Newmark's Door

"Who Killed Obamacare?"

Assuming that a major health care bill doesn't pass this year, the usual suspects--you know who they are--will try to pin the failure on "Republican obstructionism". (It's already started.) But that, not to put too fine a point on it, is baloney.

At the beginning of his presidency, Obama famously enjoyed a "surplus" of trust. Shortly after his inauguration, however, significant shortfalls began appearing between his rhetoric and his behavior. Having promised that his reforms would not force Americans to give up insurance plans they liked, the President signed off on a congressional proposal to kick millions of seniors off Medicare Advantage (MA). He then reversed his position on the individual mandate, suddenly endorsing a bad idea he had rejected during the 2008 presidential campaign. Next came his brazen flip-flop on the "Cadillac tax." Despite running a series of campaign ads denouncing John McCain for a similar proposal, Obama made it clear that he favored taxing "high-value" health benefits.

These broken pledges added to the trust deficit, but they didn't bust the budget. Complex issues like MA funding and the individual insurance mandate are susceptible to nuanced rationalizations. Even the Cadillac tax can be justified, with some plausibility, by sophisticated advocates. A much larger problem than any of these policy pirouettes was Obama's failure to honor, or even acknowledge, his C-SPAN promise. Obama's pledge to negotiate the details of health care reform in front of Brian Lamb's television cameras could not be finessed. In one of the more delicious ironies of the reform debate, the voters spent the holiday season watching innumerable YouTube videos of Obama making his C-SPAN promise while they noted with increasing dudgeon the conspicuous absence of similar footage of the actual negotiations

A differernt but complementary view, by the Associated Press(!): "Analysis: Dems' missteps led to health breakdown".

Three excellent econoblogger posts

Econobloggers continue to up their game.

William Easterly explains how many advocates of more foreign aid try to skip past the pervasiveness of scarcity via three strategies:  "there really is no scarcity," "our project doesn't use any scarce resources," and "my cause is actually the same as your cause".  A wonderful, concise post.

Mike Munger hammers young Ezra Klein of the Washington Post for not knowing about a little literature called Public Choice. (Mike, being a nice guy, declines a golden opportunity to smack Klein further: when James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize, the reaction of many in the mainstream media was "Yawn. We already knew that!" And no, Klein doesn't deserve a pass for being ignorant of this because he was just getting out of diapers when Buchanan won.)

And Arnold Kling beautifully dismisses "The Progressive Tantrum":

Everyone agrees that the Republicans are just throwing sand in the gears of good government and not offering any ideas. What that means is that they are not offering ideas to enlarge government. Congressman Paul Ryan's ideas do not count, because those would cut back on government, particularly Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. . . .

The important point is that Progressives are never wrong. Top-down reform is the only way to fix the health care system. Anthropogenic global warming is scientifically proven, and its solution requires strenuous exercise of political control over individual behavior. Deficit spending is necessary and sufficient to create jobs. Technocrats can make banks too regulated to fail. Markets without technocratic control are like adolescents without adult supervision. Individual happiness can be improved by political authorities using scientific knowledge. Concentrated political power is the wave of the future, and it is good.

I am not a populist. I fear the mob. But how can I fear the Progressives any less?

The fiscal situation of the U.S. government seems bad, maybe even dire

So how'd we get here? Two answers:

Keith Hennessey, "Ten years ago? Seriously?"

Gene Steuerle, "The U.S. is Broke. Here's Why".

"L.A. City Council decides against ending guaranteed funding for the arts"

The article--and the picture which accompanies it--tells you something about 1) why California is in fiscal trouble and 2) why California is a unique place.

The Los Angeles City Council decided Wednesday not to cut off the main funding source for the Department of Cultural Affairs, a 1% tax on hotel charges that has fed municipal spending on the arts since 1989.

As they tried to cope with a projected two-year budget deficit of nearly $700 million, council members also showed no inclination to back another proposal decried by arts supporters: eliminating the $4-million-a-year arts grant program starting in the 2010-11 budget year.

One of the downsides of criticizing bankers

"The Super-Rich Are Turning on Obama Too".

"Here, they torture you first"

One of my favorite examples of the cost of interfering with the market is rent control. And while I've been collecting rent control stories my whole career, William Tucker's great new piece, "Taxpayers, Meet Your Tenants," has two gems I hadn't seen before:

Deprived of any chance of evicting tenants, the only thing the landlord can do is reduce services. So another layer of law is necessary saying that if landlords don't provide heat or make repairs, the tenant doesn't have to pay rent. Now the tenant has an interest in seeing things fall apart. One of the most common confrontations involved a rent-controlled tenant refusing admission to the repairman sent to fix the leaky sink. In the end, the tenant can just create his own violations -- a missing smoke alarm, graffiti in the halls. "Paying rent in New York is really optional," one landlord after another told me. "It's lucky more people don't know the law."

The stories from this netherworld sometimes sounded like chronicles from the Spanish Inquisition. One Chinese woman, whose property-owning family had been murdered by the Communists, had been running an apartment house in Harlem. After one tenant refused to pay rent for two years, she finally got an order of eviction. The tenant responded by firebombing her office. She took him to criminal court. The judge looked at the case and said, "This isn't a criminal case, it's a housing matter." Back they went to housing court. The housing judge overturned the eviction. For firebombing her office, the tenant got to keep his apartment. "I think I'm going back to China," she told me. "Over there they just kill you and get it over with. Here they torture you first." 

The blue states can see their future

"N.J. Gov. Christie, lawmakers propose sweeping pension, health care changes for public employees".

"1 Trillion Obama Will Never See"

Heh.

Guaranteed future headline: "Obama administration surprised at lower than expected revenues from taxes on the wealthy."

They never learn, do they?
 

Better than "A Bridge Over Troubled Water"

Stock market and the economy got you down? Politics? Life?

When you're weary
Feeling small
When tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all

Well, actually, I can't. But you could take a moment to look at the result of some time, some beer, and a lot of magnets: ladies and gentlemen, the Obamarator.

Feel better?

Ms. Kerry got skillz.

"Where Toyota Went Wrong"

Illustrates the maxim that getting to the top is easy compared to staying there.

"MBA Job Outlook Improving"

The headline is a bit more optimistic than the article, but there's, possibly, some good news for MBA job-seekers:

On the full-time job front, career services officers say they are encouraged by small signs of progress. Michelle Antonio, director of MBA career management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School (Wharton Full-Time MBA Profile), says she has seen double-digit growth in off-campus job postings on the school's job board, despite a slight decline in the number of employers that came to campus this fall. Another encouraging sign? More second-year students appear to have accepted full-time job offers now than last year at this time; of those, many have come from on-campus recruiting opportunities, she notes.

"I think it definitely looks and feels healthier than it did last year," she says. "I'm cautiously optimistic that come spring, things will look better than they did last year."

It's Super Bowl Sunday . . .

. . . and that means the E-Trade babies will be back. Here's some behind-the-scenes info on this year's ads. And here, again, are the two best of the previous ads: Golf Baby and Singing Baby.

Author of such classic lines as . . .

. . . "Nobody ever goes there anymore because it's too crowded" and "It ain't over 'til it's over", Yogi Berra is 84 and going strong.

(George Blanda, 82, is also doing well.)

"Some silken moment goes on forever . . ."

The late Michael Hutchense and INXS, live at Wembley.

"11 Things You Didn't Know About Pinball History"

The first thing is "Pinball was banned from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s in most of America's big cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago . . ."

It's probably almost as difficult to find a decent pinball machine these days. But if you want, you can play, sorta, pinball on your PC.

"The World's 101 Most Expensive Speakers"

From $100,000/pair.

No, thanks. I'll buy a house or two, instead.

Link via Philip Greenspun.

"How To Decode Your Car's VIN"

Guaranteed, as much information as you'll ever want about your VIN.

Nostalgic for Windows 3.1?

Let Michael V. take you back. Well done.

Take that, engineers!

"Talented and dedicated engineers spent countless hours designing Japan’s rail system to be one of the world’s most efficient. Could have just asked a slime mold."

Learning languages, two types, on the Web or PC

"Colleges, Universities and Websites Offering Free Computer Programming Education Online". I can't vouch for any of them, but there are some top-notch universities on the list.

"The Web Way to Learn a [Spoken] Language". (New York Times, 1/27.)

Some people just can't stand prosperity

Hard on the heels of Food Nazis, who complain about what we eat and how much we eat, we'll soon see Net Nazis, who complain about how the Net is making life so much worse.

Let's see, so the digital revolution led us all to this: a gigantic, commercial, high school reunion/mall filthy with insipid tabloid trivia, populated by perpetually distracted, texting, tweeting demi-humans. Yes, the information age truly is every bit as glorious and special as everyone predicted it would be!

My advice: go live in the woods or on a desert island or the North Pole. The Net is one of the most empowering devices humans have ever created. We are only just beginning to reap its enormous potential benefits.

NOW he tells us

After years acting as one of the chief pimps for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Rep. Barney Frank now informs us that we shouldn't be ". . . pushing low income people into owning homes that they can't afford."

Sigh. I suppose learning late is better than never learning at all, but . . .

"Tough Love"

Review of a book, Crazy Like a Fox, by Ben Chavis about running a charter school that was "the worst-performing middle school in Oakland".

Within seven years, it was the fourth-highest ranking middle school in the entire state of California. The other top-scoring schools are overwhelmingly wealthy and white; Chavis’s former students at AIPCS (he recently retired as principal) are low-income and mostly black, Hispanic, or American Indian. . . .

Crazy Like a Fox also describes the pedagogical choices that Chavis made to achieve his school’s stellar results: longer hours, more intense focus on English and mathematics, insistence on completed homework, and having a single teacher paired with each class of students through their entire three-year stay at the middle school, teaching every class except physical education. Given his students’ academic success, it’s hard to argue with the merits of these arrangements.

YAJR

Yet Another Journal Ranking: eigenfactor.org. Many subjects.

"The President’s Tax Hike on Drilling"

Roy Cordato argues that the administration's touted cut of "subsidies" for fossil fuels--eliminating the expensing of "intangible drilling costs"--is a tax increase, an increase that will discourage investment. (I'd bet that when the price of gas goes up, the administration will blame greedy oil companies.)

Will the iPad kill the Kindle?

"Of course not."

See alsol "iPad vs. A Rock".

Economics, hit below the belt

I'm used to people sneering at economics. I'm used to people criticizing economics. But a Guardian columnist claims that economics has standards for evidence that are far below the standards of global warming research.

Orthodox economics is based on simplifications that so distort the real world as to make it unrecognisable, yet its basic tenets are credulously repeated on an almost daily basis in national newspapers and on television news. A genuinely evidence-based approach to economic policymaking would not produce a system remotely like the one we have, the business-as-usual version that many climate sceptics seem so eager to defend. Given its task, the vast range of subjects covered, the thousands of scientists involved, and the sheer size of its reports, what's stunning about the IPCC's work is that comparing it to any economic analysis used to actually run the world is like comparing the complete Oxford English Dictionary to a guide to slang published by the Sunday Sport. 

That's really a low blow. Mandatory two-point deduction. Your next foul, sir, you will have to forfeit the fight.

GIGO

For my younger readers, GIGO is an acronym for something that has been true in the past, is true now, and will be true forever: "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Case in point: NOAA and NASA temperature data.

There was a major station dropout — and an increase in missing data from remaining stations — which occurred suddenly around 1990. Just about the time the global warming issue was being elevated to importance in political and environmental circles.

A clear bias was found towards removing higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations — the cooler stations — during this culling process, though that data was not also removed from the base periods from which “averages,” and then anomalies, were computed.