Culture of Life

An odd and unreproducible chain of events dropped me in the blog of a near-neighbor. I can't quite put my finger on what I find so appealing, but check it out. Syd.

The Housing Bubble

Jeebus Forking Buddha! Who will help the widow's son rape his dead father's corpse?!? Evidently, not the real estate market - the Angry Bear sees it as too involved in running that railroad. The only sane advice is, do not pull your retirement fund out of stocks in order to dump it into property.

One subtlety of the price/rent graph: the rent on my graduate student hovel went through the roof at the exact same time that rents - averaged across the nation - were dropping in comparison to the purchase price. The chronically-depressed and counter-cyclical Utah extractive economy strikes again!

The only bright side to this is that I recently landed a job which pays about five times as much as I have ever earned before. I got mine, Jack, screw the widows and orphans.

The Housing Bubble

My God! I have been bloggered!

The Obvious Suspect

Daddy's got a new gimmick here, courtesy of pollhost dot com and the easy pieces. Check it out, Syd.

¿Quién es más macho?
	Erik Estrada
	Ricardo Montalbon
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Who Killed Cock Robin?

The newspapers, of course. CJR has a brilliantly concise writeup on the SSA trustees' report, and the shriekingly irrelevent and misleading fashion in which the story has been reported in the big foot papers. It feeds the hysteria, which enables the bushistas to lever in programs that will - in the near future - be recognised as Really Bad Ideas.

On the lighter side, check out Kung Fu Monkey's nostalgia for the way Republicans used to be. I used to be a Republican, just like he remembers except that I never smoked a pipe, but that was decades ago. Nowadays, the sober guys who keep the machine running have no choice but to sign on with the Democrats. Speaking of which, check out Garrison Keillor's Homegrown Democrat. We have a long history of being the right side, and we should be proud of it.

Propaganda

Check it out, Syd.

On the Other Hand

Brad DeLong leaps through the looking glass, and wonders how we might be treating Social Security should we find ourselves in some bizzaro world where honesty reigns.

Check it out, Syd.

Canary in a Coal Mine

Jeebus, while forking Christo, told me to make this experiment:

spew a hole lot'a jibberish while failing to record the angry bear in the act of .........

what? catching the bushistas in the act of telling lies? lining up a posse of incompetants? Hell! That's not news, that is standard operating procedure.

Jeebus! Fork that Christo until the sperm shoots out his eyeballs: we are all in deep trouble, for sure.

Krugman is the Anti-Coulter

You gotta' love the guy, especially when he smacks down Joementum like this.

Jonathon Chait is a Tool

Which goes without saying, given his job at the New Republic rag... [ Update: Dave Johnson agrees with me over at Seeing the Forest - as ever, he expresses himself better than I ever will. ]

But Josh Marshall scores again:

The question at the heart of the Social Security battle is this, do we stay with a program that has proven for seventy years to be both efficient and effective or do we discard it and move to a completely different system?

Understand this point and you will understand why this is such a great battle. You will understand why the Democrats are digging in their collective heels and shouting NO! You will understand why we heap such scorn upon Bush: his transparently dishonest vaporings have no purpose but to whip the people into a state of fear, from which they can be guided onto a spectacularly foolish path.

I don't want this nation to wake up in a few years with a devastating collective hangover. People will not be content to mutter "God! That was a dumb idea." and get back to work; the bushistas will be there to whisper "Blame the Democrats, it's all their fault." I am still angry at the way my own brother, Republican merchant of death, told me to my face that John Kerry was to blame for the war in Iraq: he did not work tirelessly enough to prevent Bush from making a really stupid move, so it's really all his fault.

To close on a lighter note, check out the latest update to the US Treasury's Social Security Destruction page.

Greg Mankiw is a Contemptible Liar

Drink some Pepto-Bismol before you head over to the New Republic, and take a look at the whole train wreck.
( Hats off to Atrios )

Harvard University is, by some measures, one of the most left-wing institutions on the face of the earth. So you may be surprised to hear that it has endorsed George W. Bush's proposal for Social Security reform. Literally, of course, that is not true. But the retirement plan Harvard has set up for faculty members like me bears a striking resemblance to what the Social Security system would become under the president's proposed changes.

The wingnuts love to chortle about the Little Red Schoolhouse on the Charles. Mankiw is a very smart guy, he writes eloquently, and he knows that his target audience with suck this shit up with a straw. Unfortunately, some of us here in Blogtopia actually attended Harvard and we know the truth about that place: it is a bastion of wealth and privilege. Aside from a minority of dissenting undergraduates, who are at best tolerated with bemused comtempt, Harvard is about as left wing as your local country club.

Mankiw is right there in Cambridge, so we know that he sees this. He is a super-bright guy, so the presumption is that he understands this. The only reason for him to then write the above nonsense is that he profits when people think that way. Method, Motive, Opportunity. Mankiw is a silver-tongued liar, he is up to no good, and I get furious when I think that I subsidised him by purchasing his crappy textbook.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Brad DeLong does it again - Dear Leader seems not to understand that Social Security, far from being in crisis, is working exactly the way it was designed to work. The 75 year plan of 1983 really, truly, and indeed has put the system on a sound footing all the way out to 2054.

The problem that does exist is that Congress, having distributed the excess FICA contributions through artificially-low rates on the income tax, may find it politically difficult to make the system whole through realistic income tax collections in the future; we may hear increasingly strident cries of "we stole that money, fair and square, and we are not giving it back!"

Daisy Chain

In the category of Blogs that Should be More Famous: MyKeru
I like the cut of his jib. He segues from the film Momento to the institutional amnesia of American society, when not dissecting the wingnut flapdoodlery over the recent shooting on Route Irish.

What He Said

Y'all won't be surprised to read that I am a big fan of unions, especially for highly schooled folk such as myself. My science PhD gives me the right to beg for a job in $100k range, but it does not in itself give me control over anything. In point of fact, the years of obsessive effort I invested in becoming the expert in my part of the field leave me at a competitive disadvantage when compared to the conniving weasels who invested those years in sucking their ways up the organisational ladder. Opportunity cost and all that.

We are, despite our highish salaries, at the mercy of the guys who control the money flow; when they stop smiling upon us, we are well and truly hosed. The only way to get any justice is for the technically adept folks, the ones who actually make the machines work, to join together and wield a credible threat against the goose that lays the golden eggs. We don't have to be jerks about it, we don't even have to make the threat explicit if such talk makes our own people uncomfortable, but the threat must be there.

After all, it is exactly this threat that gives the money guys their terrible influence over us.

She Shoots! She Scores!

Mahablog outdoes herself this morning. I link to a zinger of a tale - punchline, a big chunk of Bush's supporters really are the kind of religious lunatics that he only pretends to be and they ( like Giblets ) demand satisfaction - but the neighbors on either side are worth a look as well.

Things that Need to be Said

Angry Bear again, I love that guy/gal: the bankruptcy "reform" is not only socially unjust but economically inefficient to boot! The clear purpose of the legislation is to put money in the pockets of the financial services industry. What is not so obvious is that the cost will be paid by you and me, not just those nasty-lazy-stupid-poor would-be defaulters.

Those seething guys at See the Forest present a capsule summary of why we should all be very, very afraid about this country in the near term. So much frustration in those youngsters, I feel their pain.

Ties of Affinity

Brad DeLong

wherein he draws attention to the never-ending tension between the world of economists and the world of diplomats: taking the long view, it's not that difficult to see who the big players will be in the next century so would it not be a good idea to build relations with them now? Of course, he puts it better than I can.

Check it out, Syd.