Worst of the Web: A New Experiment in Information Retrieval

James Taranto wrote this in his April 11 2005
"Best of the Web" column

John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam*, showed up yesterday at a Boston event, where he was "using crutches as he recovers from knee surgery," reports the Associated Press. He was also using emotional crutches as he recovers from last year's election:

"Last year too many people were denied their right to vote, too many who tried to vote were intimidated," the Massachusetts senator said at an event sponsored by the state League of Women Voters. . . .

Kerry also cited examples Sunday of how people were duped into not voting.

"Leaflets are handed out saying Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans vote on Tuesday. People are told in telephone calls that if you've ever had a parking ticket, you're not allowed to vote," he said.

Where did Kerry come up with that idea about leaflets saying "Democrats on Wednesday"? Probably from this story, which appeared a week before the election:

With the knowledge that the minority vote will be crucial in the upcoming presidential election, Republican Party officials are urging blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities to make their presence felt at the polls on Wednesday, Nov. 3. . . .

"You can't walk through a black neighborhood here in Miami without seeing our 'Don't Forget Big Wednesday!' message up on a billboard, tacked to a phone booth, or taped to a bus shelter," Monreal added. "The Republican Party has spared no expense in this endeavor."

Before Kerry embarrasses himself further, someone ought to take him aside and explain to him that the Onion is a satirical publication

I admit that I found out about this here at www.mediamatters.org in an article entitled "Not funny: James Taranto twice wrongly claimed John Kerry based electoral fraud comments on jokes" so I knew that Taranto was wrong. However I decided how long it would take me to check whether Kerry might have been using a source other than "The Onion" without reading mediamatters refutation of Taranto. I read only to the end of the quote of Taranto's claim, then tried to check it on my own.

Now I am not a leading expert on the Web like Mr Taranto, so the only thing I could think of was to google Democrats+Wednesday+fraud. The first hit was vote2004.eriposte.com which is a huge site, so it took me a while to get to this entry.

11/1/04_2 [Permalink] UPDATED 11/2/04
Fake leaflet emerges in Ohio saying Republicans should vote on Tuesday (11/2) and Democrats on Wednesday (11/3)

Ohio Voter Suppression News mentions this:
Franklin County hit with phony leaflets
Matt Damschroder, director of the Franklin County (Columbus area) Board of Elections held a news conference Monday afternoon to announce that parts of the county had indeed been victimized by people distributing the following flyer:

[eRiposte note: Picture of flyer is at the URL above. I am reproducing the text here in brown font]

Franklin County Board of Elections

Election Bulletin

Because the confusion caused [sic] by unexpected heavy voter registration, voters are asked to apply to the following schedule:

Republican voters are asked to vote at your assigned location on Tuesday.

Democratic voters are asked to vote at your assigned location on Wednesday.

Thank you for your cooperation, and remember voting is a privilege.

Franklin County, Where Government Works

Note the date November 1 2004, which is somewhat before Taranto's post on April 11 2005.

Now vote2004.eriposte.com is a partisan site, so I can see how a fine journalist like Mr Taranto might not take their word for it. Now I'm a blogger not a journalist so I don't know how telephones work. However, I do know how to look up phone numbers on the web. I went back to google. This took quite a while because there were so many sites commenting on the accusation by Matt Damschroder, director of the Franklin County (Columbus area) Board of Elections that it was a bit difficult to find the web page of Franklin county. I managed to get to the Franklin county web page by googling Franklin County Ohio (that is by leaving out "Damschroder") In the process I found this obscure site. I also learned that Damschroder is a Republican no doubt eager to slander his fellow Republicans.

From the Franklin County page I just clicked on "select an agency" and then electoral commission and got this

Director Matthew M. Damschroder
Deputy Director Michael R. Hackett
280 East Broad Street, Room 100
Columbus, OH 43215
Phone: (614) 462-3100
Fax: (614) 462-3489
Email

so I learn Taranto wouldn't have had to use the phone to check the story after all.

Given the difficulty finding Franklin county amid all of the stories about the fake Franklin county flyer which told Democrats to vote on Wednesday, this took much longer than it should have. Also I was playing Spades at www.pogo.com at the same time. The total elapsed time was 12 minutes.

Mr Taranto must be very very busy if he can't spare 12 minutes to check a story before posting.

update: Now I have read to the end of the story and I find that someone at the daily Kos got the goods in 5 minutes not 12. Well I guess that's why they get 400,000 hits a day and I get about 18.

Update2: I sent this e-mail to Damschroder, although I really shouldn't have.

Dear Mr Damschroder

I'm sorry to bother you about a very old story, which, I guess has led
to a flood of e-mails, but I was wondering if something I read on the
web is true or a joke. Did you hold a press conference just before
the election (Monday the 1 November 2004) in which you reported that a
fake flyer had been found which said that Democrats should vote on
Wednesday 3 November not Tuesday 2 November ?

This is, as I guess you know, a huge story on the web. I don't want
to waste your time, but I can't figure out if it is a true story or a
joke.

Sincerely yours,

Robert Waldmann

p.s. I'm not an Ohio citizen but my mom grew up in Ohio so I'm half Ohioan
but still sorry to waste your time.

The Bolton Nomination was a very stupid move.

At first it seemed that the main problem was that it was an affront to our allies. It was especially unwise to nominate Bolton right after Bush's let's make up tour of Europe. The combination means that every European leader must understand that he can not trust Bush. It was such a bad move that Blair let it be known that he was furious, which is pretty remarkable given the things he has put up with.

Now I think the reason that the Bolton nomination was a very bad poltical mistake is that it blew the cover up of the true cause of intelligence failures. The Bush administration, Senator Roberts and Judge Silverman have put a huge amount of effort into placing the blame on intelligence professionals. Poltical junkies have always known that this is nonsense. However, when an assistant secretary of state tells the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that an undersecretary was so angry that an intelligence analyst wouldn't tell him what he wanted to hear that he "reamed him another one" people notice. People whose interest is piqued by such language will have trouble failing to notice that Bolton was demanding exactly the sort of intelligence failures which the Bush administration is trying to blame on the professionals. I'm sure many will manage not to notice or won't care, but it is very dumb to nominate intelligence failure personified to a post which requires Senate confirmation.

It seems quite possible that Bolton's nomination will be rejected. This would make Bush look like a lame duck. I think confirmation of Bolton's nomination is likely to be even worse for Bush than rejection. Bolton is now the focus of considerable media attention. The ambassador to the UN is often not a really important foreign policy figure but he or she is a very public figure. Disapproval of the UN ambassador can be very costly to a president (ask Jimmy Carter). It is clear that Bolton will make trouble for his bosses and his subordinates until he retires. By the way this meanst that I think Ford's characterization of him as a "kiss up kick down" kind of guy is unfair, since he seems to be more of a kick up kick down kick North, East, South, and West kind of guy).

The thing which really strikes me is that a President capable of such a deeply stupid move won re-election. As Dr Antonello Solinas said (in another context and language) "to lose is always painful but to lose to those buffoons is humiliating."

update: and what about the mustache ? If you are going to try to sneak an aweful nomination past, don't nominate a guy with a mustache which makes deer freaze in their tracks.

This post by Steve Clemons seems almost perfect to me.

Clemons advises Lincoln Chafee to vote against Bolton. In this post he argues, convincingly, that voting for Bolton would hurt Chafee poltically. The tone is much much more in sorrow than in anger, and Clemons is careful to praise Chafee while gently explaining all that he and others can and will do t to make such a vote as costly as possible.


Clemons and others have already convincingly argued that voting against confirmation is the right thing to do. The most credit is due to Bolton who would rather get caught committing perjury than say he now believes that in the past he was wrong (that would be perjury too but he wouldn't be demonstrably so).

However, the post is not perfect as Clemons has more in common with Matthew Yglesias than just being brilliant, principled and very hard working as is shown by this quote "Chafee may be in an even deeper whole than he might guess if Hagel or any one of these other Senators jumps ship before he does." At least he didn't misquote Ford as saying that Bolton had reamed Westermann a hole new whole.

I show I am a twit with this ad homonym attack, but I can't help myself.

Two out of Three aint Bad:

Conservative Americans generally are not inclined to do anything for prisoners. I think this is both a crime and a mistake, since unwillingness to help prisoners leads to recidivism. Oklahoma is a very conservative state but they are doing something for prisoners which I'm not even sure Sweden does.

In the Joseph Harp Correctional Center, sprawling across the tawny plains 40 miles south of Oklahoma City, officials are running a six-part course on maintaining a healthy marriage, available for the last year or so to inmates in good standing.

Now to be brutally frank, I am not sure if it is really a good idea to encourage women to stay married to convicts and I have even more doubts that it is a good idea to encourage them to marry men while they are in prison (yes some women do that). But, in the end, I think such women are willingly performing a great service to America and any help they are willing to accept is owed them.

One strong impression I got from reading the article is that finally people who talk about focusing on the family are focusing on the family. I strongly believe (with almost no evidence) that traditional values sexaphobia is an irrational response to the very real problems of divorse and irresponsible unmarried fathers. I don't have an explanation for why anger about these very real problems leads to religious fanaticism and homophobia and I certainly have no evidence, but I am unable to doubt that there is a causal connection.

This belief is part of why I am so upset that "family values" is so often used to mean "sexual-abstinence" and not "stand by your woman, the mother of your children." I sense a tiny glimmer of hope reading this "The Bush administration has proposed to spend several hundred million dollars a year for five years on marriage, fatherhood and sexual-abstinence initiatives". The money for sexual abstinence initiatives will be wasted at best. Worse the initiatives might be combined making the marriage and fatherhood initiatives programs for idiots and hypocrites. Still the fact that the Bush administration is willing to address the real issues too is relatively promising.

_____________________________pointless paragraph edited out below_______________

A shred of evidence for the hypothesis that divorce causes sexaphobia is the fact that divorce is even more common in Republican than in Democratic states. For example from the same story "the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, in a state where the divorce rate was the second highest in the nation in 1994 and has continued to hover near the top, according to officials."
I have a firm guess about why that happens too. I suspect that conservatives are less willing to tolerate a bit of extramarital naughtiness so affairs are more likely to lead to divorce (note I live in Italy which has a very low divorce rate and a very high fooling around rate). It is also possible that traditional values make people marry too quickly to find out that they are wrong for each other. Anyway the pattern is clear. This means that say initiatives to make contraceptives more available might lead to later marriage less divorce and less panic about the family. A side benefit from an initiative which, for much of America, is a pipe dream.

Latest House Republican Horror as reported by MICHAEL JANOFSKY in the New York Times

Deep in the energy bill that was approved by a House committee this week, under a section titled "Miscellaneous," is a brief provision that could have major consequences for communities struggling to clean up their dirty air.

If it becomes law, it would make one of the most significant changes to the Clean Air Act in 15 years, allowing communities whose air pollution comes from hundreds of miles away to delay meeting national air quality standards until their offending neighbors clean up their own air.

This is the usual effort to make a huge change favorable to industry and to try to hide it. The author Representative Joe L. Barton, is not an expert at the game. He openly added the provision as an amendment in the committee he chairs. It passed by a party line vote. No Joe, that's not how it's done. You are supposed to add such provisions in the conference committee (members chosen by the leadership) then give members one day to read 1000 pages and find the key sentence in the part of the conference report that is so boring that no one can force himself to read it.

Because Barton is not as sneaky as he might be, the issue is out in the open on thefront page of www.nytimes.com. Opponents have managed to communicate to NYTimes readers why this is a terrible provision "They say Mr. Barton's provision could delay improvements by 10 years as one area waits for another, which waits for another - a prospect that Mr. Barton disputed."

Now a key reason Barton looks bad is that Janofsky knows how to make an argument then express it in pure "he says/she says" form. This is sortof like writing a play in verse. If you are good, you can move the plot along while following the Rhymn scheme and meter. Maybe Janofsky is a genius. Actually, in this case, genius is not required because Barton's provision is so indefensible that a spokesman for the Bush EPA attacked it .

John Millett, an E.P.A. spokesman, said the agency had taken no position on Mr. Barton's provision, but a high-ranking agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the agency, said "a real debate" was under way among agency officials about its potential effectiveness and its effect on the Clean Air Act.

Mr. Millett said: "Some people think it's a good idea. Most don't."

Now I can't help noting that the anonymous official seems to have coordinated so closely with Mr Millet that it is hard to believe that they are different people. I fear Mr Millett was careless about what to insist was off the record.

Bryan Brendle is being careless too "'We're clearly in support of any kind of flexibility,' said Bryan Brendle, an official with the manufacturers organization."
Anyone with a brain can translate that to "this bill is good for pollution which is good for our profits". Bryan, you are supposed to explain why this "flexibility" (read filthy air) is special so that this particular kind of "flexibility" is a good idea even if regulation of pollution is a good idea in general. I mean we all know that you support any kind of flexibility, but you are not supposed to say so. I would guess that Mr Brendle presented many arguments for this particular provision to MICHAEL JANOFSKY, but Janofsky can choose what to quote. That's why you need message discipline. You know you have to say the thing you want the reporter to quote again and again and not say anything else. It doesn't matter if the thing you say again and again isn't an answer to the reporter's question. I mean like how much is this guy paid ? More than I am I bet and I can do his job in my sleep.

Robert Brendle : "The issue is that it is unfair to punish communities because they are victims of upwind polluters. That's blaming the victim. The Clinton administration didn't do that. Congress has to address the issue because activist judges over ruled the Clinton administration's reasonable interpretation of the Clean air act"
Reporter: But Mr Brendle I asked you the time of day not why this is a good provision ? Why didn't you answer my question
Robert Brendle : "The issue is that it is unfair to punish communities because they are victims of upwind polluters. That's blaming the victim. The Clinton administration didn't do that. Congress has to address the issue because activist judges over ruled the Clinton administration's reasonable interpretation of the Clean air act"
Reporter: are you a human being or a parrot. Is that the only thing you know how to say ?
Robert Brendle : "The issue is that it is unfair to punish communities because they are victims of upwind polluters. That's blaming the victim. The Clinton administration didn't do that. Congress has to address the issue because activist judges over ruled the Clinton administration's reasonable interpretation of the Clean air act"
Reporter: Does yo mamma wear army boots. If you don't say no, I will assume the answer is yes.
Robert Brendle : "The issue is that it is unfair to punish communities because they are victims of upwind polluters. That's blaming the victim. The Clinton administration didn't do that. Congress has to address the issue because activist judges over ruled the Clinton administration's reasonable interpretation of the Clean air act"

I me how hard is that. Robert Brendle is being paid god knows what to stay on message and not answer reporters' and he must have answered a question.

Here the provision is a major attack on the clean air act. It reminds us that fighting the Republicans who control everything and have no shame is a constant struggle. However it also shows us that some journalists are willing to get the truth across even if they must use the he says/she says format and that at least one is able very very able.

Of course proving that Barton is in the pocket of lobbyists is like shooting fish in a barrel, or, more appropriately, shooting a wily pumpkin.

Does this post by Matthew Yglesias
remind you of the comment by Robert Waldmann to this post ?

I'm pathetic really. Not only is Yglesias about half my age, but Cutler is younger than I am.

Broken Record Time

Social Security Reform has fallen out of the news. I found no stories on the front pages of www.nytimes.com, www.washingtonpost.com, www.cnn.com or www.latimes.com .

This is not surprising, since the Republicans seem to have decided to let it die a quite death. The Democrats should not let them do that. The issue has been very costly for the Republicans, and for good reason.

I think the Democrats should propose saving social security by eliminating the ceiling on contributions. This proposal has the support of the majority of people asked in every poll. I think it would be excellent policy even if one can't trust the Republicans with the trust fund.

There is a new reason for proposing elimination of the celing -- to bring social security back into the news.

Of course denouncing the elimination of the estate tax because it will make it impossible for the general fund to pay its debts to social security is also excellent policy and politics.

out of date update: Max Sawicky notes that Republicans in the house might bring back the social security debate on their own. Best of all they will be furiously debating with the Republicans in the Senate.

Steve Clemons and TheWashingtonNote formatting alert

This is a blogosphere issue. I think Steve Clemons over at http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/ is very good and has a real chance of affecting the vote on John Bolton. However there are two problems at his site and I don't know how to contact him.

First check if it just my browser (netscape) but his page seems technically messed up (the text I see has no title and starts in the middle of a sentence). The archived version of the post is fine.

Update: Now the main page seems to be fine too. The problem lasted about 10 minutes.

Also I think that

"This is the time to get off the Chafee dime. He is miscalculating -- and there is nothing one can do with someone who is not rationally calculating interests in something like this and who seems to want to ignore empirical reality." really really really should be

"This is the time to get off the dime Senator Chafee. There is nothing one can do with someone like Bolton who is not rationally calculating interests in something like this and who seems to want to ignore empirical reality."

I'm not sure if the sentence in Clemons' post is a typo or what, but as it is written, my reading is that Clemons is saying that *Chafee* is miscalculating -- and there is nothing one can do with Chafee who is not rationally calculating interests in something like this and who seems to want to ignore empirical reality."

It is entirely possible that Clemons meant to write this. He does think that Chafee is miscalculating and *so far* Chafee is insisting on ignoring the facts about Bolton. The sentence follows sentences addressing other moderate Republican senators, so Clemons might very well have given up on Chafee and shifted to trying to convince another Republican on the committee. I think it would be a mistake to give up on Chafee. I would advise a rewrite and the false claim that it was a typo.

David Brooks and the Tooth Fairy

I seem to have a policy of commenting on Brooks' columns. I didn't actually manage to force myself to read the latest. I got as far as

But it is ridiculous to say he [John Bolton] doesn't believe in the United Nations. This is a canard spread by journalists who haven't bothered to read his stuff and by crafty politicians who aren't willing to say what the Bolton debate is really about.

Is Brooks suggesting that Bolton's critics claim that he doesn't believe in the UN in the same way that I don't believe in the tooth fairy ? That would be extreme although he did say "There is no United Nations." as Mr Brooks might have known if he had bothered to read the editorial published in the New York Times the day before his column. You know Mr Brooks, the editorials, those unsigned columns on the page facing the one where they publish yours.

Of course the view Brooks means to mock is the view that Bolton is opposed to the UN on principle and does not either wish to see it reformed or believe that it can be reformed. This view is plainly true. Bolton has clearly stated his opposition many times. When Brooks claims that this is a canard, he is simply lying.

Brooks could have claimed that Bolton has really changed his mind and is not just pretending to have done so to be confirmed. The dismissal of the view that he is opposed to the UN as such as "a canard spread by journalists who haven't bothered to read his stuff" is simply false. Many of the journalists covering the story have not read Bolton's stuff (I haven't either) but Brooks' clearly implies that no one who has read Bolton's stuff could believe it. He knows perfectly well that this is not true. I think that Brooks should be required to write a correction. I suppose it depends on your definition of "Canard" and "believe."

Now if Brooks had argued (as he might in the rest of the column) that Bolton has sincerely changed his mind, I would be unconvinced. There is no reason to consider anything Bolton said in his testimony to be sincere. The fact that Bolton claimed that he was misquoted (see the editorial again Mr Brooks) makes it clear that his testimony is dishonest. In fact, I personally think that the question now should not be if he should be sent to the UN but rather whether he should be sent to jail for perjury. The claims which should be examined by the Justice Department (fat chance of that) are "I in no sense sought to have any discipline imposed on him [Christian Westermann]." his claim that "Jack" Pritchard was unwilling to implement Bush administration policies. If, as claimed by Carl Ford and Pritchard, these sworn statements to the Senate foreign relations committee are lies rather more important than a lie about a blow job to lawyers representing a former receptionist for the Arkansas state development corporation.

Oh and speaking of the tooth fairy. He (or she) might not exist, but in spite of that disadvantage, I think that he (or she) would make a better UN ambassador than Bolton and a better columnist than David Brooks.

Must stop writing about that dumb editorial. Must ... resist .... Temptation..... Can't .... resist

A closer analogy is this. The US federal government has scheduled deficits of mind boggling present value. The Voyager program, which costs $ 4 million a year is very minor. Yet even eliminating this very minor component of the deficit is controversial and fairly politically difficult, being criticized in ....
The reason is that eliminating this tiny amount of spending in exchange for not getting unique scientific data on the boundry of the solar system (that is the area where the solar wind becomes weaker than the radiation of deep space) and then the first up close and personal look at deep space is totally totally dumb. Even little reforms can be poltically difficult when they are aweful ideas. The fact that the benefits are tiny may make it more politically difficult to do something, because people do not have infinite patience with total idiocy.

I am still dumping on this Washington Post editorial

Now I am irritated by
"But if there's a lesson to be learned from the tone and trajectory of the Social Security debate this year, it is how difficult, and how fraught with political peril, it is to fix even this "comparatively minor" problem."

I think this argument is quite common (sorry no other links but I'm sure I have read it elsewhere recently). The argument is that if a problem is comparatively minor it must be comparatively easy to solve. This is nonsense. The social security shortfall is comparatively minor, since its present value is tiny compared to the medicare shortfall and the general fund shortfall. It would be poltically hard to solve even if solving it were the real aim of Republicans because social security is, you know, the third rail of American politics (even so it would be easy to solve if Republicans were willing to raise rich people's taxes see below).

I can't help posting two analogies three times (blogger ate my post once and a circuit breaker interrupted power as it often does when I use this computer). If it doesn't work this time, small loss (save to disk).

First imagine this computer has two problems. First it is infested with spyware. Second the insulation on the power cable is defective and it is shorting out (see note above). I ask a computer guy for help with it (never happened so I am imagining). He says "This huge mass of spyware will take a while to remove, but it is the least of your problems. Your power cable is shorting out. It might burn your house down or kill you. Get a new power cable now". Would I say "If you can't even handle the relatively minor spyware problem, why should I pay attention to your warnings about power cables?" Well not if I'm not a total idiot (see note above).

Or how about I have a cold and undiagnosed syphillis. I go to a doctor who says "I can't cure a common cold, but that is the least of your problems. You have syphillis and have to take penicillin" Would I say that, since he can't even cure a comparatively minor cold, I don't want his penicillin ?

Now, I'm sure that no member of the Post editorial board has been in this situation, because they aren't such wimps as to go to a doctor with a cold, but they must understand that their assumption that "minor" means "easy to solve" is total nonsense.

The Washington Post has a dumb editorial
Megaditto Brad DeLong and commenters especially Kharris.

The Post

We've been finding ourselves with a similarly exasperated reaction to the folks who have been arguing that Social Security represents a minor, easily solved piece of the long-term budget problem: "If it's so easy, why don't you fix it?"

OK let's fix it by eliminating the ceiling on FICA. That would eliminate the social security shortfall for at least 75 years even according to the pessimistic forecasts of the SSA trustees. The elimination has the support of most Americans in poll after poll. Most Americans reject all other options including benefit cuts, general FICA increases and raising the retirement age. It is a no brainer. Rarely have politicians received such clear, reality based and feasible instructions from the public. It won't happen because it goes against Republican ideology and the interests of their campaign contributors. The Post editorial board must know all this. They pretend otherwise writing

Sadly, the Social Security debate so far has served chiefly to underline the difficulty, in a political environment dominated by dogma and short-term self-interest. For the most part, Republicans won't consider any Social Security reform that lacks personal accounts -- or any that includes tax increases. On their side, Democrats won't talk unless personal accounts are off-limits -- and they dare not indicate any willingness to accept cuts in benefits. This is irresponsible, on both sides.

Since personal accounts would add 1.1 trillion to the shortfall, taking them off the table is a first step towards a solution. Here, as in the case of the general budget, just saying no to the Republicans is a way to address the problems which they seem determined to worsen. Not just Democrats but most Americans reject cuts in benefits. There are various ways to address the social security and general revenue shortfalls. The rejection of one approach is not necessarily irresponsible if one is willing to accept another feasible approach as more than one are.

Like pundit's generally, and curiously consistently with their personal interests, the editorial board seems to think benefits should be cut as a matter of policy. This is often asserted but never argued. The extreme stinginess of planned benefits make it very difficult to ague that they are extravegant.

In this editorial however, their case that benefits should be cut, is that no compromise with the Republicans will be possible wihout benefit cuts. Nor will a compromise with benefit cuts be feasible, since the Republicans only addressed the issue, because they hoped to lure the voters with promises of easy riches and because they want to phase out social security. In any case, any party would be crazy to seek an unpopular compromise with their adversaries instead of asking the people to give them power to implement a very popular proposal. That's would not be bipartisanship, that would be undermining democratic choice from pure masochistic stupidity.

Political incorrectitude over at the SF cronicle. Jon Carroll invents a hilarious manifesto of "Unitarian Jihad". However, I think it improper to use the word Jihad which suggests that Moslems are more prone to wars of religion than Christians. It would have been more politicall correct to call the group Unitarian Jihad/Crusade/Revolution/Aliha/some Sanskrit word.

Update: I thank Dan Smith for telling me I had posted this twice and for tellling me the corrrect spellling of Sanskrit.

Update 2: I must strongly dissent from the view of the majority of the fundamentalism subcommittee of Unitarian Jihad.

"Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions (except Buddhism -- 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism subcommittee) made your head hurt."

This is unfair to Jains, Zoroastrians, Anamists, Satanists, Jedai (a major religion in Canada according to the Census), Wiccans and those guys who like to eat Peyote but claim it's a religion so they are protected by the first amendment.

p.s. Dan don't even bother trying to correct all the spelling errors in the preceding sentence.

Glorious Traditions in Florida

I really don't know who remembered the claim that the the sister of then senator Claude "Red" Pepper was a thespian, but the word has returned to Florida politics here

"Martinez: Well-intentioned but misguided?

Staffer No. 2: That's what you said about Sandy and Diane after they said Castor was an accomplished thespian in college."
(via Jeralyn via Kevin Drum). No word on whether a young hothead in Marinez' office claimed that Castor's brother (like Pepper's) is a practicing Homo sapiens.

Castor for Chairperson of the House Rules Committee.

To be serious, I'd guess that the quote attributed to "Sandy and Diane" was invented by the comedic genius at the Miami Herald ... no not Dave Barry, the other on, Jim Defede who is just about as funny as Dave Barry (and I never expected to type that)

Spellings of "Spellings"

like the snow calling the sand white (pc version of pot calling the kettle black)
I note two typos in the New York Times article on Margaret Spellings

"Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings [snip]
Ms. Spellings's speech, [snip] Ms. Spelling, [snip] Ms. Spellings' remarks"

"Ms Spelling" is a misspelling. I have no firm opinion on which of "Spellings's" and "Spellings'" is a typo.

By the way, isn't Spellings an interesting name for a secretary of education. Will we be hearing about secretary of energy Joules BTU and a Minister of defence called Militaru ?

60% of American Catholics think women should be ordained as priests
and (concidentally)
60% of American Catholics think that priests should be allowed to marry.

according to an ap-ipsos poll reported at pollinggreort.com.

One very odd thing is that, overall only 69% of Americans (in a 22% catholic sample) think that priests should be allowed to marry. IIRC the catholic church is the only one which requires priests to be celibate (I think the Orthodox churches require bishops to be celibate).

There is an extreme case of the general pattern in polls that results for catholics and non catholics are virtually identical on the issues where Catholic teaching is very clear but controversial. Why would non Catholics think that priests should be celibate ?

VAT
Suddenly a lot of people are interested in value added tax. I don't mean George Will who wants to replace the income tax with a value added tax. I mean the people who want to add a value added tax to the current tax system and the ones who disagree. They are diverse even if you only count the ones who are old enough to drink inlcuding Ezra Klein, Bruce Bartlett,
Matthew Yglesias and, sort of, Brad DeLong arguing pro and Kevin Drum and Atrios arguing con.

I can't help joining in. Well I think a reasonable ranking is income taxes good, VAT not so good, payroll taxes bad,Thatcher-Magaziner same tax for all aweful.

So my proposal would be to replace FICA with VAT. This would be a way of prefunding social security and medicare for the boomers (the second of these two is actually needed) funding universal health insurance, eliminating the deficit and all sorts of wonderful things. The incentinve effects of VAT are less bad than those of a payroll tax. Also VAT is, at least, not regressive.

The incentive effects differ in two ways. First payroll taxes reward the substitution of capital for labor. This is not a good policy for a country which has had very poor employment growth for 4 years now and which refuses to save enough to finance its investment. Second, VAT is a tax both on real value added and on the Value added deflator which increases in the price a firm charges. Thus, relative to payroll taxes, VAT punishes firms for raising prices. This means it causes imperfectly competative firms to act more like competative firms with efficiency benefits.


A problem with VAT is that setting up a system is very costly (as noted by Atrios). Every waiter in Italy knows the difference between a ricevuta and a fattura. the value of a fattura can be subtracted from value added so if you are on an expence account you have to ask for a fattura. I personally have never had the experience. Basically this means that it is not worth introducing a small VAT.

Also a really high VAT would be evaded.

The progressivity of the tax code can be maintained with the income tax code especially the earned income tax credit. Oh and VAT is a way of cheating on GATT (not WTO). VAT is charged on imports and forgiven on exports. The fact that the USA has 0 VAT and (depending on the state) low to zero sales tax is roughly as if everyone else had tariffs 10 to 20% higher than ours. This dwarfs open tariffs.

The only fatal problem is that any policy reform will be hijacked and turned into something aweful by the Republicans. So for the time being, decent people have to just say no.

Update: Max Sawicky is not enthusiastic about a VAT mainly because of the administrative costs. They are heavy and are especially huge while people suddenly obliged to pay VAT are trying to figure out what it is. I low VAT would imply huge costs per dollar of revenue.

PGL at angry bear is not enthusiastic at all.

Kevin Drum is a bit bothered by public flags flying half mast for John Paul II.

I work for a The Università di Roma "Tor Vergata" a public entity in Italy. On my way to work, I took a detour because one of the roads on the campus was partly closed for some reason related to tents housing young people who have come to the funeral in fairly near by Rome. This follows the huge immense millenium celebration on our campus and Popestock the relatively small free rock concert featuring John Paul II and Bono Vox.

Actually I don't mind at all. Partly that's because the funeral appears to be causing a situation in Rome (which I am not about to personally witness) somewhere in between a major traffic jam and a minor humanitarian crisis.

Update: there is a public holiday in Rome for the Pope's funeral. In fact my public University in the suburbs is closed too. No separation of Church and State here.

Comment on “Comment on ‘Asset Returns and Economic Growth ‘ by Baker, Delong and Krugman by N.Gregory Mankiw” by Robert Waldmann

Mankiw’s comment is well written and is the right length. No surprise at all given the commenter. It is also very polite and quite favorable by the standards of Brookings Panel comments. I very much liked one point “The natural response to this theoretical ambiguity is to muster evidence, either from timeseries data or from the international cross-section, about the actual effect of population growth.” [footnote: I would add that, in the impossible case that economic theory were not ambiguous, it would still be necessary to look at the data to see if the theory corresponds to reality. When I say “impossible“ I do mean to say that the core assumptions of economic theory can not possibly have either testable predictions or policy implications so the implications of economic theory always depend on particular assumptions which no one finds plausible.]

Mankiw’s particular points are much less interesting largely because they do not, in general, amount to criticisms. It is difficult to write an interesting comment on a paper which makes a point which is obvious, but which policy makers have chosen to deny.

Mankiw’s first semi-criticism is that Baker Delong and Krugman (BDK) start with the Gordon formula which calculates returns from the dividend yield and the growth rate of dividends by assuming that they are constant. This approach has been criticized by people who claim that dividend payout policies might change. Mankiw notes that this criticism of the BDK argument is clearly invalid, since it is made without rejecting the assumptions of the Modligliani Miller model in which payout policy does not matter at all to investors. Oddly, he presents this as a mild criticism of BDK, because, he seems to say, according to Modigliani and Miller, dividends to not matter. If so, papers which purport to demonstrate that the stock market isn’t efficient by analysing stock prices and dividends would be totally silly and proof that their authors do not understand basic finance. Obviously, Mankiw does not really mean to say that dividends do not matter but rather that different streams of dividends consistent with the same stream of operating profits give the same returns to investors who buy optimal portfolios of debt and equity. In the end he concludes that the analysis is convincing, since BDK perform exactly the calculation which he proposes.

Mankiw then considers the open economy analysis in BDK. Here I must say that I am totally puzzled both by Makiw’s analysis. BDK argue that if profits earned by US based corporations are to grow much faster than profits earned in the US, US based corporations will have to invest much more abroad than foreigners invest in the US. They note that there is no sign of this happening and it is extremely implausible that it would happen on the massive scale required. They implicitly assume that investment by different agents earn roughly similar returns.

Mankiw argues that even if investment flows balance, US firms might earn more and more profits abroad if foreigners invest more and more in the US. In the simplest possible standard model rational investment and efficient financial markets would imply that all investments pay the same expected returns, so the difference between profits earned in the US and profits earned by US based firms would not be affected. Mankiw must be thinking of some other model. I can think of two.

First possible foreigners are irrational so they invest in the US where returns are low rather than in other countries where the returns are high. Thus US firms and their shareholders could benefit by exploiting the errors of foreigners. I am sure that this is not what Mankiw has in mind.

Second, US firms might have access to superior technology, organisation or managerial human capital than is available abroad. This would mean that they earn higher returns than foreign based firms (whether the profits are earned in the US or abroad). The word available is important. It is not enough that some foreign firms be inefficient. This must be what Mankiw has in mind.

In particular he, and Baker, consider the possibility that US based firms will invest directly abroad and that foreigners will buy their shares financing this investment. This is supposed to imply higher returns to current shareholders than would otherwise be possible. This is very odd. In the simplest model of the firm, all investors including new investors earn the marginal product of capital leaving nothing left for others. In less simple models entrenched managers somehow divert cash to themselves. I know of no model in which current shareholders gain some of the marginal product of new investment at the expence of the new investors who finance it.

Of course I can think of one. Current shareholders elect xenophobic managers and change the rules so they can not be removed. The xenophobes offer discounts on goods sold in the US to shareholders. This benefits US based shareholders but not foreign investors. Or maybe the xenophobes can predict exchange rate fluctuations and time dividends for periods in which the dollar is undervalued. I think these are about the most plausible such models and note that, when I said it was always possible to come up with a model to make any prediction, I didn’t say that all such models pass the laugh test.

I will assume that all shareholders of a firm must earn the same returns. If so, even if a firm can earn supernormal returns, selling shares to new investors who would otherwise have to accept a lower return current shareholders will not benefit. The assumption implies that the returns to technology will be shared proportionally to share ownership, so the part corresponding to investment financed by foreigners will go to the foreigners. Now consider if the firm does not issue new shares and foreigners buy from current investors. Imagine two steps. First the firm sells new shares to foreigners and invests overseas. So far no gain to current investors. Second the firm buys back shares from US based investors. Mankiw assuumes that share buybacks are essentially equivalent to increased dividends and according to Modigliani, Miller and Mankiw can make only a small difference to current shareholders.

Another way to look at it is that the problem according to BDK is that, given a low GDP growth rate, the capital ratio in the US will increase implying lower returns on capital. For this to cease to be true in an open economy it is necessary for the US private sector to run a capital account deficit (current account surplus) to get rid of the capital. Otherwise one would have to assume that firms are investing in the US earning a low return and abroad eaning a high return. That is US firms would have to be irrational (and Mankiw is certainly not assuming that).

This brings us to the growth models which BDK use to argue that slow growth implies an increase in the ratio of capital to effective labor (labor corrected for labor augmenting technological progress). In the Ramsey Cass Koopmans model, the standard but extreme assumption of perfect intergenerational altruism implies that dencreased population growth causes saving to dencrease enough to keep the capital labor ration the same as it would have been. BDK note that anything less than perfect altruism implies that, in this model as in others, decreased population growth implies a higher steady state capital labor ratio and a lower return on capital. Mankiw does not argue that perfect altruism is plausible. Rather he considers the fact that an extreme assumption implies zero effect while all others imply the same sign means that the effect is ambiguous. I certainly agree with him that this is an emprical question which should be addressed with data, but that is more because, like BDK, I don’t trust the models than because I consider a limiting case of zero to mean that the theory is ambiguous.

Mankiw’s case would be much stronger if he presented an example in which decreased population growth implies an increased return on capital. This is always possible, but I find this difficult. If people in the US cared more about those who will live in the USA in 2500 than about themselves (including all of the offspring of imigrants) then there were be more than perfect intergenerational altruism so the effect of population growth on saving would outweigh the effect on labor supply. Aside from that, right now I can only think of models in which for the same capital stock, the marginal product of capital is lower if the population is higher. This can happen if there is another key factor of producion in limited supply (land say or maybe energy) and increased population reduces the supply for firms (that is increases the rent they must pay on unimproved land or the price of energy). It is really hard to make such a model consistent with a stable return to capital, and, of course, impossible to reconcile it with available data. These models don’t pass the rotflmao test.

Mankiw is not at all thrilled by the BDK model of the equity premium. Neither, for that matter, are BDK. They describe it as “the simplest crudest and most extremely ad-hoc model of the equity premium.” I skipped that section of the paper. I just read it and I have to say that I agree with BDK and Mankiw. I think it is included because the paper is a not so veiled critique of Bush’s secret welfare reform plan and the plan can be defended by claiming that the equity premium is not justified by risk. BDK mainly note that, if they believed the equity premium is overlarge and likely to remain so, they would advocate having the social security administration invest directly, as proposed by Clinton and Reagan.

Finally Mankiw argues that he supports personal accounts for reasons other than estimates of the return on investment including personal accounts Here I agre, that is, I oppose personal accounts and would even if share prices dropped so much that the return on equity became very high. In that case I would go with Clinton and Reagan. Brad DeLong, however, disagrees.

I agree with the Washington Post Editorial Board

Conflict of interest notice: My father's income was reduced significantly by the ethics rules criticized by the editorial.

I'm a twit notice: I am mainly thrilled that something which has to do with my very onw dad's finances is getting so much attention.