Category Archives: Government
Unemployment Liberation
War is peace, freedom is slavery, and unemployment is liberation.
A new Congressional Budget Office report says ObamaCare will cost the economy 2.3 million jobs. Lower income workers will have a “disincentive to work”, as CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf put it.
“By providing subsidies that decline with rising income (and increase with falling income), and by making some people financially better off, the Affordable Care Act will create an incentive for some people to work less,” the report states.
The White House has embraced this. Jason Furman the chairman of the Council for Economic Advisers calls it freedom from “job lock”.
Unemployment Liberation Update:
University of Chicago Economist Casey Mulligan thinks that’s nuts:
I don’t know what their intentions are,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “but it looks like they’re trying to leverage the lack of economic education in their audience by making these sorts of points.
I can understand something like cigarettes and people believe that there’s too much smoking, so we put a tax on cigarettes, so people smoke less, and we say that’s a good thing. OK. But are we saying we were working too much before? Is that the new argument? I mean make up your mind. We’ve been complaining for six years now that there’s not enough work being done. . . . Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy. Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we’re glad that people are working less? We’re pursuing our dreams?
Peyton Manning Code Cracker
Richard Sherman cracked the Peyton Manning code. He says he and his teammates figured out Manning’s hand signals based on the situation and knew what play was coming in a advance.
Super Bowl Version XLVIII.2
Hate to drag politics into the sports, but I didn’t want to miss out on Super Bowl Version XLVIII.2. First, Team Obama tweeted The One throwing a football. Then Bill O’Reilly interviewed him.
Dr. Krauthammer says the interview was better than the game and the score was closer.
Dana Milbank says O’Reilly treated President Obama like a guest on the Factor. Which is to say, not well. O’Reilly’s interruptions were annoying but Obama would have verbally stonewalled him if he let him. Instead he blamed his problems on Fox.
As it was Obama booted questions on Benghazi and Republicans have yet to recover the ball (view from 6:24-7:37).
Super Bowl Version XLVIII.2 Update:
Fox New’s Catherine Herridge nails the CIA for knowing the attack in Benghazi had nothing to do with demonstrations gone wild, yet the director changed talking points allowing Susan Rice to blame the attacks on protests about a video.
Chris Christie Tied Up
Chris Christie and his political ambitions are tied up right now. A lawyer for the guy responsible for the infamous closing of the lanes on the George Washington bridge says Christie knew about the stunt.
Christie’s campaign committee wants permission to spend $127,000 left over from its $12 million binge to re-elect the governor. The campaign says it needs that money, and more, for legal defense against subpoenas issued by US prosecutors.
After parsing the slippery “meaning of is” language used by both Christie and the lawyer in the bridge case, The Washington Examiner says the bombshell could be a dud.
Update:
Politico reports on a Christie email criticizing the New York Times and David Wildstein (the guy responsible for the bridge lane closing).
Bipartisan Farm Bill
Congress got something done last week. It passed a bipartisan, 10 year, trillion dollar farm bill.
The farm bill includes insurance against “adverse price movements”. Isn’t that what the credit default swaps were supposed to do for subprime loans before the great recession?
Bipartisanship on Farm Bill
It’s all too much for the editors of National Review who note that:
Many crop prices are near all-time highs, and if they drop as expected, new loss-protection programs could — likely will — cost billions more than the CBO calculates.
In an even rarer case of bipartisanship the Washington Post editorial board agrees:
Supposedly necessary to secure the nation’s food supply at a time of record farm income and epidemic obesity, this federal largess flows almost regardless of how much money its recipients already have.
The Post then calls on President Obama to use his pen to veto the bill.
More Bipartisan Farm Bill Update:
Bloomberg reports the Senate threw out a requirement that members of Congress would have to publicly report if they receive federally subsidized crop insurance.
