Whatever crosses my mind.
The U.S. government has done all it can to promote home ownership, clustering over-indebted Americans together out in the lush green suburbs behind white picket fences. But, what was once the American dream is now where 15.4 million people living below the poverty level reside, according to the Brookings Institute.
It’s not so much that attempts to do good always produce bad results. It’s more a matter of insufficient knowledge preventing any reliable prediction of results.
Bottom line: the idea that the state needs to protect us from the actions of private companies is just a smokescreen to hide the fact that the state itself gives these companies extra-market power in the first place by various state policies and laws…
I'm BAAACK
Well, my experiment with an alternative to tumblr was certainly a bust. I gave it a good try, but it seems tumblr best fits my preferred mode of broadcasting. Stay tuned!
Turning A Page
I am changing my habits and will no longer be posting to tumblr. Instead, I will be relying on Google Reader and using it’s sharing capability to identify things I’ve found enjoyable and to make short comments. If you want to continue to follow my output, it can be found at
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jimdew
Alternatively, if you’re a Google Reader user, you can follow my profile there.
I appreciate the small band of followers I’ve acquired on tumblr and apologize for any inconvenience.
The U.S. Postal Service has broached the possibility of closing 3,700 post offices. It hopes to save $200 million per year by doing so, but the USPS is losing $8 billion a year. Whatever the merits and demerits of the closures, many other things are going to have to give. The fundamental challenge for the USPS can be shown in one diagram taken from a recent white paper from the Office of the Inspector General. The volume of mail rose for decades, but has now topped off and dropped dramatically. A network built for the amount of mail being delivered in 2005 just won’t work for the volume of mail being delivered in 2010.
The report found that the CEOs of 25 major companies paid themselves more than their companies paid in Federal income taxes. Exhibit 1 on page 31 names and shames them (well, assuming they are capable of shame)
25 Big Corp CEOs Made More Than Their Companies Paid in Federal Taxes « naked capitalism
And why, exactly, is that a problem? What ought to be the ratio? And why? This seems like nothing but naked envy. And, last I looked, CEOs didn’t pay themselves - the shareholders paid them. And I’d gladly pay you 20 million bucks if you could put 10 million in my wallet by earning 30 million!
People on the left and right and especially the technocratic center who like to see the Fed as a loophole through a dysfunctional Congress are kidding themselves. The Fed is a political creature, not some haven for philosopher-economists in togas who will openly consider your ideas. Get over it
The cult of experts has acolytes in all ideological camps, but its most institutionalized following is on the left. The left needs to believe in the authority of experts because without that authority, almost no economic intervention can be justified. If you concede that you have no idea whether your remedy will work, it’s going to be hard to sell it to the patient. Market-based ideologies don’t have that problem because markets expect events in ways experts never can. No president since Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt has been more enamored with the cult of expertise than Obama. That none of his economic predictions have panned out is not surprising. What is surprising is that so many people are surprised.
