Lost Decade Looming?

Krugman talks about the commentary masquerading as news, and it makes me wonder: I don’t really have a lot of faith in the media, so I assume that commentary masquerading as news is generally just the regurgitation of talking points.  And what if the ‘deficit / inflation hawks’ are intentionally setting us up for a longer recession, one that hopefully lasts until 2012.  It’s a scary concept, this politicization of economics, and not in the traditional way.  Economics is politics at nearly every level and certainly the macro, but the idea that one side would intentionally misread the current economy in order to gain politically at the cost of the macroeconomy… that really frightens me.  Maybe I’m naive but I didn’t think we were there, and I hope we’re not.

Which brings me to the post from a few weeks ago, prompted by this headline at the Huffington Post, the link to which I can no longer find:

Dems Have Fractious Meeting On Bank Reform, May Weaken Bill To Win GOP Votes

I’m not a big reader of the HuffPo, or any of the political theater blogs, but sometimes a guy needs a break from whatever.  This pattern, Dems Have Fractious Meeting On X, May Weaken Bill To Win GOP Votes seems like a fools game.

Maybe this is obvious to everyone who pays attention to these things, but I can’t believe the Democrats are still falling for stuff like this. I mean, the fact is that the Republicans don’t want reform to succeed – they want (at the very least, see above) a costly political failure. Collaborating with them only means that X, whatever X is, is more likely to fail.

I had this idea a while ago, that in order to be a part of ‘something’, and especially to be in charge of ‘something’ you have to believe, at least on some level, that that ‘something’ should exist. It’s not the Secretary of Education’s job to decide if the Department of Education should exist, it’s their job to lead it.  The SEC fell down because the people running it didn’t believe in its mission. I understand that this rule can’t hold 100% or else we’ll end up with bloat evident even to the left, but there’s something to be said for the general idea.

How will more regulation, especially more watered down regulation, help that?

If I was a paranoid guy, the headline would be something like:

Chinese exporters in race with FDA to mask and vary the ingredients in synthetic copies of illegal drugs.

Of course the reality is a less scary, but no less interesting.  I admit that from time to time I’ve read up on the latest ‘fake’ drugs, and they’ve always seemed to be just that.  I didn’t expect anything different when I started hearing about K2, but the reality’s quite different.

Imagine a world where they took this opportunity to regulate and tax this stuff instead.  Rather than playing whack-a-mole with each new product, or watching a bunch of kids snarf down acetone laced and unevenly dosed infusions, the FDA instead removes the uncertainty and solves the deficit problem instead.

Last night on the O’Reilly Factor, Bill turned to the audience letters. From Peter in Canada: “Has anyone noted that life expectancy in Canada under our health system is higher than the USA?” Bill wasn’t phased, but he did use some creative math to answer. “Well Peter, that’s to be expected,” he said, “we have ten times as many people as you do!”

My immediate take on this contrast was, Bush is really gone.

It’s not supposed to be about politics in a crisis like this, but getting us out of this means that we frame the debate a certain way, and that is politics. His turning attention to people doing the right thing, and asking that we do the right thing, rather than distracting us with some sort of feel good circus (not to take anything away from Sullenberger et al) makes me think we might have a chance.

They’re all pretty straightforward;  answer according to party lines, etc.  Probably a grasp of economics helps, hopefully.  I might not have that, or maybe, but a lot of them are political questions from political people.  Mitt’s questions were particularly dumb and we really dodged a bullet there.  I hope I get around to writing down my ideas about ‘our ability to compete globally’, or I might be too busy trying to put my portfolio back in order.

But moving on:

President Obama supports the estate tax. Why should a person who leaves his money to his children pay more in taxes than another person with the same lifetime income who spends all his money on himself? — N. GREGORY MANKIW, a professor of economics at Harvard

The attribution  fails to mention that “From 2003 to 2005, Mankiw was the chairman of Ex-President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors“, according to Wikipedia and my own recollection.  (as an aside, typing that ‘Ex’ made me smile)

As I got off the train and walked the couple of blocks to work I was thinking about that (the question, not the fact that we’ve been waiting for 1/21/09 for 7+ years).  I liked the way he phrased it, and for a second I agreed.  But then I realized there’s nothing wrong with fighting against an accumulation of wealth.  We’re not fighting the American Dream, we’re not saying that you can’t acquire wealth.  We’re just  trying to stop some people from getting too far ahead, so we can all compete on a level surface.  Do they hate competition?

So that’s not particularly profound, but I started thinking about it again with the Kennedy thing.  I wish that the fact that she’s, you know, unqualified meant that we’d get some scrappy fighter from the Bronx.  We won’t, but unless they appoint Bush we’re ahead.