Friday Fun: Job data

The BLS put out labor statistics that may raise some eyebrows. Want to find out more about your area? The map below is a screenshot, but to find more info click here.

PJ and BD

Penn Jillette is funny. I watched a few of his

shows and I laughed, but often felt as though he was not honest in his arguments. Maybe, that's too harsh, dishonest, but you could at least say skewed towards his point of view. So today, CNN puts up an article Jillette writes about Obama's economic policies. Here is the thesis:

Obama tells us that we can spend our way out of debt. He tells us that even though the government had control over the banks and did nothing to stop the bad that's going on, if we give them more control over more other bank-like things, then they can make sure bad stuff doesn't happen ever again. He says we can get out of all those big wars President Bush caused by sending more troops into Afghanistan. And I don't know. I really don't know.

Now, that link doesn't go to any statement by Obama to that effect. I don't remember Obama ever saying we can spend our way out of debt. I do know that economists on the right and left agreed that stimulus spending needed to be big. Which is to say, Jillette is bullshitting us. And that is disappointing.

Friday Fun: Budget Hero

The Republicans put out a their "Road to Recovery"
(and kudos to their SEO people, the document is very easy to find!). There aren't many details and this has upset some. On the other hand, writing a budget is hard.


Don't believe me? Well then, try creating one yourself here.

Halfway there...

The chart below from dshort.com should give us all some perspective as to how the current financial crisis aligns with those in the past.

We seem to be following the 1929-32 iteration more closely than 1973-4 or 2000-2. As others have noted, this may get worse before it gets worse.

Trash talking...Senate style

This is going to be everywhere tonight. Just remember you saw it here first.


Click here if the video doesn't work (of course that would mean you saw it there first, I guess).

MeFi repost

Over at MetaFilter, the poster named Mutant asks the following:

The Fed's Public Private Partnership Program, promises to clear down as much as $1T worth of "legacy assets" from banks balance sheets. Globally, equity markets responded positively. But what about assets held off balance sheet?

He continues...

Off balance sheet vehicles originally were designed to mitigate risk, focusing investments into subsidiaries so credit ratings or leverage ratios of parent companies wouldn't be impacted. Many financial firms improperly used such vehicles to hide poorly performing assets, culminating in the well known collapse of Enron in 2002. Last July The Financial Accounting Standards group postponed FAS statement 140 - which would require firms to move assets on to their balance sheets - for one year, an impending deadline that concerns many analysts.

How much is held off balance sheet? As of Q1 2009 off balance sheet assets at the four largest US banks - Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America - totaled roughly $5T, or a sum potentially dwarfing Geithner's trillion dollar plan.

Regulators are aware of the problem and already are planning to increase requirements for economic capital, but considering how reluctant the United States was to adopt Basel II [.pdf] , a real fix could take a while.

All of this is to say, it looks like the hole is deeper than we are told.

Cover me, cover you

I'm not exactly sure what Obalesque is arguing here. It seems as though Rep. Schultz is for universal health care.

You down with PPIP?

The Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP), Treasury Secretary Geithner's plan to save the US financial sector from catastrophe, is...uh...complicated. I won't try to describe it (for that, I"d suggest going here). I will say that from what I understand, it is basically asking the private "investors" to price something that will mostly (completely?) be paid for with tax dollars.

I don't know if this is the right approach or not. I do want to note something I don't think other people have mentioned. In reading the Ryan Grimm piece about the nationalization of IndyMac, the following stood out:

Depositors didn't all stick around to see how things worked out. A year ago, the bank was sitting on those $19 billion in deposits. When it was finally sold last Thursday, that number had fallen to $6.4 billion.

From $19 billion to $6.4 billion. That is a drop of about 67%. People weren't made to feel secure enough by the FDIC to not pull their money out. I am left wondering if nationalization of the largest banks wouldn't create the same illiquidities and/or create runs on the banks involved? Is this why we are moving forward with TARP v.2?

Oh Canada

MattY had a post today about the border implications of global warming...namely, that they will have to be re-visited. Meanwhile, it seems that our, more mundane, boprder dispute with the Canadians has been resolved. Another quiet victory for the Bush Administration.

Bonus and bailouts

Fivethirtyeight.com's Nate Silver posted about the prospects for the passage of the bonus tax. By his logic, the bill has a very small chance of passing in its present form. In light of this, the question Ed Henry posed last night is not totally without merit:

Maybe a better question would have been "what are you going to do about the AIG bonus?" versus, "why did it take you so long to speak up?". I think that Obama's answer to the question posed couldn't be beaten. And as far as the "what are you going to do about it?" approach...well, it probably isn't going to be a tax.

Better minds than mine noted that the bill passed would create a law that...

would apply only to payments made from January 1, 2009 forward. But almost prospective is like half pregnant. The bill is retrospective for just long enough to clawback the politically fetishized AIG bonuses, while leaving those who made out during the thick of the toxic credit bubble completely untouched. It has all of the philosophical distastefulness of an ex post law, and no offsetting benefit whatsoever, other than punishing a few trophy miscreants from AIG. [em]

So, what do we take away from the sound and fury of this all? Krugman has already noted and others chimed in, "we are not going to stop, or change, the bailout plan. And there won't be another congressionally approved bailout, either. Those wads have been shot."

I hope that this consensus is wrong.

Sudent loan woes

Fully behind Incertus on this:

[I]t might be nice to think about those of us who've recently left and are struggling with some pretty crippling student loan debt...

And I'll go them one better--I don't require, or even request, a full-on bailout. I don't need something for nothing. Just make me a deal whereby I spend a handful of years in the public sector making what people in the field make--teaching in a public school, for instance, since
that's where my expertise lies--and in return, I get rid of my student loans.

To round this discussion out, it is important to remember the following:

[R]ight now we do student loans through a really pointless mechanism of basically laundering the money through private firms. All of the downside risk is borne by the government in case of default. And the lenders receive federal subsidies for doing the service of undertaking no-risk lending. But of course the companies also take a slice off the top for profits and salaries for executives and so forth. Consequently, this is more expensive than just directly lending the money. And the government is bearing all the risk anyway.

Stadium approved

(via....no, this one is ripped off of SFDB, nice pick Rick)
I'm not a Miamian, so I'll let one speak for himself on this:

The most infuriating part of Monday's discussion for me was when Bob Dupay, the president of Major League Baseball, stood up and said if Miami wanted to be considered a major American city then it needed to build the stadium.

Major League Baseball should be ashamed of themselves. They have created and fostered a system whereby communities are extorted for money. If Major League Baseball cared about the communities they serve they should have set up a fund a long time ago to help teams build their own stadiums. And the only reason Major League Baseball doesn't take responsibility for their own construction projects are because elected officials keep doing it for them.

Ouch. The whole article is great and I highly suggest heading over to read it.

Bailout back-and-forth

There seems to be a slowly mounting opinion about Obama. Bobby put it well yesterday:

It's way too early to pass judgment on the legacy of the Obama administration, but the one thing you can say is that all of the predictions made by folks on both sides of the political spectrum have been off the mark: he's not the wild-eyed socialist Black Panther liberal the right feared he was (and in a perverse way hoped he would be so they could raise campaign funds on secret photos of Angela Davis playing on the White House swing set), and he's not the crusading progressive mowing down the malefactors of great wealth and purveyors of narrow-minded homophobia and intolerance that the liberals hoped he would be, either. The most predictable -- and maddening -- thing Barack Obama has done is defy predictions.

Today, MattY follows up:

Meanwhile, I actually think the most distressing thing about the criticism from folks like Krugman and Stiglitz is what you can infer reading between the lines from how ferocious it is. They, and other leading critics, are acting like people who’ve been totally shut out of the consultation/communication loop. And it’s distressing to see people of their stature and expertise getting shut out while the administration works harder on kissing Wall Street’s ass to try to persuade the finance class to avoid deliberately sabotaging the economy.

The thing to keep in mind is that this type of behavior, while frustrating, is in line with Obama's behaviors during key moments in his past. Which is all fine and good except that this time it doesn't seem as though the bridges are getting buit. CQ reports that there are divisions with Obama's economic team:

So here was one of Obama's top economic advisers undermining Geithner's key claim (we have no choice!) and questioning Romer's characterization of the firms participating in the toxic assets program. This was not a confidence booster. And I wondered what it would be like to sit in the room when Obama's economic advisers get together and try to sort all this out.

Me too.

Burying public notification

(via Flablog)
Apparently, when the Legislature isn't trying to kill DCA they spend their time trying to do end runs around the public:

This legislation (SB 2292; HB 1477) by Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Brandon, and Rep. Juan Zapata, R-Miami, is the antithesis of open government and should be allowed to expire without further ado.

These proposals are, in fact, a great example of how government can labor in obscurity — and sometimes menacingly — if citizens, and the media, don't have ready access to information about city, county, school, state and federal agencies.

Legal notices are but one way, yet an important way, to be forewarned and thereby forearmed regarding proposed changes to your neighborhood, your street, your school zone or your wallet.

So, I think that public notification in newspapers is a good idea whereas the website approach is not as good. On the other hand, the view that says that your municipal planning staff is a Menace 2 Society is...uh...not exactly the most positive take.

Market assumptions

Between yesterday's Dow surge and today's small drops, it is important to remember this little gem from Dan Gross about the stock market being a public policy quality assessment instrument:

The market is made up of all types of participants: rational, irrational, some focused on the past, some on the future, some obsessed with Washington, others with China. In October 2007, with the Dow at 14,000, did the market "know" a recession was about to start and that a financial tsunami was about to hit? Um, no. Of course, over time the market does respond to fundamentals like earnings and dividend payments. But in the past half-dozen months, the fundamentals have been fundamentally unsound. The S&P 500 could be at around 700 because Obama is a Commie who wants to destroy free enterprise. Or it could be at around 700 because that's roughly 15 times the index's estimated operating earnings per share.

And if anyone knows about the market, inside and out, it's Dan.

The right on Crist

It looks like Obama is not the only one catching flak from both sides. Ambinder reposts Townhall about this Sun Sentinel story on Gov. Crist:

One hundred plane trips and nary a single disclosure as to what they're all about? I realize you don't have to, Charlie, but c'mon -- let us know about the special interests, or don't take the trips. I know you can do it. You're so cool.

The last line sounds a bit bitter to me. Could it be that there is weak support out side of Florida for a Crist Senate run?

Gold in thar' comments...

Felix Salmon wonders if we are on the verge of an honest-to-goodness class war:

In one corner are the technocrats not only in finance but also in government and the media: people who can understand the importance of distinguishing between a $250,000 base salary, a $2.5 million bonus, a $250 million bonus pool, a $2.5 billion bonus pool, a $250 billion bailout package, a $2.5 trillion monetary stimulus, and so on.

In the other corner are the real people, the angry people, the unemployed people -- and with them their elected representatives in Congress. They're not interested in such distinctions any more, they're not interested in what's fair or what's sensible. They saw their real wages stagnate for decades as the orgy of plutocratic self-congratulation reached obscene levels only to keep on growing. All they ever had was the American Dream: the idea that they, too, might one day become dynastically wealthy and join the overclass.

Now, of course, that dream is shattered -- and, what's worse, it turns out that very overclass is responsible for the working classes' own present straits. While the talking heads in New York and Washington throw around their millions and billions and trillions before commuting home to their comfortable middle-class-and-better lifestyles, the rest of the country is mad as hell, and ain't gonna take it any more. They're not interested in constructive solutions or in leveraging private capital or in the sanctity of contracts: fuck that shit. Those days are over. They want to see jail time, confiscatory policies, and worse.

A commentor responds:

And just imagine what an American revolution might look like... proper pensions, a labour movement, maybe even an NHS...Good god, it'd bring them kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, not having 60 Democratic Senators means that programs like the ones above may have to go through all sorts of contortions to have a chance at being passed.



Photo by Flickr user nycmonkey used under CC license.

The business of America is...what?

John Mellencamp wrote a piece for HuffPo (yeah, that John Mellencamp), that is interesting but, I think, fundamentally off-base. I'd suggest that you read the whole thing, but the one portion that stands out for me is the following:

These days, some people suggest that it is up to the artist to create avenues to sell the music of his own creation. In today's environment, is it realistic to expect someone to be a songwriter, recording artist, record company and the P.T. Barnum, so to speak, of his own career? Of course not. I've always found it amusing that a few people who have never made a record or written a song seem to know so much more about what an artist should be doing than the artist himself. If these pundits know so much, I'd suggest that make [sic] their own records and just leave us out of it.

I understand what Melencamp is saying here, but I think it is also important to recognize that artists and the record companies that supported them (parasitically fed off of them?) both benefitted from the same anachronism. In the past, the ability to play a song when you wanted to play it meant owning a tactile product (Record, CD, etc.). This created a scarcity since this required actually manufacturing something. Today, with digital music, there is no scarcity. Producers thought they were selling music...they were really selling plastic. The music itself, it seems is worth, in money terms, less (which is why, I believe, there is so much unrepentent music "sharing"). The problems is in the selling of it.


I can see that this position would be patently offensive to many. But among the many psychological distortions created when you view the world through a lassiez-faire perspective is that the only way of expressing worth is through something's value in money. But there is real value in time spent helping kids learn to read. There is value in providing pro-bono legal services to homeless veterans. The fact that our version of the capitalist system deems these projects not as valuable as a facelift and tummy tuck should not mean that they are actually worth less.


Now, this is a political website, not a cultural one. And as far as I am concerned, the problem isn't even capitalism. The problem is with an economic philosophy that believes "constant insecurity is what opens up the possibility of genuine happiness". I think economic security, vis-a-vis a more robust safety net, would allow us to survive with less, be more creative, sell less music, perform more music cheaply, but ultimately, and this is most important, be happier.


I think am correct about this. I may be wrong. I'd suggest anyone who disagrees provide me with the data that proves me wrong.

Friday Fun: ReDistricting Game

Fair Districts Florida has all sorts of important information about the re-districting issue. It's an important issue to be sure. I say, however, why bother reading about it when you can play an online video game in which you become the tawdry re-districting official yourself!

Play the ReDistricting Game. Have a nice weekend everyone.

Florida snark

Flapolitics reviews the deteriorating budget situation in the state

and finds a silver lining:

The saving grace in all this of course, is that Floridians aren't saddled with that "insidious" intangibles tax on wealthy investors, that raised hundreds of millions in tax dollars.

Oooh, burn.