Cox Crow

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

Or, what goes up, must come down. Oh, look! It went back up again!

The newspaper says there’s a problem, but is there really?

via Tom Palmer, David Cay Johnston wonders the same thing. In a letter to his fellow journalists, he writes,

In covering the proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street don’t repeat the failed lapdog practices that so damaged our reputations in the rush to war in Iraq and the adoption of the Patriot Act. Don’t assume that Congress must act instantly, as so many news stories state as if it was an immutable fact. Don’t assume there is a case just because officials say there is.

There’s a woodpecker knocking on my house.

The
excerpts from, and an interview with the author of, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency are disturbing, and reinforce what we already suspected.

In what I hope is not a quixotic exercise, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has brought suit, Jewel v. National Security Agency, et al.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies today [September 18, 2008] on behalf of AT&T customers to stop the illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records. The five individual plaintiffs are also suing President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington, former Attorney General and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and other individuals who ordered or participated in the warrantless domestic surveillance.

(some observations, which I’ll hopefully clean up and form into a coherent post)

Some say the financial crisis is a market failure, fixable by regulation; others, that it’s a regulatory failure, fixable by the market. In any case, someone took a risk, and lost. Once bitten, twice shy? Not if the losers don’t feel their losses. Again, their risk is passed on to me. Why should I accept that when I do not profit from it?

It’s very difficult for politicians to do nothing and let the disease run its course. So they give Typhoid Fannie drugs which cover up the symptoms, and allow her to infect the rest of the population, when quarantine or execution would be better for the public health.

At times like these, you would think that the politicians, of all stripes, would also stop planning to spend more on entitlement programs whose costs can’t be controlled. But it’s very difficult for a politician to get elected without promising the voters 40 acres and a mule (and his friends, perks). And there will be no cost at all to this. We can do it all without raising taxes. We can lower taxes without cutting services. And who will pay for this, I ask?

Our mortgage is half of my net pay. Our other expenses consume the remainder. Because I’m paid twice a month, and bills come due throughout the month, we bridge the gap with credit. This works as long as our expenditures on credit do not exceed my earnings. Others do the same, but on a larger scale.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/business/18insure.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

If they do, then we take funds from our savings; we borrow against our future. I think the questions we all need to ask ourselves now are these: Are my sources of credit sufficiently diverse? Is there such a thing as sufficiently diverse in the current circumstances? Assuming that I remain employed, can we live on cash?

For what it’s worth, historical data maintained by the FDIC shows that during the Great Contraction, many fewer banks failed than did during the Savings and Loan Debacle of the 1980s. I’m sure that’s reassuring.

http://www2.fdic.gov/hsob/SelectRpt.asp?EntryTyp=30

I tend to agree with Greg Mankiw — more generally with Arthur Pigou — on his recommendation to increase certain taxes in order to cover the external costs that those products feed. However, there’s a flawed assumption in the analysis. Mr. Mankiw states,

[Pigovian taxes] raise revenue that the government can use to reduce other taxes, such as income taxes, which distort incentives and cause deadweight losses.

And then later,

The economists in the Treasury department are fully capable of designing a package of tax hikes and tax cuts that together internalize externalities and leave the overall distribution of the tax burden approximately unchanged.

I’m certain they are, too. Unfortunately, I’m also certain that the practical experience of government shows that taxes tend to go up, and that a new stream of revenue rarely leads to reductions in other taxes. Instead, it leads to the government spending, or redistributing if you prefer, the additional revenue.

So while I would prefer increased gasoline taxes and lowered income taxes, the chances of such are approximately equal to the likelihood of a snowball’s survival in Hell.

Or as Mr. Mankiw puts it,

I am eager for this tax only if the revenue is to be used to reduce other taxes, either contemporaneously or in the future.

Watching the Presidential caucus race is, for me at least, akin to watching baseball. It helps to look at it as a team sport, with a rivalry as deep-seated as that between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. There are fans of both teams who will never, under any circumstances, consider rooting for the other, and for reasons just as logical: They are, after all, the Red Sox.

So while some of the events of this week in politics, as in every week, are just plain dumb, they do serve to get the fans riled up.

For one of her classes last year, D. wrote a paper which analyzes an effect of the self-absorption of the media, in response to one of the unfounded assertions in the class’s text, that the rise of the Internet and “thousands” of cable channels had fragmented society. She asked, “Do Our Unlimited Choices Limit Our Shared Experiences?” Her expectation was that the text would be correct. It wasn’t. We’ve been led to believe that everybody watched the popular shows, and really only a small fraction of the population did.

I find this topic fascinating, and eagerly assisted with research and editing. My experience of “pop culture” was somewhat isolated, by choice and by my parents, so I felt out of place in the Big World at college. I wonder how many people there were familiar with all of the things they’d said they were, and how many were poseurs.

(Meanwhile, I’m seriously considering stopping our DirecTV subscription and removing the television, but do not yet have the support of other members of the household. Maybe we can compromise and keep Netflix.)

Ancient Rome gave away bread. We give away television.

• % of television-watching population which receives their television signal over-the-air, and will be affected by this cutover: 16.2
• % of population which receives their signal from cable, and thus unaffected: 57
• % of population which receives their signal from satellite, and thus unaffected: 23.8
• % of population which doesn’t own a television, and really couldn’t care less: 3
• Fraction of population wondering why he’s paying for a converter box for someone who doesn’t want to buy a new television: 1/305,108,936

Sources:
• OECD Communications Outlook 2007, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
• “U.S. and World population clock,” U.S. Census Bureau
• “HH-1, Households, by Type: 1940 to Present (2007),” U.S. Census Bureau
• Bullshit, a/k/a The Digital TV Transition: What You Need to Know About Digital Television,” Federal Communications Commission

• Show search results from my history first, not from the web.
• So, how do bookmarklets work now?
• Default to restoring open tabs.
• Where’s that “Open in [other browser]” menu item to work around broken web sites? Guess I’ll have to cut-and-paste.
• Hey, at least the keyboard shortcuts are the same.
• The way the on-page find feature works is neat.
• I like the 404 page.
• Memory usage is not reduced. I went from using 1.2 GB RAM under normal conditions to 1.8 GB.

In this political season, it’s helpful to remember that it’s all about popular.

… think of
Celebrated heads of state,
Or specially great communicators!
Did they have brains or knowledge?
Don’t make me laugh!

They were POPULAR!
Please!
It’s all about popular.
It’s not about aptitude,
It’s the way you’re viewed,
So it’s very shrewd to be,
Very very popular
like ME!

“Popular,” Wicked: The Musical

Today I learned that my daughter’s 3rd grade class takes their clipboards to the school garden, and then writes something about what they observe. On Friday, they wrote one of each type of sentence. The Big Sister showed us where her teacher posts what the class writes. I expected that they would all be simple sentences, like “The sky is blue.” She wrote,

A flower fell on me while I was sitting under a tree.

I am a proud father.

I read in The Poughkeepsie Journal the other day that Dutchess County is considering widening 1.8 miles of Noxon Road, and that the project requires Federal approval because they’re providing 80% of the funds for it.

The United States Federal Highway Administration is providing 80 percent of the estimated $3 million to $4 million cost. The state Department of Transportation could provide as much as 15 percent, leaving the county with 5 percent of the cost.

I haven’t driven that stretch of road recently, but I’m generally in favor of addressing safety concerns by lowering and enforcing speed limits rather than improving a raceway.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that the Federal Highway Trust Fund is short a few dollars.

An important account in the federal Highway Trust Fund will run out of money this month, a situation that could hamper completion of road and bridge construction projects across the country, Transportation Secretary Mary E. Peters said on Friday.

….

The fund is financed by federal excise taxes on motor fuel, 18.4 cents a gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents a gallon on diesel. But the fund’s highway account is being rapidly depleted because for months Americans have been reacting to the high price of gasoline by driving less, Ms. Peters said. In May, for instance, vehicle-miles were down 3.7 percent from a year earlier. [emphasis and links mine]

I suppose the governments will need to find another source of revenue in order to continue redistributing the spoils. Or maybe they’ll be a little less generous, and a little more selective, in providing funds for internal improvements. Certainly, without the funds for it, local governments would be less inclined to spend money on projects without an obvious or immediate return.

Every now and again I would appreciate a comment on here that’s not spam.

The speakers at the Republican convention are harping on exploiting domestic energy sources in order to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of oil.

Because, after all, Canada is an unreliable trading partner.

And the world market never, ever, impacts the prices of domestic goods.