Moe Lane

…but it can’t be better than this parody of it.

Personally, I’m getting tired of the cowardice of politicians.  Particularly when it comes to dealing with sour market conditions.

This is a couple of days old, but it is still just a downright rude thing to say about Megan McArdle:

It is nearly a cardinal rule of American politics that if Megan McArdle likes your policy plan, it will go down in the Senate 95-0, and end with a fumbling recantation on Meet the Press.

…even if it was actually said by, well, Megan McArdle.

Read the whole thing, by the way.

Stop LAUGHING!

Hey, guess what? The Democrats plan to focus on jobs! (Via Ace of Spades)  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… what, you have?

A lot?

Are you sure?

(more…)

Peter Beinart doesn’t understand why the Tea Party gets to be the populist movement transforming American politics, instead of whatever latest cargo cult on the Left is these days.  In the spirit of bipartisanship – with ‘bipartisanship’ being defined as ‘kicking progressives in the teeth for the amusement of the crowd’ – I shall deign to explain things for him, hardline progressives, and everyone else with cognitive disabilities.

• First, and most important point: judging from events from 2001 onward, any nascent political grassroots movement on the Left would be immediately co-opted by the professional activist Left (see “The American Dream” for the latest, rather sad, example along those lines).  This, of course, dooms any theoretical left-grassroots groups, as most people do not like to hang out with scum.

Yes, this is going to be one of those kinds of posts. (more…)

Regretfully, little lessons like this seem to be necessary.

I know, I know: this sort of thing shouldn’t have to be taught by outsiders… but apparently you can’t expect the parents to teach this stuff to their own kids these days, and if we expect them to grow up to be anything like responsible adults, there’s kind of an obligation to make sure of that.  There’s far too much ignorance and just plain bad information out there on the subject already, and it won’t get better on its own…

Ignore the rest of his article on the ongoing debt ceiling controversy – Dionne is the kind of person who is comfortable trying to portray House Majority Leader Eric Cantor as being some kind of Machiavellian mastermind running a shadowy conspiracy to control the Republican party behind the scenes, if you know what I mean* – but as Mickey Kaus notes, Dionne’s got a good (if probably unintended) idea here for putting President Obama on the hot seat:

…Cantor takes every domestic spending cut that was discussed as part of the negotiations with Vice President Joe Biden, declares that the administration has blessed them, and packages them together for a vote.

Dionne calls this a worrisome scenario: I call it a good idea that hasn’t really been assessed and discussed yet by us folks over here at the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, which is why I’m highlighting it now.

Thanks, E.J. Dionne!  If this works out, maybe we’ll buy you a fruit basket or something.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*And I think that you do.

…to fix the economy.

I paraphrase: they’re trotting out a variant of  ‘the country’s problems are too much for any one man’ line that Democrats love to use whenever one of their guys is in office and something’s gone wrong.  At some point these folks will realize that all this does is reinforce the meme that “Democratic pundits” = “whiners”…

…right?

Moe Lane (more…)

Via James Pethokoukis comes an updated version of the graph (originally created by Obama’s economic advisers Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein) that has been succinctly countering (for years) any and all attempts to argue that the misnamed ‘stimulus’ worked:

For those without access to the picture: it’s a modified version of this graph, which was used to sell the idea that with a stimulus, unemployment would not rise above 8%; and that without a stimulus, unemployment might rise all the way to… 9%!!!!!! That last sentence is what usually gets emphasized in these discussions, and for good reason (it was a nitwit prediction).  But I’d [like] to note that according to the original chart we were forecast to be having about 6.5% or so unemployment at this point, with that number dropping rapidly.  For that matter, I’d also like to note that neither Romer nor Bernstein are currently employed by the Obama administration; they were more or less booted as quietly as could be managed, once the magnitude of the stimulus disaster was fully grasped by the White House.

Alas, the damage has been done.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Fred Barnes, who is perhaps just a bit restive waiting for the 2012 election cycle to really start:

The economy is languishing, joblessness is stuck at an abnormally high rate, the housing market remains in decline, the deficit will exceed $1 trillion for every year of Obama’s term, the national debt is north of $14 trillion, and markets are anxious. There’s a connection between our troubled economy and Barack Obama. If Republicans drive home the link, they’ll oust him and win big in 2012. It’s as simple as that.

And if it was June of 2012 and we hadn’t started this, I’d be concerned – but, contrary to popular belief (and perhaps egged on by the pundit class*), it’s early days yet.  Heck, we don’t even have a nominee. Because the election’s not for another year and a half, and all that.

Moe Lane

*Ahem.

That number represents, apparently, the amount of money Americans spend every year on stuff we don’t actually need.  And, of course, you can take that one bit of particular information any way you like: even the article that it comes from manages to use it to argue both for the inherent power of capitalism and for the need of a value-added tax.

On the other hand, Instapundit’s reader is right: Best Buy is a toy store for adults (I paraphrase).  Which is another, I’ve-had-some-wine way of saying that the aforementioned 1.2 trillion being pumped into the economy could easily disappear if people get worried enough.

Moe Lane

There are two very simple questions that need to be asked over the next eighteen months. The first is, Are you better off than you were four years ago?

If the answer is “Yes,” the second question is even more blunt: Really? How are you managing that?

(Items with an * are using February 2011 data)

…because the rest of the country’s kind of getting hammered, here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

We won.

It looked that way earlier in the day, and it’s now confirmed.  The ‘deal’ will be that the White House ‘delays’ raising taxes for two more years in ‘exchange’ for getting a thirteen-month extension on unemployment benefits*.  That last is problematical, but given the Democrats’ moral weakness thus far the GOP might still be able to keep pushing a little and get offsets in federal spending elsewhere to make up the difference.  Besides, it’s Christmas: the optics are bad.  Even if we don’t get that, everybody who matters is going to breathe a huge sigh of relief.  The Democratic establishment will have a fig leaf for their cowardice and the Right will have successfully kept the Other Side from delivering another kick to the groin to the US economy; it’s not perfect, but it’ll keep things from getting worse until 2012.

By the way, ‘deal,’ ‘delay,’ and ‘exchange’ were all in scare quotes because this wasn’t really a deal; more like the Democrats finally admitting that they didn’t have the guts to raise taxes in the middle of a sour economy.  And the White House isn’t delaying raising taxes; even assuming that Obama’s in a position to raise them in 2012 he won’t dare do it then, either.  And it’s not an exchange; as noted above, the GOP can give ground on this topic readily enough, particularly if we can take the opportunity to gut some useless spending elsewhere.

In other words, it’s pretty much all over except for the gloating.

Moe Lane (crosspost) (more…)