The Washington Post web site has the piece Economists to Romney campaign: That’s not what our research says.

The article starts with:

On Tuesday, the Romney campaign responded to the fire it’s taking from economic analysts by unleashing some artillery of their own. They released a paper by four decorated economists associated with the campaign — Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, John Taylor, and Kevin Hassett — that tried to lend some empirical backing to “The Romney Program for Economic Recovery, Growth, and Jobs.”

Hubbard, Mankiw, Taylor and Hassett make three main points: The first is that this recovery has been terribly slow, even by the standards of post-financial crisis recoveries. The second is that the Obama administration made a grievous error by relying on stimulus. And the third is that Romney’s tax and economic plans would usher in an era of rapid growth that would both be good for the country and provide the boost to revenues and employment necessary to make their numbers work out.

Each of these sections include supporting documents from independent economists. And so I contacted some of the named economists to ask what they thought of the Romney campaign’s interpretation of their research. In every case, they responded with a polite version of Marshall McLuhan’s famous riposte. The Romney campaign, they said, knows little of their work. Or of their policy proposals.

The article concludes with:

So even the studies that the Romney campaign’s economists handpicked to bolster their case don’t prove what the Romney campaign says they prove. And some of the key policy recommendations that flow from those studies are anathema to the Romney campaign. And in perhaps the key policy area highlighted by these studies, the Romney campaign doesn’t have a formal policy. If this is the best they can do in support of their economic plan, well, it’s not likely to quiet the critics.

Was the author of this article being generous when he called the Romney economists decorated?  Or was he thinking of something unpleasant with which they were decorated, or at least full of?

This is not the first time on this blog that I have published something about the economist Glenn Hubbard.  See for instance, What Is Republican Economist Glenn Hubbard Thinking Department?

Don’t “respected” institutions of higher learning have any standards for what is written by people they give the title of Professor or Department Head?

Politico has the article GOP memo: ‘Don’t say entitlement reform’.

 It only took two hours after the Paul Ryan vice presidential announcement for Republican congressional candidates to get their talking points on how to spin the Ryan budget and Medicare attacks.

“Do not say: ‘entitlement reform,’ ‘privatization,’ ‘every option is on the table,’” the National Republican Congressional Committee said in an email memo. “Do say: ‘strengthen,’ ‘secure,’ ‘save,’ ‘preserve, ‘protect.’”

If you are a Democrat, do not take any comfort in the beginning of the story.  It may look to you that the Republicans are panicking, and have just about told the Democrats what words to use to fight back.  However,  in discussing the memo, Politico went on to say:

The memo included a link to a 10-minute, 27-second YouTube video Shields had created in which he discusses a 2011 Nevada special House election Republicans had won. The race, Shields argues in the video, demonstrated how Republicans can successfully fight back against Medicare-centered attacks and “chase” Democrats “off the field on something they want to talk about.”

The Democrats made the huge mistake of  failing to respond to the issues raised by the Republican in the Republican’s counter claims.   The Democrat originally called the Republican a liar.  The Republican returned the favor by telling a lie against the Democrat that was bigger than the truth told by the Democrat.  As proof of his claims, the Republican used the Republican’s mother to vouch for his original lies. (And people fell for that, because the Democrat didn’t respond to the Republican lie that was bigger than the Republican’s original lie about wanting to protect Medicare.)

If people knew that the $500 billion dollar cut to Medicare claimed in the Republican video, is actually a cut in the subsidy to private insurers that encourages the private insurers take on some some of Medicare’s clients, then they would see what a big sham the Republican claim is.  The government has to give the private insurers something like a 15% subsidy to get them to do what Medicare does without that subsidy.

This program is called Medicare advantage, and I am on a Medicare Advantage plan, myself.  I figure that if the Government is going to be foolish enough to give insurance companies a 15% incentive to give me slightly better benefits to entice me to leave the Medicare system, then I am going to take them up on that offer.  If the government wants to go back to a level playing field and terminate this waste of money, I will be perfectly happy to go back to government run Medicare, and find my own way to get the miniscule extra benefits at far less cost than what the private insurers are getting now.

So the Republicans tell us that the we need to get a handle on Medicare’s impact on the budget.  They want to do this by cutting the benefits to the recipients of Medicare services.  The Democrats also say we need to get a handle on Medicare’s impact on the budget.  The Democrats want to do it by cutting out the waste of private insurers.

I am not going to be bamboozled by the Republicans’ attempt to use a big lie to combat the truth.

Are you going to be bamboozled?  Are you going to let your friends and relatives who are seniors be bamboozled by the big lie?

2012/08/15

In Paul Ryan’s plan for Medicare sets stage for campaign debate, I found a backup for the points I was making above.

Concerned about potential blowback from his pick, the Romney campaign aired a new ad Tuesday that says Romney’s plan would protect Medicare and accuses President Barack Obama of slashing Medicare spending through his health care law. That’s a misleading reference to 165 provisions of the Affordable Care Act that would spend $500 million to $700 million less over the next decade through reduced payments to providers and other provisions.

I think they meant billion not million, but at least some in the press are not going to let the Republicans get away with this misleading claim.

March 11, 2019

Look at the date of this post. It was in 2012 and it was for Elizabeth Warren’s first Senate race. I believed in Elizabeth Warren back then.

If you live in Brimfield, Brookfield, Charlton, East Brookfield, Holland, Palmer, Southbridge, Spencer, Sturbridge, Wales, Warren, or West Warren, I can supply you with an official Elizabeth Warren lawn sign.

Just go online and fill out the Lawn Sign Request Form. We will deliver your free lawn sign as soon as we can.

You have to fill in the form to get your sign, as the Warren campaign wants to keep tabs on who has lawn signs and where they are located.

If you do not live in one of the towns mentioned above, then I suggest you contact a Massachusetts Democratic Party Grassroots Office to get your sign.

The Elizabeth Warren official FAQ page says:

I want a yard sign. How do I get one?

Bumper stickers [yard signs ed.] are available in any of our 27 grassroots field office. Please find your nearest office and stop by between 10am-8pm to pick up your sticker.

You can also contact The Elizabeth Warren campaign at:

Elizabeth for MA
PO Box 290568
Boston, MA 02129
617-286-6715

Or visit the campaign headquarters at:

5 Middlesex Ave, First Floor
Somerville, MA 02145 (map | directions)

Office is located in the gray building with Planet Fitness and Lincoln Technical Institute (in between the Home Depot and K-Mart parking lots)

June 5, 2013

Now we are delivering Ed Markey lawn signs. See the post Ed Markey Campaign Lawn Signs.

Truth Out has Paul Krugman’s article US Conservatives Pile on the Excuses.

Thus someone like Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, starts by claiming to be a deficit hawk. Push him really hard, however, on why in that case he advocates big tax cuts, and he’ll shift to arguing that big government (as opposed to not-paid-for government) is the real problem. But if you push hard on that, it turns out that there’s yet another layer: the claim that policies like taxing the rich to help pay for social insurance are immoral, because people have a right to keep the wealth they created — which is why suggesting that no plutocrat is an island is heresy.

This onion structure is why you should never believe reasonable-sounding conservatives who say that you’re attacking a straw man, that “nobody believes” that wealth creators owe nothing to society.

Oh, yes they do — it’s usually hidden inside a couple of socially acceptable excuses, but at their core Mr. Ryan and people like him believe that they’re characters in “Atlas Shrugged.”

I think that last statement is key to understanding Paul Ryan, and is key to understanding the fallacy of their prescription for society.

Up until about sophomore year in college, I was a big fan of Ayn Rand and her books including “Atlas Shrugged”.  I thought that the book of fiction explained a lot of the problems our country faced in real life. The big, bad government hampered the marvelous efforts of the entrepreneurs.  The welfare recipients were just lazy parasites.

Then I undertook to write a research paper for an economics course that I was taking.  I don’t remember how I came to decide to write a paper focused on what was called back then “cultural deprivation”.  As I researched the subject, I came to understand that there were children who grew up in an environment that was lacking certain “cultural advantages” such as a home life where parents could devote time to reading to and talking to their children starting from infancy.  Statistically speaking, these children had much less chance of succeeding in education and careers that depended on education.  They did not come in contact with role models that could demonstrate the way that education could lead to a better life.  These children had no way of figuring out a way to a better life, and didn’t even have a clue that there was a way out.

You could not blame the parents for their children’s predicament either.  The parents were struggling so hard to provide for the basic needs of their children, that they could not provide cultural amenities such as books, magazines, and newspapers in the home.  Probably worse, was that they could not devote as much time with their children as they would have liked because they had to devote so much time to providing the bare necessities of life.  In earlier times, where generations of families stayed pretty much where they were born, older generations could provide backup for the younger, child rearing generation.  The way our industrial society was structured, more families had generations that moved to where the jobs were and severed the ties to their support systems.  The parents of children who were “culturally deprived” were probably “culturally deprived” as children themselves.

Of course, we don’t live in a binary world, where all people are characters from “Atlas Shrugged” or where none of the people are characters from “Atlas Shrugged”.   The problem with the world view portrayed in “Atlas Shrugged” was that it was more appropriate, perhaps, for the Communist, totalitarian societies in which Ayn Rand grew up, rather than in the Democratic mixed economies of countries like the United States.  There was no place in the “Atlas Shrugged” world for the idea that there may be deprived people who could be helped with some intervention from society.  Nor could she fathom that society could be improved by giving help to such deprived people.

So at about the age of 18 or so, I grew out of my infatuation with the Ayn Rand philosophy.  Unfortunately, their are people like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney who never grew up.  They are suffering in their own way from a different form of “cultural deprivation”.  They have no clue as to the problems that certain people not in their “class” may suffer at the hands of people in their “class”.  The people in the Romney class want to set up a society that is based on an unrealistic view of the composition of people in that society.  What works to the advantage of the people raised with all the proper amenities works to the distinct disadvantage of the people who were not so fortunate when they were children.

You should not consign people to a place in society based on what they lacked as children. They were very unlikely to be able to overcome their disadvantage on their own.  Notice, I said unlikely.  There are always exceptional people in any population – the very idea is the foundation of “Atlas Shrugged”.  You cannot point to these exceptional people and claim that everybody in their situation should have been able to rise above their circumstances.  Sounds like Garrison Keillor’s description of Lake Woebegone where all the children are above average.

Notice also, that what I presented here is the point that President Obama was making when he said successful people did not make it entirely on their own.