Juan Cole gets the prize

For the most repellent, most inhuman piece I think I’ve ever read: Dear Oklahoma: We Feel for you, we love you, but do us some favors

What the hell does James Inhofe being a Senator or ‘the sequestration’ have to do with the disaster that befell these people in Moore, OK. ‘Sorry about you losing loved ones and all but could you vote a different way? Or at least get a majority of other people in your state to vote a different way since actually I have no way of knowing how you voted, I’m just going by average numbers, which is dumb, and even in the reddest of red states at least 25-30% of people voted (D), meaning in those cases my admonition to you makes no sense, but whatever. I’m a professor’?

This reaction is the height of selfishness. It’s all about how it affects Juan Cole. And ‘affects’ is used almost-infinitely loosely here, because the effect we’re talking about is the very diffuse effect of OK sending (R) Senators and Congressman to DC X% more consistently than the average state, which affects votes on national policy to a degree of something not exceeding X times 1/50, and some of those policies end up being policies that Juan Cole doesn’t like and wishes were different (albeit even of those, the policies he doesn’t like probably don’t affect Juan Cole in any measurable way).

Stack that up against strangers losing their loved ones and Juan Cole, weighing his priorities, decided that his small-minded and retarded party-politics screed just had to be aired.

What sort of person could write such a piece. What sort of mind sees a devastating, deadly tornado and turns immediately to party politics. A soulless, monstrous creep of a little, little man that’s who.

Why is this man a professor? Other professors have been hounded and drummed out of their positions for writing things far, far less offensive.

There’s usually more than one way to pay things

Seeing scattered talk on the right about whether Obamacare will lead to a sudden insurance-premium sticker stock. I would advise that this doesn’t really make sense. There is a danger here of being perceived as crying-wolf.

Will employees with health care plans see their ‘premiums’ suddenly go up next year? Um, maybe? But maybe not. This really requires asking ourselves: what is a ‘premium’?

You go to a job. Your employer gives you Compensation. What is that Compensation? Some of it is Money. (This is the best form of Compensation IMHO.) Other Compensation might be 401(k) matching, stock options, etc. But some of it is in the form of Signing You Up For A Health Plan (and reducing your Money Compensation).

Is that what people are referring to as their ‘premium’? The nominal pay reduction the company tells you you’re taking for being in a Health Plan? Notice that you don’t actually ‘pay’ that ‘premium’. Instead what happens is you get a smaller paycheck than the (theoretical) paycheck your company tells you you’d be getting if you had no health plan (which is usually impossible – isn’t it? at least, although I’ve never tried it, I presume you’d have to submit a whole bunch of paperwork to decline your company’s health care plan altogether, even pre-Obamacare).

So if that’s what is meant by ‘premium’, that number doesn’t have to ‘go up’ at all. Even if insurance costs will indeed soar, and the result will indeed be passed onto employees, there’s more than one way to do that. Money is fungible. The employee doesn’t necessarily have to be shown a literal increase in the form of the nominal ‘premium’ their employer tells them they’re literally ‘paying’.

Maybe you just don’t get that pay raise you would’ve otherwise gotten (or smaller than otherwise).

Maybe your company just puts a freeze on promotions so any promotion you would’ve otherwise gotten is effectively pushed back by a year or three.

Maybe they cut back on perks, expense compensation, etc.

Maybe your company reduces headcount and loads the extra work onto the remaining employees, like you.

All of these things would be meaningful setbacks and reduce your effective hourly Compensation, in direct response to the increasing cost of insurance. But none of them would be instances of your ‘premium’ actually rising.

The problem with screaming ‘premiums will rise!’ is that accounting can hide any such ‘rise’ and thereby lull people into thinking dumb things like: ‘golly, look at my new health-care pamphlet, Obamacare isn’t costing me any extra at all like the ‘wingers said it would!’ When you hear this – as, I think, you inevitably will – please just remember how dumb a thought it is, and keep in mind that just because a cost isn’t explicit doesn’t mean it’s not there.

First-order thinking, SWPL moms, and the Warren-Facebook Phenomenon

Something about Elizabeth Warren seems to bring out the dumbest in left-leaning commentators. A year or two ago it was some stupid GIF that people were posting on their Facebook with a stupid quote from her on it and her head tilted in that ‘concerned/caring’ manner and the quote was about as deep and as wide as saying ‘share the wealth mmkay?’. Was it a smart statement? Dumb statement? The truth is that it wasn’t even worth apprehending or wasting brain cells thinking about; it may as well have been your kid’s daycare worker telling him to share his Legos. You don’t reason with that or argue with that (or for that matter, agree with that), you just came to pick up your kid and get the heck home.

Who in the world made that GIF? And why? Who exactly read that quote from Elizabeth Warren and said ‘you know what? That quote’s so brilliant I’m going to make a GIF out of it”? How dumb does a mind have to have been to have been impressed by that quote? I dare not even speculate. I just ate.

Anyway, it worked, because the left swooned. Their brains shut down. And who can blame them? The background of the GIF was a nonthreatening gray. The woman, whoever she was, had a round soft haircut. Glasses bespoke intelligence. You felt like she was your college professor or perhaps more likely, some kind of administrator with vague responsibilities involving lots of Meetings. Hand in motion in front of her as if she was talking. Talking directly to them. Hey! I like ladies who talk with their hands! She must know what she’s talking about!

Culturally, that image was a knockout punch. That’s exactly who Smart People want running things. Round face round hair glasses-wearing pants-suit nonthreateningly-plain-looking white (but ‘diverse’!) daycare-center-coordinator type who vaguely wants to share the wealth. Say no more. You had them at ‘mmkay?’. It was the entire package. None of them knew the first thing about who this ‘Elizabeth Warren’ (also – a great name! she sounds like a serious person!) was but they all knew one thing, they wanted to make her be a Senator or whatever the heck it was she was running for, wherever the heck it was.

And so now she is, so we’re stuck paying attention to her. On the basis of the reasoning outlined above. That’s how our system works. That’s how Smart People make their decisions. GIFs on Facebook. They look at the GIF. And think ‘I don’t know anything about that person but she mouthed the right platitude and looks like the type of person I want to be in charge of everything’. Maybe she reminded SWPL-type White People of their (soccer) moms? Whatever the explanation, just remember the Warren-Facebook Phenomenon next time you’re tempted to think Smart People are actually smart.

Anyway, her latest utterance to have short-circuited the brains of and thereby captured the imagination of Smart People is some suggestion she apparently made to have the fedgov offer cheaper student loans. Last time we observed in this space that Noah Smith thought it was a good idea because student loans are riskless because he’s so smart he knows of the existence of portfolio theory, which no one else does, and only idiot non-economists like Megan McArdle don’t realize that portfolio theory makes all things riskless or something (I’m paraphrasing). And now (of course) Matthew Yglesias is here to chime in that even though it’s a gimmick it’s still a great idea.

If the problem with lowering the student loan rate to the discount window rate is that it’s too fiscally costly, then making it a one-year measure is the solution.

Logic: If making it a one-year measure is ‘the solution’ then wouldn’t it stand to reason that making it a zero-year measure is an even better solution? If the problem with eating two piles of shit is that it tastes bad, is ‘the solution’ to eat only one pile of shit?

But in the short term with unemployment more than 7 percent and the inflation rate running well below the Federal Reserve’s self-imposed 2.5 percent threshold, there’s nothing wrong with having the federal government lose money.

Got that? There’s ‘nothing wrong with’ having the federal government lose money. A nice little reminder that these are exactly the type of people we want to be in charge of everything. Smart People. To lose your money in Smart ways.

Seriously, how dumb is this going to get? I am afraid. Senators have 6-year terms; that’s a long time for the entire lefty commentariat to get continually, monotonically dumber.

Anyway, perhaps I missed it but when did we all decide that we need to send even more fricking people to college, to come out with a degree and nowhere to use it (and debt, albeit low interest debt – it’s still debt)? And, is college tuition somehow too low after decades of inflating tuition rates with easy-money student-loans that we want to inflate tuition even more by spraying even more (now, lower-interest!) federal money at all the universities’ loan offices? And of course when tuition climbs in response to sap up/rent-seek at this newly-Warren-inflated federal student-loan trough, and you give all these kids this debt, how exactly are you doing them a favor by charging them X% lower ‘interest’ if their (non-BK-dischargeable!) principal is actually 2X% higher? Or, where is the actual analysis that convinced all these Smart People that this isn’t what would happen?

Or do Smart People not even get that far in their reasoning? As happens all too often the reasoning indeed seems to be utterly first-order, stopping entirely at Step One: ‘college degrees good, so give more loans to get college degrees = good’. But come on. Usually the reasoning is at least better than this. It really just seems to be the case that Elizabeth Warren – whoever the heck she is – makes people dumber. Especially Smart People.

Megalinx

Linx clogging things up:

Should we adopt the Swedish model? Sounds dirty somehow.

Foseti unlike certain others can’t think of any opinions that should disqualify someone from being employed by a willing employer.

Why a QE exit isn’t scary.

Is the fix for credit rating agencies to create an ‘open-source’ rating agency, i.e. yet another federally-deputized bond-blesser, but an ‘open-source’ one therefore (presumably) for Occupy hipsters to work for? Me I still vote for no federally-deputized bond-blessers.

Evil Obamacare rejectionists are trying to spike the law by pointing out what it actually says.

Some kind of prime number breakthrough.

Matt Welch on the stupid Youtube-video cover story: “Who cares if we have slandered a Cerritos resident by mischaracterizing his crappy art as “incitement” then followed that up with two weeks of partial blaming; we’re trying to manage an interagency turf war over here!” Indeed.

The actual data doesn’t seem to indicate that Hispanics vote, or not, based on big immigration bills. The Stupid Party doesn’t care about actual data though.

Why David Simon doesn’t tweet. Like one needs a reason.

The IRS scandal is not about the President.

Yglesias makes the argument that the answer to bubble hangovers is to make people work harder. The argument is actually compelling. So I assume this means that in a downturn he would advocate, at the very least, (1) not extending unemployment insurance, (2) reducing regulations and taxes to make it easier and cheaper to employ labor. He certainly wouldn’t be in favor of slapping a giant new cost-of-hiring-people onto employers in the form of a national health care overhaul, but with a healthcare-welfare backstop for those who don’t get it. We want more people working! I mean, right?

Juan Cole thinks Benghazi and the Youtube video was a Republican plot to make Obama look like Jimmy Carter. ‘Make’? Anyway, do read it. Comedy gold.

Art Carden smacks down ‘Pigovian tax’ reasoning: “we can’t make policy designed to fix externalities without taking all the relevant externalities into consideration”. Thank you. All large calculations are wrong.

Conor Friedersdorf points out that President Obama has indeed broken the law, a lot, in a piece that deserves widespread publicity.

There was no surge in IRS tax-exempt applications in 2010. This is a good time to point out that sometimes people who are Informed and Keep Up With The News can be dumber than people who ignore all this nonsense. If you like me know some lefties who are Informed, they read this or that Kevin Ezra Drum Klein piece that feverishly laid out the talking-points for them, the catechism, which began like: “You see, back in 2010, the IRS was faced with a mountain of applications…” Satisfied, these Informed lefties nodded their heads sagely, then put down the piece, and stopped paying attention to this issue. ‘I understand. I have a good talking-point now’. They told this talking-point to anyone who would listen. That’s what being Informed is for! Quickly and efficiently collecting easy-to-remember talking-points that reaffirm what you already wanted to believe. Do you notice the later story which says, Uh, no, there wasn’t really any such surge? Of course not. Of course you don’t. Not that I pretend to know who’s right here. I don’t think it’s worth sorting through. The main point is that Pundits are not engaged in giving truth; the truth-value of what they write is roughly 0. Disclaimer: I’m not a Pundit, technically. My truth-value is more like 0.35.

You don’t say

Chris Matthews:

“What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press…. He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft,” Matthews said.

“So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere,” Matthews continued. “But what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.”

Why, it’s almost as if President Obama was just some goofy, spoiled activist who had no meaningful executive experience – or any other kind of relevant experience for being the President for that matter – or something.

Next up on the Chris Matthews show – I can only assume – ‘Maybe a guy being ‘Cool’ isn’t such a great proxy for how good of a leader he will be after all?’

The riskless trade

If you want to know a riskless, free-option trade, it’s student loans, apparently. I heard this from (I gather) Econ Prof. Noah Smith on Twitter. Student loans are riskless for the government and they make the government a free profit (with, did I mention, no risk). You guys should all go all-in into SLABS now. (<—Note: NOT actual investment advice)

His arguments involved two main factors: (1) historically-realized default rates/severities, and (2) the purportedly low correlation in student-loan portfolios, again by which I assume he means historical/realized. Both of these relate to the magic of portfolio theory (which apparently, according to Econ Profs, makes risk go away, i.e. idiosyncratic risk becomes riskless if it’s bundled into a portfolio) and are indeed great prospective risk metrics which, I think you’ll agree, served us so very well during the subprime/CDO crisis. I think some investment bank should quickly snap up Noah Smith to be their Fixed-Income Chief Risk Officer.

I can’t link to any of this because he seems to have blocked me, or whatever bizarrely pussy/cowardly move it is that people do on Twitter that makes me suddenly not be able to find the tweet back-and-forths we’d been sending. (Sorry, I’m still kinda new to Twitter, maybe someday I’ll figure out how to do that pussy move too). So you’ll have to take my word for it. But I did want to record for posterity that I got this hot trade idea of riskless student loans from a Econ Prof, and what it was based on. You’re welcome.

I’d trade impeachment for substantive criticism any day

This is exactly the kind of wagon-circling silliness that I think post-Nixon impeachment-fetishism engenders. The whole piece is Jamelle Bouie sweating out a fever-dream that President Obama will be impeached. Why does he care? Because Obama is His Guy and so that would Make Him Feel Bad. I guess. I dunno. But that’s the whole piece. “If there’s a problem”, he sputters (“if”! he can’t even bring himself to say there’s a problem!), it’s that it provides “fodder” for conservatives. That’s how scared of ‘impeachment’ he is.

It happens every time. Any time there’s a scandal or misdeed, the first thought of the Incumbent Defenders is ‘oh noes what if the other side says this is impeachable’ and the first thought of the out-of-powers is ‘hey maybe this is impeachable and we can finally get him?’

And so of course in the meantime there is no room for serious discussion let alone actual contemplation of the actual things that these people in our government did: target political enemies for extra tax scrutiny, and lie about the cause of an attack on our country to prevent electoral embarrassment.

The important thing to remember, as always, is that it is moot. No President will be impeached. Ever again. (I’m not even sure any Presidents will ever lose their second-term re-elections ever again. At most, once in a blue moon.) Ok?

So here’s a deal for the Jamelle Bouies of the world: I’ll metaphysically promise not to ‘impeach’ President Obama, if you’ll promise to wake up, open your freaking eyes, and actually think and talk about the substance (if you’re capable, that is) of what people in government do or don’t do, so that errors, mistakes, and bad decisions can be meaningfully critiqued and (perish the thought!) corrected. This stupid ‘impeachment’ threat (do (R)s even really want to impeach Obama and wake up to President Biden?) is a pointless albatross that prevents all serious discussion. Of everything. And since I don’t believe for a microsecond that it has any chance of happening anyway (remember: Obama is cool, and black), I don’t really feel like it’s giving anything up.

Do we have a deal?