the effort to […]

‘Far More Grim’

Instapundit links a sobering discussion of America’s fiscal problems by National Review‘s Yuval Levin: Most of the baseline assumptions about the size of our debt assume that today’s exceedingly low interest rates continue. If they don’t — even if rates just return to the average of the past 20 years — the picture looks far […]

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