Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan's "lost decade" in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth. There follows the names of almost 200 academic leaders, listed by University.
#1
Hard to believe there are 200 much less 2 academics in this country who disagree with a left-wing socialist radical. Bill Ayers probably has a bomb built for each one.
Posted by: Jack is Back! ||
01/28/2009 10:09 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Not listed herein, Dr. Barron H. Harvey Dean of Howard School of Business voted 'present.'
#3
To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production.
Well, that's so basically against the foundation and tenets of the Donk Party, it's DOA. If they had sweetened that deal with "...thus providing more money for reelection funds, nepotism, and just outright graft.", they may have gotten at least a fleeting notice.
#4
Who cares what the little people have to say, We have spoken and so shall it be.
hmmm I see they signed their names... Rahm, make sure this doesn't happen again. You know what to do
Posted by: President Obama ||
01/28/2009 13:24 Comments ||
Top||
#5
I know at least one academic who would've voted McCain - couldn't though, as he's just a Brit in the USA. There are quite a few right-thinking academics out there, but they're particularly vulnerable to leftist hate if they speak their minds. And academia is a pretty cosy community.
#6
Japan's lost decade was the product of Japanese "honor" which compels pay-back to those who make bad investments. Investors should suffer for ill-advised moves. Floridans should be feasting on the foreclosed property market, but can't because potential buyers fear regulated trustees who try to float non-viable assets. Post 2000, every small time builder wanted to be Donald Trump. I am not losing sleep over the collapse of the luxury condo craze.
#7
I would be angry if I thought the clowns were against me and knew what they were doing. The clowns do not have a clue on how to get us out of the Barney Frank recession.
"Cello scrotum," a nasty ailment allegedly suffered by musicians, does not exist and the condition was just a hoax, a senior doctor has admitted.
Back in 1974, in a letter to the British Medical Journal, Elaine Murphy reported that cellists suffered from the painful complaint caused by their instrument repeatedly rubbing against their body. The claim had been inspired by reports in the BMJ about the alleged condition guitar nipple, caused by irritation when the guitar was pressed against the chest.
But Murphy, now a Baroness and a former Professor of Psychiatry of Old Age at Guy's Hospital in London, has admitted her supposed medical complaint was a spoof. "Perhaps after 34 years it's time for us to confess we invented cello scrotum," she wrote with her husband John, who had signed the original letter, which was published in the BMJ on Wednesday.
"Anyone who has ever watched a cello being played would realise the physical impossibility of our claim."
Murphy, who said the couple had been "dining out" on their story ever since they made it up, said they had decided to reveal the hoax after it was referred to in a recent BMJ article on health problems associated with making music.
She also said she suspected "guitar nipple" had been a joke.
#1
Reminds me of the old joke about the lady in church who was asked if she wanted to invoke any special prayer and she rose and told about how her husband had fallen and injured his scrotum and how it took some many serious operations to repair it, blah, blah, blah. Then a man rose and asked if he could also speak to the church goers and was given permission. He said that he was the lady's husband and just wanted to tell her for the last time that "its called a sternum, not a scrotum".
Posted by: Jack is Back! ||
01/28/2009 10:12 Comments ||
Top||
#2
So why do my balls still hurt?
Posted by: Yo Yo Ma ||
01/28/2009 11:48 Comments ||
Top||
WASHINGTONPresident Barack Obama expressed frustration Wednesday after members of his cabinet failed to recognize his allusion to the 24th issue of the comic series Savage Sword Of Conan during their first major meeting together. . . .
"If my inner circle of advisers can't even communicate about the most basic issues, how are we going to tackle the massive problems our nation faces?" Obama said during a press conference. "When I tell my cabinet that getting bipartisan support is exactly like the time Conan got Taurus to help him steal Yara's jewel, they need to understand what I mean."
After receiving no reaction from the assembled reporters, Obama added, "Because a giant spider is protecting this chamber full of precious jewels, just like Congress is protecting its . God, how are you people not seeing this?" . . .
Aides also confirmed that Obama has refused to lend his copy of issue #24 to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, fearing the former Republican congressman will carelessly bend or rip the pages. The commander in chief is reportedly intent on keeping the comics in pristine condition for their eventual inclusion in his presidential library.
"How am I supposed to effectively lead this nation when [attorney general nominee Eric] Holder has to stop the meeting and ask what the story of Taurus using the black lotus powder to kill the five guard lions has to do with increasing broadband Internet connections nationwide?" Obama said while vigorously rubbing his temples.
Added the president, "For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?" . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
01/28/2009 07:49 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Well, issue #24 is ok but for a really good read find a copy of issue #64. The artwork by John Buscema and Ernie Chan is fantastic! Joe Jusko's cover painting isn't too shabby either....
#2
Memories are flooding back. Big John Buscema and Ernie Chan were an awesome team. Then they went to Gary Kwapwitz and I coudn't stand the magazine anymore.
#1
That's a bit harsh - I'll bet it's still the most respected institution in the UK!
Reminds you that, although you might have a perfectly logical philosophical dislike of unelected privilege, you can't deny that there's a lot to be said for people having power by accident rather than having clawed and shoved their way up the greasy pole for it...
like that is hard to do... kind of like being the most sympathetic SS guard at Treblinka or similar...
Rot has set in on the UK, and they are not able to take care of their Muz parasites (or the native ones either)
Posted by: Abu do you love ||
01/28/2009 14:08 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Y'all are forgetting... Americans went to war _twice_ to obtain our independence from this institution (along with the House of Commons and the rest of the British Government) the elites want to pretend was a "Beacon of Integrity."
How many geniuses does it take to change a lightbulb...
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama is building a White House staff so loaded with big names and overlapping duties that it could collapse into chaos unless managed with a juggler's skill.
It's an administration that seems "addicted to czars," says one longtime observer of government organization. Obama has installed a White House health czar who doubles as secretary of Health and Human Services. The State Department now has "special envoys" for the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and for climate change - areas already overseen by other officials.
#1
I wondered when someone else was going to notice this. O's structure will lend itself to turf fights and backstabbing, with the real power going to those with access to Rahm and O.
O's strategy seems to be to simply throw money and bodies at problems.
#4
O's strategy seems to be to simply throw money and bodies at problems.
This is what happens when the electorate put someone with absolutely NO actual work experience in high office. The man has no management skills, because he has no management experience to build them. He's just a glib tongue and a new face. "Empty Suit" is being too kind.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
01/28/2009 15:16 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Too crowded. Time to move the entire operation to Chicago.
#11
But the system can be cumbersome, rife with jealousies and hampered by conflicting efforts and messages
And to think each of these career types will carry a staff along with them. When the egos and agendas start to collide look for the typical DC tactics. (Anonymous leaks to the press) Just call it a stimulus package for the NYTimes.
If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results. After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt. As if the permanent solution to a financial panic and years of spending wealth we didn't create were a government take-over of the economy in the manner we currently witness in Spain, Italy, and Greece--or the high-tax, high-spend ethos of a bankrupt California.
The reaction to the economic panic was sort of analogous to the call to 'charge it!' after 9/11 (cf. Ike's fights about the surtax to pay for Korea), or to the Iraq 2006 upsurge in violence, when suddenly our leaders declared the war lost, blamed the nebulous "they" for tricking them into voting for the war, and calling for immediate withdrawals and retreats. Ditto the Stalag-Gulag Guantanamo that, by January 19, had ruined the Constitution, shredded the Bill of Rights, and forever tarnished our reputation. Yet, on the 20th, it was suddenly complex and problematic, and required a "task force" to do a year-long inquiry into the bad and worse choices confronting us.
At some point in all this serial hysteria, we are beginning to see the problem is not in the stars of the economy or of the war, but in ourselves--a weird generation that, when it finally came of age, proved to be just about what we could expect of it from what we saw in its youth.
#1
Some say after it is all over we will resemble France. Not me. I think we end up resembling America in the mid to late 70's - high inflation, high unemployment and high interest rates plus oil going through the roof. We are fighting the wrong economic war with the wrong-headed ideology and equipment. We have a smarter and more radical Jimmy Carter type leader who is hood winking the boomers because that is what they crave - someone who will save their 401K and equity in their house. Spending will not do that. Not government spending at least. This all started in 68 with the march on the Pentagon and is ending in 2008 with the march on the Fed and Treasury. Neither are likely to survive.
Posted by: Jack is Back! ||
01/28/2009 10:21 Comments ||
Top||
#2
I blame anyone over 30 boomer taxpayers and retirees. Bomb The VILLAGES!
To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect," President Barack Obama said in his inaugural. But in truth, the new way forward is a return to realpolitik and business as usual in America's encounter with that Greater Middle East. As the president told Al-Arabiya television Monday, he wants a return to "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."
Say what you will about the style -- and practice -- of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush's presidency. America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. That dominion of plunder and terror was given up under duress.
True, Mr. Bush's diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared. But we are still too close to this history to see how the demonstration effect works its way through Arab political culture.
The argument that liberty springs from within and can't be given to distant peoples is more flawed than meets the eye. In the sweep of modern history, the fortunes of liberty have been dependent on the will of the dominant power -- or powers -- in the order of states. The late Samuel P. Huntington made this point with telling detail. In 15 of the 29 democratic countries in 1970, democratic regimes were midwifed by foreign rule or had come into being right after independence from foreign occupation.
In the ebb and flow of liberty, power always mattered, and liberty needed the protection of great powers. The appeal of the pamphlets of Mill and Locke and Paine relied on the guns of Pax Britannica, and on the might of America when British power gave way. In this vein, the assertive diplomacy of George W. Bush had given heart to Muslims long in the grip of tyrannies.
Take that image of Saddam Hussein, flushed out of his spider hole some five years ago: Americans may have edited it out of their memory, but it shall endure for a long time in Arab consciousness. Rulers can be toppled and brought to account. No wonder the neighboring dictatorships bristled at the sight of that capture, and at his execution three years later.
The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the "parochial" man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order. Mr. Obama could still acknowledge the revolutionary impact of his predecessor's diplomacy, but so far he has chosen not to do so.
The brief reference to Iraq in the inaugural could not have been icier or more clipped. "We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people," Mr. Obama said. Granted, Iraq was not his cause, but a project that has taken so much American toil and sacrifice, that has laid the foundations of a binational (Arab and Kurdish) state in the very heart of an Arab world otherwise given to a despotic political tradition, surely could have elicited a word or two of praise. In his desire to be the "un-Bush," the new president fell back on an austere view of freedom's possibilities. The foreign world would be kept at an emotional and cultural distance. Even Afghanistan -- the good war that the new administration has accepted as its burden -- evoked no soaring poetry, just the promise of forging "a hard-earned peace." The nation had cast a vote for a new way, and had gotten the foreign policy of Brent Scowcroft.
Where Mr. Bush had seen the connection between the autocratic ways in Muslim lands and the culture of terror that infected the young foot soldiers of radicalism, Mr. Obama seems ready to split the difference with their rulers. His embrace of the "peace process" is a return to the sterile diplomacy of the Clinton years, with its belief that the terror is rooted in the grievances of the Palestinians. Mr. Obama and his advisers have refrained from asserting that terrorism has passed from the scene, but there is an unmistakable message conveyed by them that we can return to our own affairs, that Wall Street is more deadly and dangerous than that fabled "Arab-Muslim Street."
Thus far the political genius of Mr. Obama has been his intuitive feel for the mood of this country. He bet that the country was ready for his brand of postracial politics, and he was vindicated. More timid souls counseled that he should wait and bide his time, but the electorate responded to him. I suspect that he is on the mark in his reading of America's fatigue and disillusionment with foreign causes and foreign places. That is why Osama bin Laden's recent call for a "financial jihad" against America seemed so beside the point; the work of destruction has been done by our own investment wizards and politicians.
But foreign challengers and rogue regimes are under no obligation to accommodate our mood and our needs. They are not hanging onto news of our financial crisis, they are not mesmerized by the fluctuations of the Dow. I know it is a cliché, but sooner or later, we shall be hearing from them. They will strip us of our illusions and our (new) parochialism.
A dispatch from the Arabian Peninsula bears this out. It was learned, right in the midst of the news cycle announcing that Mr. Obama has ordered that Guantanamo be shut down in a year's time, that a Saudi by the name of Said Ali al-Shihri -- who had been released from that prison in 2007 to his homeland -- had made his way to Yemen and had risen in the terror world of that anarchic country. It had been a brief stop in Saudi Arabia for Guantanamo detainee No. 372: He had gone through a "rehabilitation" program there, then slipped across the border to Yemen, where he may have been involved in a terror attack on the U.S. Embassy in the Yemeni capital in September of last year.
This war was never a unilateral American war to be called off by an American calendar. The enemy, too, has a vote in how this struggle between American power and radical Islamism plays out in the years to come.
In another time, the fabled era of Bill Clinton's peace and prosperity, we were mesmerized by the Nasdaq. In the watering hole of Davos, in the heights of the Alps, gurus confident of a new age of commerce pronounced the end of ideology and politics. But in the forbidding mountains of the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, a breed of jihadists that paid no heed to that mood of economic triumphalism was plotting for us an entirely different future.
Here we are again, this time led by our economic distress, demanding that the world abide by our own reading of historical challenges. We have not discovered that "sweet spot" where our economic fortunes intersect with the demands and challenges of an uncertain world.
Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. He is also an adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
#1
Lets see if they are as naive as 57% of the American population.
Posted by: Jack is Back! ||
01/28/2009 10:23 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Message sent.
WASHINGTON The nation's top military officer said Tuesday the United States did all it could to intercept a suspected arms shipment to Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, but its hands were tied.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that a Cypriot-flagged ship intercepted in the Red Sea last week was carrying Iranian arms and that U.S. authorities suspect that the shipment was ultimately bound for the Gaza Strip, where Hamas and Israel are observing a shaky truce after three weeks of fighting.
"The United States did as much as we could do legally," Mullen said, adding that he would like more authority to act in such cases. "We were not authorized to seize the weapons or do anything like that."
#3
What about Israel's traumatized youth? I received a letter from the Jewish National Fund the other day, asking for donations to help build a bombproof indoor playground for the children of Sderot, who daren't play outside. It will double as a senior center during the school day, thus preventing multigenerational trauma which no doubt otherwise would result in geriatric Israeli commandos wiping out entire Palestinian villages because they couldn't get to their afternoon therapy craft session.
#4
You mean their not now? And before? Then who the hell was building the tunnels, smuggling the arms and shooting the rockets? Old men and women?
Posted by: Jack is Back! ||
01/28/2009 10:24 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Psychologists say Israel's three-week military offensive inflicted more severe trauma than previous conflicts in Gaza because civilians didn't have a safe zone.
Maybe because Uncle Mahmoud was setting up with his RPG in sonny's bedroom window?
Spare me...
#6
Better headlines include -
A Generation in Danger of Being Blown to Bits, or
A Generation of scattered body parts, or
A Generation in the Land of the Dead, or
Murdered by Arabs, Bombed by Jooos.
"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."
So said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in November, and Democrats in Congress are certainly taking his advice to heart. The 647-page, $825 billion House legislation is being sold as an economic "stimulus," but now that Democrats have finally released the details we understand Rahm's point much better. This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.
We've looked it over, and even we can't quite believe it. There's $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn't turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There's even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.
In selling the plan, President Obama has said this bill will make "dramatic investments to revive our flagging economy." Well, you be the judge. Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects. There's another $40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects that are arguably worthwhile priorities.
Add the roughly $20 billion for business tax cuts, and by our estimate only $90 billion out of $825 billion, or about 12 cents of every $1, is for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus. And even many of these projects aren't likely to help the economy immediately. As Peter Orszag, the President's new budget director, told Congress a year ago, "even those [public works] that are 'on the shelf' generally cannot be undertaken quickly enough to provide timely stimulus to the economy."
Most of the rest of this project spending will go to such things as renewable energy funding ($8 billion) or mass transit ($6 billion) that have a low or negative return on investment. Most urban transit systems are so badly managed that their fares cover less than half of their costs. However, the people who operate these systems belong to public-employee unions that are campaign contributors to . . . guess which party?
Here's another lu-lu: Congress wants to spend $600 million more for the federal government to buy new cars. Uncle Sam already spends $3 billion a year on its fleet of 600,000 vehicles. Congress also wants to spend $7 billion for modernizing federal buildings and facilities. The Smithsonian is targeted to receive $150 million; we love the Smithsonian, too, but this is a job creator?
Another "stimulus" secret is that some $252 billion is for income-transfer payments -- that is, not investments that arguably help everyone, but cash or benefits to individuals for doing nothing at all. There's $81 billion for Medicaid, $36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits, $20 billion for food stamps, and $83 billion for the earned income credit for people who don't pay income tax. While some of that may be justified to help poorer Americans ride out the recession, they aren't job creators.
As for the promise of accountability, some $54 billion will go to federal programs that the Office of Management and Budget or the Government Accountability Office have already criticized as "ineffective" or unable to pass basic financial audits. These include the Economic Development Administration, the Small Business Administration, the 10 federal job training programs, and many more.
Oh, and don't forget education, which would get $66 billion more. That's more than the entire Education Department spent a mere 10 years ago and is on top of the doubling under President Bush. Some $6 billion of this will subsidize university building projects. If you think the intention here is to help kids learn, the House declares on page 257 that "No recipient . . . shall use such funds to provide financial assistance to students to attend private elementary or secondary schools." Horrors: Some money might go to nonunion teachers.
The larger fiscal issue here is whether this spending bonanza will become part of the annual "budget baseline" that Congress uses as the new floor when calculating how much to increase spending the following year, and into the future. Democrats insist that it will not. But it's hard -- no, impossible -- to believe that Congress will cut spending next year on any of these programs from their new, higher levels. The likelihood is that this allegedly emergency spending will become a permanent addition to federal outlays -- increasing pressure for tax increases in the bargain. Any Blue Dog Democrat who votes for this ought to turn in his "deficit hawk" credentials.
This is supposed to be a new era of bipartisanship, but this bill was written based on the wish list of every living -- or dead -- Democratic interest group. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, "We won the election. We wrote the bill." So they did. Republicans should let them take all of the credit.
#1
I guess, the whole idea is to throw a whole bunch of money in all direction and hope the economy rebounds itself, as it happens always. But will it happen? I doubt. We buy most of things made in China, good service sector jobs are exported to India and our economic boom was a bubble based on fraud and cheat. So help us God!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan's "lost decade" in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.
To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect," President Barack Obama said in his inaugural. But in truth, the new way forward is a return to realpolitik and business as usual in America's encounter with that Greater Middle East. As the president told Al-Arabiya television Monday, he wants a return to "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."
Psychologists warn that Gaza's traumatised youth will become easy prey for extremists.
