It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

I have a lot of thoughts about Paul Krugman from time to time. Most of them are negative, as he is a self-promoted liberal with some pretty horrendous ideas for how the government should operate. However, he's also a pretty smart guy, which makes it frustrating that he can fairly accurately assess a situation, then apply his liberal bias to come to a completely wrong-headed conclusion. Take, as a recent example, this piece about the danger of the world falling into another depression due (primarily) to the lack of jobs. The premise is sound, and entirely agreeable: without jobs, the economy spirals downward, generally making everyone unhappy. If you want to fix the situation and avert a more serious problem, you'd want to do a few things: make sure the climate is good for businesses to operate and employ people, provide a fair and level playing field to encourage people that all they would need to operate a successful business was hard work (as opposed to political friends an...

Now I know what you're thinking: any other day, and this wouldn't have even warranted a byline, much less a headline, in any respectable information source. Nothing in the headline is really that unusual, or that surprising. However, when it's couched as sound analysis, and in the context of how to advise the president , it seems kinda like one's duty to point out how monumentally idiotic this particular liberal is, and how people in power can drive nations to financial ruin by listening to bad and dangerous advice. Robert Reich, aka public enemy #1 for the day, lays out the current situation basically correctly, before moving out to lay out two different government approaches. In the first, he explains the typical Keysian/liberal economic approach: borrow/print more money, bail out the irresponsible states with new federal borrowing, make taxation more unfair, and waste another $300 Billion or so on corruption and insider payouts, all while doing nothing to address the...

I had a couple of topics I wanted to blog about recently, but haven't had much time; however, this caught my attention, and I wanted to take a bit to write about how dumb analysts are. When I say dumb, I don't mean the people are necessarily not bright or informed, but their analysis is often so off-base that you have to suspect they are either willfully ignorant or just lying for undisclosed reasons. The article in summary discusses analysis of recent gold and commodities prices; gold is going up, and commodities are going down. One person had this to say: “Bernanke is dispelling the argument that people are out there buying gold because of the threat of inflation,” said Matt Zeman, a metals trader at LaSalle Futures Group in Chicago. “Deflation is now more of a threat.” Well, that's all fine and good, but it's totally wrong. Commodities are a hedge against short-term inflation, and gold is a hedge against long-term inflation. Short-term inflation might be caused by a...

Most days, the machinations of the malignant imbeciles in Washington as just the backdrop of life in the US: an evil, to be sure, but a somewhat necessary evil to allow the country and society to continue its strained existence. You can usually write off the constant struggle between the people and their would-be rulers as the price of living in a country with some semblance of law and order, and just hope that there are enough people sacrificing their time and energy to keep the government in check to prevent the situation from deteriorating too much. Some days, though, enough abuses pile up that you can't help but feel a sense of profound anger and frustration, even if each individual abuse seems small compared to the sheer magnitude of vileness emanating from Washington, and today is one of those days for me. See, this particular frustration starts (oddly enough) with looking at new cars. Now, I'm not really considering buying a new car, but I wanted to see what was new in t...

Barney Frank is a funny guy... or, at least, I'm sure some people find him amusing. In a joking swipe at the controversy around Obama's concerted efforts to ensure that nobody outside of a couple of public officials in Hawaii can actually verify his citizenship (and hence his qualification to serve as president), Frank suggested that the media should verify the citizenship of new House representative Charles Djou. Notwithstanding the fact that citizenship is not required for membership in the House of Representatives, I'm thinking it provides a potential political opportunity. See, Djou was born in LA, so it would be pretty trivial for him to acquire a certified copy of his actual birth certificate, and post it online or something. You'd have to be careful about the wording, but I'm thinking of a public statement along the lines of: You see, it's not actually difficult at all for an American-born citizen to acquire and produce for verification one's birth c...

I've talked about this before, somewhat, but I'm not sure if I've ever laid-out a specific prediction on the future of medical care in the US, now that it has been partially socialized by the Obama administration. One could argue that these changes were inevitable with or without the latest "reform", and that they stem from the Medicare system in general, but more socialization certainly doesn't help. From Texas: more doctors opting out of Medicare . Now, no big surprise here: Medicare is somewhat unfair to practitioners, underpays for procedures, has horrible inefficiencies, a spotty payment history, and is generally a pain compared to other insurance programs. To some extent providers accept Medicare for the same reason businesses take credit cards: it opens up markets and allows more sales opportunities. However, as the Medicare costs go up and the system continues to degrade, look for more practitioners to drop it as a coverage option, leaving few actual r...

From USA today, via CalculatedRisk : "This is the absolute worst time to lose our residential mobility," says Richard Florida, a professor of U.S. urban theory at the University of Toronto. "It's important for people to move to where the new opportunities are, because that is the cornerstone of our idea-driven economy." CR goes on to note that part of the reason for the lack of mobility is that lots of people are underwater on their homes... which is true, but not the only factor. I'd venture to say that another significant reason why people are reluctant to move is that many people know that there's significant pending price declines in he housing market, and don't want to make a move now because they know prices are going to be lower after the delayed foreclosures work their way through the system in the next few years. This is less likely to be preventing people from moving for employment if they are desperate (after all, you can always rent), but...