CYA in the USA

The "Politics" section of Fark is just not a good source for reasonable political discourse. You can get funny headlines, every now and then, and that's worth something. Most of the time, though, it is an echo chamber (at worst, a popularizer of bad information). With that in mind, here is the headline:

Not funny and not true. Bad Fark. Jane Hamsher has the goods:

But the bill that passed the Senate actually made the compensation limits retroactive, according to the Wall Street Journal...

Who pushed back against Dodd, and told him to neuter the provision? The WSJ says Geithner and Summers...

Dodd's version prohibited TARP recipients from paying out bonuses, retention awards or incentive compensation to the 25 most highly compensated employees. It also prohibited any employee of a company receiving TARP funds from making more than the President. Both provisions would have been in effect so long as a company was receiving TARP funds. Since AIG just paid out $1 million in bonuses to 73 employees, Dodd's version limiting all employees to
what the President made (roughly $500,000) would have substantially nipped that in the bud...

So -- in the end, all compensation limits only applied to contracts written after February 11, at the specific request of Timothy Geithner, and AIG was able to pay out $286 million in bonuses on Sunday...

Between this and the public declaration of Geithner's job being safe, one is left wondering who exactly is directing the cover-your-ass campaign? Has the party given up Dodd for dead?
(h/t Brian Beutler)

VerSteeg's bad analysis

Deputy Editor of the Post Editorial Page, Jac Wilder VerSteeg, writes:

The drumbeat of "worse than economists expected" negatively affects the nation's psyche and further depresses the economy. If economists had been better at predicting just how bad things were going to be, things wouldn't have gotten as bad as they have.

What the economy needs, obviously, is economists who will start expecting that the economy will be much worse than economists expect. Only then can we expect the economy to get better.

Seriously? Economics is a social science. As with all sciences, there are disputes. The disputes in some areas of economics are particularly difficult since you can't easily conduct experiments in many cases. This leads to the use of historical data, with the problem being that historical data might include some variables that you are under (or over) accounting for. Hence, the difficulty in agreeing upon controversies within the discipline.

Disagreements, however, are not resolved with this "throw the baby out" line of thinking. And they are definitely not improved by lazy columnists who complain about vague job titles (such as "economist") without explaining the differences that exist within the universe of opinions within those titles. The internet helps those of us in the public interested in learning more (hello Dean Baker, Dani Rodrik, and Brad Delong), but of course some Post Editors have a problem with bloggers too.