Confessions of a Census Enumerator

Here.

IOUSA

A former colleague sent me the link to the video, IOUSA, that looks at the threat of the growing national debt. I could quibble with some of the points it makes (I think the debt held by the public is a more meaningful number than the gross debt, and the clip does not explain how a trade deficit is the inevitable outcome when a country that borrows does not save), but it explains why the debt should be the most important issue of domestic politics. It got good reviews, though I wonder if the people who liked it would like a 2010 remake. When the 2008 version says that one of the nation's problems is poor leadership, it is clearly pointing to the Bush administration.

On that topic of political leadership, Peter Wehner had an April 5th blog post at Commentary arguing that history will not look kindly on the Obama presidency. He notes that Obama inherited a terrible debt and deficit problem, to which both Republicans and Democrats had contributed. However:

What I do hold President Obama responsible for is that he took office when it was clear that our debt and deficit had reached crisis proportions. While that situation wasn’t the case when he decided to run for the presidency, it was the situation when he assumed the presidency. And rather than rethink the core purpose of his presidency, he decided to pursue his agenda in a state of denial, as if the financial collapse that began in September 2008 never happened, as if our ominous new fiscal reality had never occurred.

At the moment when history demanded one thing of Mr. Obama, he did another.
....
I have little doubt that Obama, having helped to engineer this fiscal calamity, will, later in his term, try to portray himself as a model of fiscal rectitude and Republicans as the party unconcerned with the mind-bending levels of deficit and debt he’s saddled us with. I am skeptical this trick will work. Family members are surely happy if a gambling addict gives up habit, but they aren’t about to be lectured on financial responsibility by a person whose gambling ruined the family finances.

The majority of the Obama presidency is still before us. Nevertheless, it’s not too early to say that on this vital front, Barack Obama has been, and will eventually be judged to be, a significant failure. He not only missed history’s calling, he mocked it. He placed his own statist ambitions above the needs of the nation he was elected to serve. Soon enough, and perhaps on a scale he cannot now imagine, Obama and his party will be held accountable for having done so.

 A 2010 remake of IOUSA would, if honest, have to reach conclusions similar to Wehner's. George Bush was as fiscally irresponsible as any president the U.S. has ever had, but compared to Barack Obama, he looks rather frugal.

DOGW

Here is a funny political video from the UK especially designed for April Fools Day:

Pornography

Is pornography addictive? This piece suggests that it is and that it has serious consequences for third parties.

Imagine a drug so powerful it can destroy a family simply by distorting a man’s perception of his wife. Picture an addiction so lethal it has the potential to render an entire generation incapable of forming lasting marriages and so widespread that it produces more annual revenue — $97 billion worldwide in 2006 — than all of the leading technology companies combined. Consider a narcotic so insidious that it evades serious scientific study and legislative action for decades, thriving instead under the ever-expanding banner of the First Amendment.

Pornography deserves a second look from economics. The libertarians have tended to treat it as a private matter, and argue that there is no disputing tastes. However, as a compulsion or addition it would be interesting from the point of view of behavioral economics. And if we recognize that it has externalities, mainstream public finance has a lot to say about it. I have been wondering if the enthusiasm many economists have for the global warming scare is not in large part due to the fact that they see it as an externality problem, and economists know how to fix externality problems.

Outsoucing and Obamacare

An effect of Obamacare:

Mumbai – With 22 pen strokes, President Obama signed into existence not just a historic healthcare reform law but also monumental piles of paperwork: New member registration forms. More claims. Ever-expanding databases. And on top of that, pressure to cut costs.
The bulge in administrative work may look like a nightmare to American insurance firms and government employees. But to outsourcing executives here in India, it’s heaven-sent. A number of Indian companies are already anticipating an increase in workload thanks to Obama's healthcare law.

As seen in Ely

There were a number of these signs in Ely, Nevada last week.

Polls say that Reid is in trouble this election year. The story behind the signs here.

Peter Robinson

http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/05/buckley-gergen-brooks-opinions-columnists-obama-liberal.html

The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right.

Moral Hazard

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner, seems to have forgotten what moral hazard is.

Competition

http://gizmodo.com/5484997/how-to-save-148-on-an-ipod-touch

Steyn on Greece

Mark Steyn has written one of those columns that only Mark Steyn can write, pointing out why Greece is in trouble and asking why Obama and the Democrats want us to follow their example:

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th-century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over.
....
So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?
....
We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.
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The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. 

The Welfare State is a giant Ponzi scheme and it only stays afloat as long as people have plenty of children. The authors of the welfare state probably never considered the possibility of demographic decline, just as those who gave us the housing bubble never considered the possibility that housing prices could decline. And as in the housing bust in the U.S., where bailouts of irresponsible financial institutions did not solve the underlying problems, bailing out entitlement states merely postpones the inevitable.