Paul M. Jones

Say it with me: "protectionism is stupid."

Obama’s protectionism echoes Herbert Hoover’s protectionism, which helped spawn the Great Depression. President Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which helped turn a recession into the Great Depression by triggering a trade war with other countries.

Unemployment is now even higher than what Obama predicted it would be without the stimulus. The White House now admits that there will be no job growth until 2010. The Congressional Budget Office repeatedly predicted that the stimulus would shrink the economy “in the long run“), but increase it in the short run, i.e., by the next election.

But so little of the stimulus money has gone into sectors of the economy where unemployment is high (like construction and transportation) that it seems to be doing nothing for the economy even in the short run. The $100 billion it pours into education -- a sector where unemployment is very low, and where the U.S. also spends more per capita than almost every other country -- appears likely to be wasted. Only 5.9 percent of the stimulus will go to transportation, a small amount compared to the amount of money it showers on state governments, which are using it to continue to provide lucrative pension and health benefits for state employees, whose wages continue to rise much faster than private sector workers.

via Stimulus Ignites Job-Killing Trade War With Canada | OpenMarket.org.

Free trade helps everyone, *especially* the country practicing it. Even if nobody else reciprocates, the country that practices free trade comes out ahead.

Does the cost of living get less expensive when you don't own a car?

No, you've got it backwards, a car-free existence is more expensive. I live in Manhattan, so I can tell you how expensive it is to live here. It costs a lot less money to live in some non-walkable place in the midwest and own a car or two.

I also lived in Arlington VA, and it was walkable but much more expensive than most other places in the USA as well, and you still needed a car to drive to work.

For whatever the reason, packing in people so close together that car-free life is feasible also has the effect of raising the price of everything else, and thus we can only conclude that densely populated areas are economically inefficient.

via Half Sigma: It costs more money to live without a car.

Part two here: http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/05/its-less-expensive-to-own-a-car-part-ii.html

TED has developed a cool new technology that makes it possible to search, caption and translate TED talks. Each talk will now come with an transcript. What's cool is that you can click on any phrase in the transcript and you will jump to that point in the video. If you go to my talk, for example, and click on "open interactive transcript" you can see this in action. What this means is that videos will now be Google searchable.

via Marginal Revolution: TED Talks: Search, Translate, Subtitle.

The idea is to have a commission examine which procedures should not receive full Medicare reimbursement. I favor spending cuts for Medicare so for me it's a go. Megan McArdle considers some basic issues. I'll add or second a few points ...

via Marginal Revolution: Medical care and comparative effectiveness.

Outrage spread in Canada, with the Toronto Star last week bemoaning "a plague of protectionist measures in the U.S." and Canadian companies openly fretting about having to shift jobs to the United States to meet made-in-the-USA requirements. This week, the Canadians fired back. A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts -- the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.

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This is not your father's trade war, a tit-for-tat over champagne or cheese. With countries worldwide desperately trying to keep and create jobs in the midst of a global recession, the spat between the United States and its normally friendly northern neighbor underscores what is emerging as the biggest threat to open commerce during the economic crisis.

Rather than merely raising taxes on imported goods -- acts that are subject to international treaties -- nations including the United States are finding creative ways to engage in protectionism through domestic policy decisions that are largely not governed by international law. Unlike a classic trade war, there is little chance of containment through, for example, arbitration at the World Trade Organization in Geneva. Additionally, such moves are more likely to have unintended consequences or even backfire on the stated desire to create domestic jobs.

via Trade Wars Launched With Ruses, End Runs - washingtonpost.com.

For now, the only two elements of the political system are Progressive Corporatism and The Resistance. And the latter does not amount to much yet.

Why I Fear a One-Party State, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

Count me as part of the Resistance, I guess. Fat lot of good it seems to be doing.

No, really:

President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.

“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”

via Obama Says U.S. Long-Term Debt Load ‘Unsustainable’ (Update2) - Bloomberg.com.

He doesn't seem to be acting as if he believes it, though.

Neumont University is devoted to pumping out a steady stream of experts in computer science -- the only major that students can choose. The 6-year-old school places its graduates in high-tech jobs at such companies as EBay Inc., Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp. If trends hold up, more than 90% of the 59 students graduating with bachelor's degrees today will find work within three months.

But surrounding introverted computer programmers with other introverted computer programmers creates unique challenges for school administrators. Employers praise the skills of Neumont's graduates but complain about their computer addictions and difficulty socializing with colleagues. For their part, some students grumble that their peers spend too much time playing video games and too little time in the shower.

So in addition to the intricacies of computer science, Neumont is trying to teach its students how to get along better in the real world. Administrators forced them to close their laptops in class, established social clubs and required them to take courses in interpersonal communications and public speaking.

The efforts have met resistance. After all, students ask, what's the purpose of attending a place known affectionately as "Geek Heaven" if you're not free to geek out whenever you choose?

via At 'Geek Heaven,' students are skilled in tech, if not talk - Los Angeles Times.

Every tax day, a handful of lefties pen paeans to the federal government, and how they do and the rest of us should feel inspired, patriotic, and invigorated when we pay our taxes.

...

The sentiment is particularly misguided this year, as we begin year seven of a misguided war waged under false pretenses; we’re hearing new revelations every day about how the federal government has systematically violated our constitutional rights, and the human rights of others; and the government is spending billions, and risking trillions, to prop up private companies that took stupid risks and should have gone out of business for doing so–despite that the majority of the public opposes the bailouts.

Still, I always want to ask people who write these articles, why not pay more than your fair share, then? If greed (i.e., wanting to keep as much of your own money as possible) is evil, and if government really is so benevolent and wonderful (provided your party is running it, of course), why not pay double or triple what you owe?

via The Agitator » Blog Archive » Why Not Pay More?.

THIS is bad news for a functioning capitalist economy: federal aid has "supplanted sales, property and income taxes as the biggest source of revenue for state and local governments". The Heritage Foundation, no surprise, flips out at the news ...

via The state of the states | Democracy in America | Economist.com.

The money is taken from state residents by the Federal government, skimmed some to line Federal pockets, and then funneled back down to the states again. Talk about redistribution.