The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Good News! Unemployment Hits 9.8%

It’s the most wonderful time of the year isn’t it? New York Times: In a jolting surprise to the economic recovery and market expectations, the United States economy added just 39,000 jobs in November, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, according to the Department of Labor. Did somebody say “surprise”? Yes! Which can […]

As a Freelance Independent Blogger Consultant, I Have Enormous Sympathy …

. . . for those pathetic slobs who are merely “long-term unemployed“: The longer people stay out of work, the more trouble they have finding new work. . . . This country has some of the highest levels of long-term unemployment — or joblessness lasting more than six months — ever recorded. . . . […]

Economic Growth Causes Consumer Spending, Not the Other Way Around

Regarding Keynesian economics as self-evidently false, I seldom bother explaining in detail what’s wrong with it, preferring instead to mock it, e.g., “Aggregate Demand! Aggregate Demand!” It is nice, however, when economists provide us with the detailed analysis of specific errors of Keynesianism, in this case a five-minute video examining the relationship between consumer spending […]

Shorter Obama: ‘In This False Dilemma, America Must Make a Manichean Choice Between My Indisputably Wise Policies and My Tendentious Straw-Man Caricature of Republican Policies’

Of course, that description fits just about anything Obama says, not just today’s speech justifying a two-year freeze on federal civilian employee pay. It goes to show how, even when arguing in favor of a good policy, the president’s rhetoric is predictably crammed with invalid logic, counterfactual assertions, and — always — the effort to […]

‘Far More Grim’

Instapundit links a sobering discussion of America’s fiscal problems by National Review‘s Yuval Levin: Most of the baseline assumptions about the size of our debt assume that today’s exceedingly low interest rates continue. If they don’t — even if rates just return to the average of the past 20 years — the picture looks far […]

Did Someone Say ‘Desperation’?

Yeah, it’s Ed Driscoll talking about the attempt of liberals to make sense of their election “shellacking” through conspiracy theories. By the way, Michael Gerson’s invocation of John Stormer’s 1964 book None Dare Call It Treason is unfair to John Stormer, a patriotic American whom I interviewed in 1999 after the publication of his book […]

‘Unexpectedly’!

“New U.S. single-family home sales fell unexpectedly in October and prices dropped to a seven-year low, a government report showed on Wednesday, pointing sustained weakness in the housing market following the end of a home-buyer tax credit.” — Reuters “Orders to U.S. factories for long-lasting manufactured goods plunged in October by the largest amount in […]

Debt Causes Collapse of Irish Government

Something here I can’t quite put my finger on: The Irish government faced imminent collapse on Monday, only a day after it signed off on a $100 billion bailout, setting the stage for a new election early next year and injecting the threat of political instability into a European financial crisis that already has markets […]

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