[George Dreckmann, Madison's recycling coordinator,] said it costs nearly $6 million to run the city's recycling programs and Madison receives about $1.1 million from a state recycling grant. He sees few other ways to replace the money other than cutting back the recycling program. One possibility, he said, might be to no longer recycle glass, which is expensive to process.Exactly. Do that. Why should the state waste money incentivizing something that shouldn't be done? Why should Madison folk get to stoke their feeling of self-goodness with money from non-Madison Wisconsin?
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
"Walker proposed ending state-mandated community recycling, which was signed into law by Gov. Tommy Thompson in 1990, as well as elimination of the grants that help local governments pay for recycling."
Good! Right? If recycling is worth doing, it should be paying for itself without a state government subsidy, or, if not, let local communities decide if they want to cough up the money to do it anyway. It's time for decentralization, efficiency, realism... not fluffy-headed idealism. Saving money is the morality we need, not posing as good people by doing something if it actually makes no sense. I'm for pragmatism, not narcissism.
"I would've come yesterday but I had to work."
A sign at the Tea Party side of yesterday's demonstrations:
Other signs on display in this picture: "Scott Walker for President! Balance the Federal Deficit too! Stick with Walker and we're behind you!" and "PASS THE BILL" and "What DO you do when you're out of other people's..." (presumably: "money").
I can't guarantee that everyone in this picture is on the pro-Scott Walker side. I mean, I've been walking around everywhere, lending my body to the mass of humanity that reads as support from whatever the surrounding signs say. You tell me: Do you think the shaved-headed young man in the sunglasses and North Face jacket is a Tea Partier? If not, why not?
Other signs on display in this picture: "Scott Walker for President! Balance the Federal Deficit too! Stick with Walker and we're behind you!" and "PASS THE BILL" and "What DO you do when you're out of other people's..." (presumably: "money").
I can't guarantee that everyone in this picture is on the pro-Scott Walker side. I mean, I've been walking around everywhere, lending my body to the mass of humanity that reads as support from whatever the surrounding signs say. You tell me: Do you think the shaved-headed young man in the sunglasses and North Face jacket is a Tea Partier? If not, why not?
Food price warning.
The severe drought in China:
"China’s grain situation is critical to the rest of the world — if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population, it could send huge shock waves through the world’s grain markets..."
"The Most Feminist Place in the World."
You know it's got to be Iceland.
[A]ctivists from Stigamot, the rape crisis center in Reykjavik, gave Knut Storberget, Norwegian justice minister, black boxer-briefs with the words I Am Responsible written down the crotch....
Feminism, or at least the notion of gender equality, has so infused politics that, a couple of years ago, women members of Parliament performed The Vagina Monologues....
There are also new feminine spaces in the economy. As the economy went into overdrive, Kristín Pétursdóttir and Halla Tomasdóttir, who had been warning of disaster from her position at the Chamber of Commerce, founded Auður Capital, a “financial service company emphasizing feminine values and social responsibility.”...
"Take care of the ____ run and the ____ run will take care of itself."
Full in the blanks with the words “long” and “short.” A test originally proposed to distinguish conservative and liberal economists. I wonder if it more generally distinguishes conservatives and liberals.
Bloomberg uses the quirk of phrase that shows he hasn't absorbed the most basic message of the Tea Party movement.
From today's "Meet the Press":
DAVID GREGORY: Do you believe the tax cuts have an actual stimulative effect on the economy?Did you notice the phrase? He uses it twice. Interestingly, David Gregory takes care to avoid it, so Bloomberg had a good prompt, but he used it anyway.
BLOOMBERG: I don't think there's any question that they put more people -- more money in people's hands, and I think that the public will do a better job with more money in their hands to stimulate the economy than you will do with government programs.
GREGORY: But, Mayor, economists say, especially wealthier Americans don't end up necessarily spending money that they, that they keep through tax cuts. And look at the effect of the Bush tax cuts over a decade... what some have called a decade of, of futility, if you look at the number of jobs created.
BLOOMBERG: OK. But number one, some of these things are not connected, they just happen to have at same -- happened at the same time. And I think the more money you put in people's hands, the more they will spend. And if they don't spend it, they invest it. And investing it is another way of creating jobs.
"The Ohio and Wisconsin projects aren't even worthy of being called high-speed rail, as Wisconsin's average speed was projected to be just 59 mph..."
"... and Ohio's an even more lethargic 38.5 mph. ... New transportation technologies are successful when they are faster, more convenient, and less expensive than the technologies they replace. High-speed rail is slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and at least five times more expensive than either one. It is only feasible with heavy taxpayer subsidies and even then it will only serve a tiny portion of the nation's population."
Randal O'Toole at Cato.
More opinion collected here.
Randal O'Toole at Cato.
More opinion collected here.
Somehow, Bill Clinton is now President!
ADDED: "Please go." What a line!
AND: In defense of Obama, Clinton can be a windbag.
ALSO:
With Mr. Obama standing largely silently at his side, Mr. Clinton took over the lectern to lend his backing to the tax compromise the White House reached this week with Republicans. And then Mr. Clinton went on, for half an hour, answering questions and holding forth on topics from triangulation to Haiti to the mortgage crisis and the nuclear arms treaty with Russia.Why did Obama leave himself vulnerable to this grotesque upstaging, and why did Clinton do it? Was Clinton unaware of how this looked? Was Obama? Maybe Obama realized he'd made a mistake sharing the stage with Clinton without any ground rules, and walking out on Clinton was the best idea he had at that point. And maybe Clinton decided to deliberately show off the way a real President talks to the press because he actually wants to weaken Obama and create an opening for Hillary to challenge him in 2012.
Even after the 44th president excused himself and left the room, the 42nd went on. On cable TV, Mr. Clinton’s presence in front of the blue backdrop with the White House logo was familiar, as were the wagging finger and the occasional bitten lip.
Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama turned up suddenly after meeting privately together for almost 90 minutes in the Oval Office. With no warning to Mr. Obama’s aides, the two men wandered through the nearly deserted West Wing — most staff members were at a holiday party — and tried to get into the briefing room but found the door locked. Only after they finally encountered Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, were arrangements made to turn on the lights and microphone and assemble the press corps.
"The Stones carry no Woodstockesque, antibusiness baggage."
Why the Rolling Stones are able to make so much money.
Speaking of romance, Jagger addresses the subject of marriage:
Not everyone, of course, is enchanted by Jagger’s business smarts. There are those who see the Stones’ transformation into a brand as an affront to the very spirit of rock ’n’ roll, a betrayal of the lawless, piratical impulse that once made them great. Such romantics are inclined to question whether a song like “Street Fighting Man”(“Hey! Said my name is called disturbance/I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants”) can still be plausibly sung by an elderly knight who does sponsorship and licensing deals with Microsoft and Sprint.These "romantics" just need to perceive the romanticism of capitalism. Capitalism could say "my name is called disturbance" — creative destruction and all — don't you think? By the way, Mick Jagger studied at the London School of Economics.
Speaking of romance, Jagger addresses the subject of marriage:
“I don’t really subscribe to a completely normal view of what relationships should be... I have a bit more of a bohemian view. To be honest, I don’t really think much of marriage. I’m not saying it’s not a wonderful thing and people shouldn’t do it, but it’s not for me. And not for quite a few other people too, it would appear... I just think it’s perhaps not quite what it’s cracked up to be. I know it’s an elaborate fantasy.”Capitalistic?
"Normally when we think of happiness, we think of money and status, but Denmark teaches us the opposite lesson."
"There, you have a place where you are taxed to the mean. A cultural norm reminds everybody that they are no better than everybody else, so you're not going to choose your career path based on status. You're in a place where a garbage man makes as much as a lawyer. So what you have are 4 million people who excel at things like furniture design and architecture."
More from NPR.
More from NPR.
Did Paul Krugman endorse "death panels"?
The evidence.
I'd say he thinks you're not serious about the deficit if you let the term "death panels" scare you away from making tough decisions about what medical treatments the government should pay for.
I'd say he thinks you're not serious about the deficit if you let the term "death panels" scare you away from making tough decisions about what medical treatments the government should pay for.
How can they take away the mortgage interest deduction?
It's one of the deficit commission's proposals:
It's a complex policy question, and since there are other, offsetting tax breaks, it's hard to see who will be hurt the most. But generally, isn't it fairer to have lower tax rates than a bunch of deductions? With deductions, they only help if they're more than the standard deduction and if you do the thing the government has decided to favor.
Wouldn't it be better if you made housing decisions — rent or buy, big or small — without the government adding weight to one side? But if you've already bought a house, and the government's encouragement factored into your decision, you might feel cheated if they take that deduction away. Of course, the government always had the power to take the deduction away, and there's always the argument that you should have factored that in when you made your decision.
But that argument is going to piss people off unless they can remain calm long enough to see that a lowering of the tax rates more than offsets the bottom-line value of their deduction. But is that true? Does anyone know?
“The mortgage interest deduction is one of the pillars of our national housing policy,” said Michael D. Berman, chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association. “Limiting its use will have negative repercussions for consumers and home values up and down the housing chain.”...But:
[O]nly those in the top third of wage earners even itemized their deductions, meaning that two-thirds of taxpayers weren’t eligible for the break.Then why did "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blast[] the commission’s suggestions, saying it would force middle-class homeowners to subsidize tax breaks for the wealthy"? I guess there are a lot of "middle class" people in the top third of taxpayers.
“No one can make a serious intellectual argument in favor of the mortgage interest deduction,” [said Calvin Johnson, a tax professor at the University of Texas]. “Why should the government subsidize homeowners rather than renters? The only thing it’s good for is middle-class votes.”
It's a complex policy question, and since there are other, offsetting tax breaks, it's hard to see who will be hurt the most. But generally, isn't it fairer to have lower tax rates than a bunch of deductions? With deductions, they only help if they're more than the standard deduction and if you do the thing the government has decided to favor.
Wouldn't it be better if you made housing decisions — rent or buy, big or small — without the government adding weight to one side? But if you've already bought a house, and the government's encouragement factored into your decision, you might feel cheated if they take that deduction away. Of course, the government always had the power to take the deduction away, and there's always the argument that you should have factored that in when you made your decision.
But that argument is going to piss people off unless they can remain calm long enough to see that a lowering of the tax rates more than offsets the bottom-line value of their deduction. But is that true? Does anyone know?
"Rich professors doth protest too much."
Says Michael Kinsley. And I might want to read that article, but I'm too annoyed by the use of the verb "dost" with a third-person plural subject. I know it's a Shakespearean reference, but in an effort to go literary, he goes illiterate. He goeth illiterate. See? Doth is does, with a lisp. It's not plural.
ADDED: This post wrongly assumes Kinsley writes his own headlines over at Politico. Some unknown headline writer attempting to be literary, went illiterate.
ADDED: This post wrongly assumes Kinsley writes his own headlines over at Politico. Some unknown headline writer attempting to be literary, went illiterate.
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