February 2009 Archives

In his response to President Obama's speech to Congress, Republican hopeful Gov. Bobby Jindal attacked volcano monitoring.

Good to see the Republican War on Science continues.

Nate Silver explains how volcano monitoring has saved tens of thousands of lives--including members and dependents of our armed forces.

Must GOP talking points be this lame?

Yes, it is good to be a Washington Capitals fan -- after all of the years in the wilderness, these moments are a part of the reward.

Alex Ovechkin added to his legend tonight with this goal against Montreal.

Health Access' Anthony Wright provides a pitch-perfect description of the California budget negotiations as everyone scrambles to find one more Republican vote in the Senate to reach the insane two-thirds vote threshold required to pass a budget:

In this hostage situation, the ransom for a budget has already been high: $15 billion in cuts, a spending cap that would force cuts into the future, corporate tax giveaways to further take resources from health and education, undoing voter-approved funds for children's services and mental health services, and changes to labor and environmental rules. A budget deal that includes all these elements is no victory. It's defeat.

The consequences for health and human services of no budget deal are significant, but so are the consequences of a deal. The difference is that the the budget deal is a negotiated terms of surrender, rather than allowing the carnage of continued war.

Indeed.

George Will's decision to repeat in his column the lie that scientists largely believed in global cooling in the 1970s should have consequences.

TPM Muckraker is trying to get Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt to explain how a column could be printed with two false statistics at its core. Nate Silver does his regular outstanding job of showing, with charts and graphs, how the 1970s "global cooling" talking point is a huge lie.

As Ezra Klein notes, we should look forward to reading an appended correction: "This column was wrong about the scientific consensus of the 1970s and wrong about the only climate fact in the article. The Washington Post regrets the errors."

I doubt Hiatt or Will shall be held accountable. But now everyone should have all the information required to prove false this oft-repeated radical conservative talking point.

And I am so happy that my local respected business coalition decided to have Mr. Will be the keynote speaker last month at its most important function of the year. Sigh.

The Big Picture's John Mauldin posts the recent The Liscio Report, a tracker of tax revenues for the 50 states.

The report contains scary data point after scary data point, leading to frightening chart after frightening chart.

The U.S. consumer is out of business, and that has huge impacts on the U.S. and world economies.

Mark C. Chu-Carroll explains why a widely-circulated chart purporting to show how much value financial firms have lost over the past year is just flat-out misleading.

So what's wrong with it?

Look at the Citigroup circle. In 2007, the total market cap of Citigroup was around $255 billion. Today, it's down to about $19 billion. That's a pretty damned dramatic loss, right? Citigroup is worth less that one tenth of what it was worth just two years ago.

But if you look at that chart, the circles show it as as being worth less that one one hundredth.

See, the idiot who drew the chart apparently doesn't understand the idea that the area of a circle is quadratic. He drew the circles so that the diameter of the circles is proportional to the value - not the area. So if you take a really narrow slice down the center of the circle - so that you wind up with a bar chart - that's the real relationship. But no one who looks at this chart is going to interpret it that way. Because in a chart like this, it's obvious that you're supposed to compare the areas. If they wanted to use a bar chart, they would have used a bar chart, right?

Compare that figure to this bar chart - which correctly represents the values by bars. Pretty dramatic difference, huh? Citigroup still looks piss poor - but they don't look anything like what they did in the original figure.

This appears to be one of the more bizarre policy implications of the current California state budget debate. Health Access' Anthony Wright explains here:

It's stunning that any Republican legislators find it appropriate to demand corporate tax giveaways in the budget, yet somehow mock separate policy bills to ensure children have health coverage--not to mention a bill that would bring in California millions in new federal funds.

Priorities, you know.

In a discussion of why the recent federal economic stimulus bill did not include more money for desperately needed mass transit, Ezra Klein reminds us that absurd policy arguments are not reserved for Sacramento:

At a time when we desperately need to stimulate the economy and desperately need to transform our transportation sector to avert catastrophic climate change, the Senate is still arguing over whether the DC subway system will give its conductors overly lavish pension plans.

I suppose it beats discussing the real issues.

As we enter day three of California's least favorite drama, Find One More Republican Senate Vote on the Budget, perhaps those paying attention will understand the tyranny California's insane two-thirds vote requirement has created.

Calitics' Brian Leubitz wonders if this spectacle is changing anything about the perception people -- and the reporters -- have for what the budget stalemate actually means and who is responsible for it.

It's clear this isn't about any policy positions anymore, his statements indicate he knows that the state needs additional revenue. He is, as the Bee alludes to but does not say, terrified of his party. Terrified of John and Ken. Hell, you can guess from the comments on the editorial just what kind of vitriol he's getting right about now. Surely a Yes vote would take some political courage, but just as surely it's a necessity of the real world.

Perhaps this weekend just might be a net positive for the state. Perhaps after today we get coverage of what is actually happening, and not cursory mentions of what the Republicans say and what the Dems say. Perhaps this weekend will cause the state to wake up to the fact that we are in a literal hostage situation. Howard Jarvis's rotting corpse is reaching out to put Arnold and the entire state in a choke hold.

That's not a pretty image with which to start the day, but it is an apt one. I wish I had more confidence that this weekend's events will put the lie to the false equivalencies we see in reporting of the state budget.

It is hard to compromise with people who refuse to compromise. As Senate President pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg explains as he closes the floor session last night.

Even for a fan of the Chicago Cubs, this day is full of hope. Right, Mr. Vedder?

The Big Picture and Calculated Risk have posted updates and additional analysis of the scary job loss chart created by Speaker Pelosi's office I mentioned here.

The updates are not comforting.

This chart compares all post-World War II recessions -- and not just those since 1981. This chart includes a red line that looks at percentages of job number changes year-by-year since 1960. That figure is useful because it helps account for the increase in the population over time.

Either way, the current job loss numbers are huge -- and now compare (at best) with the 1974 and 1983. Worse, we now know that in 1974 and 1983 the recovery was underway. I'm not aware of many people who would argue that we are at the initial stages of a recovery.

Finally, a commenter at the Big Picture notes that recovery is taking longer with each recession.

Length of time it took to regain all jobs lost. That is for the line to come back to zero.

1974 - 19 months
1981 - 28 months
1991 - 32 months
2001 - 48 months

I'm so glad that some misguided people, who alas are now United States Senators, think bipartisanship and fiscal restraint are the top priorities under such circumstances.

As Harpers' Scott Norton explains, Senator Leahy endorses this necessary idea.

The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein has a must-read column that exposes the economic illiteracy of those making the strangest arguments against the stimulus package. Here's one of my favorite sections:

"This is not a stimulus plan, it's a spending plan," Nebraska's freshman senator, Mike Johanns (R), said Wednesday in a maiden floor speech full of budget-balancing orthodoxy that would have made Herbert Hoover proud. The stimulus bill, he declared, "won't create the promised jobs. It won't activate our economy."

Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services -- a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus. The only question is whether spending it on other things would create more long-term value, which it almost certainly would.

There's more like this, but it would be unfair to repost Pearlstein's entire column here. So click through and read his important analysis of the pathetic political arguments from Neo-Hooverists to which we must be subjected in the name of bipartisanship.

As this chart shows, this recession has seen huge job losses that did not appear in the last two recessions.

We've fallen off another cliff.

But some people think it is more important for the "centrists" to have their time in the sun to show us how they can muddle through and show how influential they are by reducing a necessary stimulus package.

Priorities, you know.

The California Budget Project crunches the numbers and finds that another conservative argument about California's budget and economy is false:

A recent comment on our blog post reminded us of a persistent, but factually incorrect, rumor frequently heard in state policy circles - that rich people are leaving California in droves for states with lower personal income tax rates. Curious to find out whether this was actually true, CBP staff dove into data provided by the IRS showing the incomes of Californians who stayed, moved into, or moved out of the state from 1995 to 2007. What we found was that taxpayers who left the state actually made less on average than those who stayed. Those leaving the Golden State in 2006-07 had an average adjusted gross income of $55,907, while those staying had an average adjusted gross income of $67,722.

I doubt we will see the end of this argument from those who want to see government shrunk until they can drown the rest of it in a bathtub. But it is time to make sure those who make it no longer go unanswered.

Jay Ackroyd links to John Cole's apt metaphor about the perils of focusing on bipartisanship for its own sake.

I really don't understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

Andrew Sullivan is right to hope for sanity to return to the Republican Party. Until then, compromise can lead to severe digestive problems.