With Friends Like These...

Ugh. In the course of a pretty good column on taxes and the economy, Boskin proceeds to destroy his credibility with a stupid claim. "The lower marginal tax rates in the 1980s led to the best quarter-century of economic performance in American history." I mean, is he trying to convince people that tax-cut enthusiasts are just charlatans? We can support lowering tax rates without resorting to this sort of thing, people.

Grasping Reality?

Ha!
"Megan McArdle's major problem is that she is looking at one table--Table 1.1 in OMB's Historical Tables. She is not reading Hoover's Budget Messages" (it goes on like this).
Translation: McArdle's problem is she is looking at the data instead of the rhetoric.
Really? This is the best you can do, Professor? If you want to claim that spending should have increased a lot more than it did, or that Congress tried to increase spending by more than actually happened, or that Hoover tried to cut spending, or that his tax increases were contractionary, that's all fine and defendable, and probably true. Lines of criticism of McArdle along those lines I have no problem with. However, the evidence is crystal clear, government spending under Hoover went up, and claims that cuts in spending exacerbated the Great Depression are false. Grasp reality, not ideology.

The Right Tool, at the Wrong Time

(Background to let you know what this is about here, here, and here).
I can prove that Greg Mankiw is a better economist than is Paul Krugman. How? Well, Paul is something like 5'6", and Mankiw is 6'2". Therefore, anyone claiming otherwise is selling voodoo.
What's that you say? You think that that's not a good way to show what I want to show? Well, you must be pretending to be stupid. I mean, NBA scouts use height to judge prospects. And height has a lot to do with a man's attractiveness.
True, height doesn't have much correlation to economic knowledge or wisdom. So? Krugman's economic brilliance must be puny if he's not even close to Mankiw in height.

More dishonesty from BDL

The NY Times had a Room for Debate forum about Bernanke, the Fed, etc. In Megan McArdle's portion she wrote a fairly blah piece, talking about how some see it this way, some another. DeLong's response? To go after her because "she talks about how Ben Bernanke has been 'recklessly ignoring inflation'." Go read what she wrote. I support criticizing her for her Shape of the Earth type writing, and I agree with DeLong that Bernanke and The Fed are doing too little (I'd put it a slightly different way, but that's splitting hairs at this point), but why lie about what she wrote? Delong has shot whatever remained of his credibility.

Oh

Wow, I can't believe it didn't see it before. Clearly people who have problems with federal spending on infrastructure are racists, if not outright pro-slavery.

Empirical Proof that America's Liberals Are Stupid

Sasha Volokh wrote a pretty out there post about asteroids, taxation and rights, specifically noting that his views here are not normal for Libertarians. Delong doesn't just rightly make fun of Sasha, no he says that this shows that "America's Libertarians are Completely Insane". Reading comprehension and/or fairness/honesty are not the man's strong suits. Using his logic, I conclude that America's Liberals are dishonest or idiots, or both. And no, I don't think he's kidding.

Amazing!

This reminds of a someone, can't quite place my finger on who, though.

Oy

Greg Mankiw wrote a post Saturday on why he is agnostic on the question of how long people should be eligible for unemployment insurance. While he does a good job of raising the questions that we should ask to figure out what the optimal length of eligibility should be, the post is somewhat disingenuous, as he could pretty easily get good answers to all of his questions by walking down the hall to talk to his colleague Chetty who's studied this stuff, as pointed out by DeLong.

However, DeLong, in the course of pointing this out, is even more disingenuous, and more blatantly so. He points that out Chetty "conclude[s] that an unemployment benefit-market wage of about 50% is about right", and that he also concludes that more is called for at certain times (such as now). Well, that's all fine and good and interesting, but it really doesn't tell us how long people should be eligible for benefits, neither in normal times nor in times of high unemployment. I pointed this out to DeWrong in his comments section. His response? To delete my comment and ban me.

Why oh why can't we have a better economics professor section of the blogosphere?

Update: Well, BDL let me know why I'm banned. It's because I spread misinformation in the past. How did I do so? By questioning how someone used a model of global climate (NB: no claims about climate change made by me), and by trying to fill in the blank spots in the story of the Krugman-Okrent tiff. I don't know if I was right or wrong in either case, but I certainly never spread misinformation; both times I speculated a little (clearly labeled so marked as such, not as fact) and asked questions. Regardless, I think we can take this as an admission that I'm right in this case; why else go to the extra effort to bring up things that happened years ago instead of engaging on the points I made about his UI evidence this time? Also, he's clearly lying about why I'm banned, as I've left a few comments in between then and this most recent time; I embarrassed him with truth, and it pissed him off so that he had to find an excuse to get rid of me. In any case, I'd still like to know if there's good research on the ideal length of benefit eligibility.

Pick and Choose

Comment of the day:
"As a Christian I'd probably look at her with disgust and tell her she's been reading the wrong parts of the Bible."
Good to know that we can identify the right and wrong parts.

Really?

Really?

Drinking the Manischewitz

Compare, and contrast. Both are one-sided and probably a little unfair, but PCR stays grounded in reality, while Chesler wanders off into la-la land. Actually, that's not quite right; she stays in la-la land.
I mean, her argument boils down to the fact that the aid boat had some questionable people aboard, and that it had rocks, sticks, and other laughable weapons on it, and they attacked the Israeli soldiers. The Israeli soldiers who first attacked by boarding the boat in international waters. For planning to violate Israel's immoral and illegal act of war, aka, the embargo on Gaza. That Israel had agreed to lift but never did. Imposed with the goal of impoverishing the Gazans to just short of a humanitarian crisis, so that they might become so miserable that they "decide" to change their (admittedly awful) government.

ID Reloaded

Getting back into it, with some quick hits:
On Arizona's illegal immigration bill, this is just about right.
On a related note, when dealing with the police, know your rights and how to defend them.
Sowell on the limits of power, examining the ultimate case. Whatever problems I have with him on foreign policy (largely because he doesn't apply his domestic/economic thinking consistently there), he almost always spot on with this kind of stuff.
Shorter Paul Krugman: When Democrats are in favor of something, it's because they're good people. When Democrats are against something, it's because they're good people. When Republicans are for something, it's because they're bad people. When Republicans are against something, it's because they're bad people. Glad we got that straight.

What's the Administration Doing on this Front?

Nothing it seems.
So let's see. Cheney endorses torture, says it happened under his watch, and the lawyers say they were ordered to cook up legal justifications by Cheney. Why isn't there at least an official investigation of this? Oh, right, it would hurt the gov's reputation too much. Right.
Maybe the lawyers are lying, maybe not. Either way, some people committed serious offenses. Crimes that should offend anyone, and that hurt national security. Do not abide this.

Why to not vote for Coakley

Well, one of the reasons.

I <3 GG

Cass Sunstein scares the living bejeebus out of me. The fact that he has a significant (or any, really) role in the Obama administration is a disgrace. I particularly would like to point out his advocacy of what amounts to a conspiracy to deal with people advocating conspiracy theories. Think I'm exaggerating? "In 2008...Sunstein [proposed] that the U.S. Government...'cognitively infiltrate'...activist groups which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the Government."
Also, Greenwald makes some good points on the Jon Gruber situation in the same piece.

Bigger than Twitter

I wish I had a pithy line to put an exclamation point on this, but I don't. Read it.

If B, then B

This takes question begging to a whole new level. Usually people just implicitly assume their conclusions. Here Krugman does it explicitly. He starts with the assumption that P is fixed. Then examines what would happen under a given policy and finds that P doesn't change. Wow. Very impressive.
Update: See this Sumner post on this as well. Really hoists Krugman by his own petard. You might say that Krugman is petarded.

Cripple Fight

What's worse, having no evidence, or retarded evidence? Brooks claims that text messages have ruined romance. Based on...nothing that I can see. Yglesias attempts to refute him by referring to The Rules of Attraction, written in the 80s. A NOVEL written in the 80s. And by referring to Mad Men, about an office in the early 60s. A FICTIONAL office in the 60s, written and shot today. I guess I'll go with the retarded evidence as superior, or at least more honest. At least I can point out the problems with it. With Brooks, there's nothing there at all. Winner, Yglesias.

Freedom of what?

Disgusting. Simply disgusting.

Inversion

Yglesias points out that people don't think the government is helping them, despite the fact that they received tax cuts in the stimulus package. That's some pretty good logic. Let me try it out: When the school bullies didn't steal Matt's lunch money, they were buying him lunch. Yeah, that sounds just about right. Nothing disingenuous here.