"In many states, [GOP] candidates don’t get to choose who their delegates are.” https://t.co/5V7xEvdc2K
— David Frum (@davidfrum) December 29, 2015
In other words: it’s very possible that Trump could arrive at Cleveland in far first place -and still see nomination taken away from him
— David Frum (@davidfrum) December 29, 2015
@davidfrum And he & his supporters would burn that convention to the ground. It would destroy the GOP.
— Steven (@leftofjuniper) December 29, 2015
It was such a beautiful prospect, for us chaos muppets, but the New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza says it’s not gonna happen:
In the Wall Street Journal, on Monday, Benjamin Ginsberg, a longtime Republican Party lawyer who is most famous for the role he played as the Bush campaign’s legal counsel during the 2000 Florida recount, caused a stir in political circles. In a piece called “Flirting With a Chaotic GOP Convention,” Ginsberg argued that Republican leaders need to take seriously the idea that there might not be a candidate who has secured more than half of the 2,472 delegates needed to win the Party’s nomination when Republicans meet at their convention, in Cleveland, next July…
… In the media, this situation is often referred to as a “brokered convention”—but that’s a misnomer, because there are no convention brokers. That job doesn’t exist anymore. When it was normal for convention delegates to gather and decide on their party’s nominee, brokers—state party leaders, labor or other interest-group bosses—acted as managers of blocs of delegates. These days, nobody even knows who the delegates are, much less exercise any control over them. The more precise term for a situation in which the nominee isn’t clear after the primaries is a “contested convention.”
How likely is a contested convention? Not very. In fact, it may be infinitesimal…
It’s hard to see now, but the large field of Republican candidates will almost certainly be winnowed down to three or four contenders after the voting happens in the first three states—Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The G.O.P. field has already been gradually compressing, as candidates who have found little support in the polls, or from donors and party insiders, have dropped out of the race… In previous cycles in which contested conventions were predicted, the dynamic of winnowing eventually produced a two-person race and then a clear winner. If Donald Trump is one of those two candidates this time, there will be enormous pressure on the Republican Party establishment to consolidate its support for one of his rivals, and the others will be driven from the race. Aside from Trump’s rise, the oddest thing about the 2016 race is that the G.O.P. establishment has been slow to pick an alternative. Usually this happens in the year before the election. But this time, it seems likely that it will take a few caucuses and primaries to offer some clarity before the Party decides on its mainstream choice. Avoiding a potentially disastrous contested convention will serve as an added incentive for the Republicans to rally around a single candidate…
For all the 2014 braggadocio about the GOP’s “deep bench”, what seems to have happened is that every candidate on offer had such shallow support that a whole bunch of second- (third-, fourth-) stringers weren’t discouraged from jumping into the competition face-first. Sure, by every rule of “normal” politics, it’ll be down to three or four candidates after March 1st, if not sooner — but “normal” hasn’t been a big factor in this cycle’s GOP competition, so far.
***********
Apart from wishing (further) confusion to our enemies, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Baud
Whatever happens, it’ll be good for John McCain as far as the media is concerned.
raven
Gotta take my truck and pick up xmas trees for the annual “Bring one fir the Chipper” event at the neighborhood school!
amk
gop 2016 is a poo flinging contest. who knows which sticks and which falls off.
Mustang Bobby
The Grey Lady Paper of Record reports that radical Islamists are using Donald Trump for recruiting videos.
No comment from the Trump campaign yet, but anyone wanna bet they’ll blame it on Hillary Clinton for giving them the idea?
bystander
Given the average repub’s connection to reality, the GOP’s only hope is that some channel counterprograms a kitten repub convention, like the kitten bowl, and they never notice they got the wrong channel.
JPL
@Mustang Bobby: Personal responsibility is only for the little guys.
Villago Delenda Est
Deep bench of shit, more like it. They’re all assclowns.
Villago Delenda Est
@bystander: Oh, they’ll notice. Kittens are cute. Unlike Rethugs. Ugly to the bone.
OzarkHillbilly
As the waters recede, the clean up begins.
My wife took Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off so she just wouldn’t have to deal with any of it. And get a handle on some of the incessant clutter in this house.
An Outhouse
Sometimes you need to destroy it to save it. Besides I don’t think the GOP cares. They know they can’t beat Hillary. They’ll sit out 2016 and let the clowns self destruct.
Baud
That would be Cruz, no? I don’t see Cruz looking to help another candidate by dropping out.
Uncle Cosmo
Did anyone else note the Tweet of the Year in last night’s “open thread for night owls” over at the GOS?
Priceless!
Uncle Cosmo
@Villago Delenda Est:
That’s deep trench–with a board for naked arses to perch on as they shit into the dark olfactory obscenity far below…
SRW1
@Baud:
Was wondering in the same direction: How would the establishment buy off Cruz?
Also, too: With Trump clinging on to a third of the support and Cruz possibly managing to come close, just how many percentage points does Mr Ginsberg think would be left for a consolidated candidate of the establishment?
MattF
I imagine that there are lots of less obvious ways for the Republican Establishment to put their thumb on the scale. It’s possible that Trump will just run away with the nom, otherwise it will be someone who no one wants to vote for.
ETA: I’m not counting Cruz. There are, believe it or not, people who want to vote for him.
Satby
@OzarkHillbilly: Wow.
Satby
@MattF: the knuckle daggers who want Trump will not take the Republicans stealing the nomination from him as well as previously, I think. They support him because he’s not the establishment candidate.
Gimlet
The biggest issue that would make a GOP candidate President in 2016
http://nypost.com/2016/01/01/why-america-is-right-to-think-obamas-losing-the-war-on-terror/
The latest CNN/ORC poll shows that more Americans think terrorists are winning their war against the United States than at any time since 9/11. The survey shows public discontent with the White House approach to be even greater than in the depths of George W. Bush’s Iraq debacle.
Sixty percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of terrorism; 64 percent of his approach to ISIS.
the no-so-good news: It remains to be seen if the Iraqis can follow up on the Ramadi win — or if the government will let its Shiite militias run wild, pushing the Sunni locals into the arms of the next terror group to come calling.
And the bigger bad news: In the 16 months since Obama announced his “degrade and ultimately destroy” approach, ISIS has acquired satellites around the Muslim world, from Libya to Afghanistan to the Sinai peninsula. Oh, and the Israelis broke up an ISIS cell in Nazareth just before Christmas.
Plus, the worse news: Al Qaeda again has bases in Afghanistan, with more on the way, as the Taliban controls more of the country than it has since 2001.
debbie
If only they’d noted the potential irony in their talking point about an “embarrassment of riches”!
@Baud: I can’t imagine the establishment stomaching Cruz after what he’s done to them over the past few years. I’d bet it will go to Rubio instead.
OzarkHillbilly
Pied Piper of failed river policies saw this flood coming
…..
I remember after the flood of ’93, the city of Chesterfield put up a billboard on I-64 right where one began the drop into Chesterfield Bottoms where the Monarch Levee had failed. It said, “Chesterfield of Dreams- Rebuild it and They will come”. I wanted to spray paint on it, “Like Lambs to the Slaughter”. And it’s there, waiting, waiting for the next unprecedented flood that nobody could have seen coming. Except of course for those of us who did. And this time it won’t cost just a billion $ or so, it will billions of $. The way we manage rivers in this country is an absolute insane self-inflicted disaster that each and every one of us pay for.
And the flooding of rivers is not like other natural disasters such as hurricanes, or tornadoes or earthquakes. We can’t abandon the whole of the west coast which sets on the ‘ring of fire’, or the entire midwest because of tornadoes that can strike anywhere, or the whole of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts** to avoid hurricanes. But we can stop building in flood plains and allow them to perform their natural function even as we continue use them for farming. Anything else is folly.
**then again with climate change we may have no choice but to abandon parts of them at the very least
Satby
@efgoldman: They’re sporadic voters and mostly the long gone Reagan Dems, who left the party because too much was being “given away” to the undeserving. But the spite is strong in them, and they vote when they’re riled up. Which they will be by having their frontrunner robbed of the nomination if he’s still leading.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
Similarly, I remember the mayor of some Iowa town refusing to let them build a dike after the 1993 floods because it would hurt tourism. No matter how bad they get, floods don’t stand a chance against greed.
Satby
@OzarkHillbilly: if they couldn’t get insurance they wouldn’t build. Sooner or later the market will decide for the lily-livered politicians who can’t.
Keith G
I would bet that if the job of “Convention Broker” did exist, one of the options under consideration to make the better of a horrific situation would be to get Paul Ryan to be the nominee.
The Trump base would go spastic, but they would have a meltdown anyway. Ryan, as bad as he is, would be the kind of person who might get a growing consensus (minus the far Right) to build around.
I am not saying that this is probable or that Ryan would ever want to agree, but the GOP might want to find a rabbit to pull out of it’s hat that will not be automatically repulsive to such large swaths of the population.
bystander
@SRW1:
Probably with deposits to accounts in Canada.
@Gimlet: That is scary, especially given the ease with which repub pols use the media to megaphone their hair-on-fire shrieks.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Cruz is the Littlefinger of the GOP. “Chaos is not a pit, it’s a ladder.”
MattF
@Keith G: It’s true that you see articles from op-ed writers who eliminate every possible R candidate one-by-one, and then just pick a name out of the hat– along with that suitablely tame and de-fanged rabbit. But it’s obviously wishful thinking. We shall see, I guess.
OzarkHillbilly
@Satby: Flood insurance is a federally subsidized program. Your tax dollars at work.
Schlemazel
@OzarkHillbilly:
I assume that at some point ACE will propose sacrificial fields along rivers. They will select low-lying farms & fields and pay the land owners to allow flood waters to fill those while towns and infrastructure get higher flood walls. But thats just a guess.
Schlemazel
@Keith G:
Conventional wisdom says Ryan would be hated by the wingnuts who now blame him for Congress allowing the passage of a budget & failure to fill ACA. I think they’d like him to ‘cool off’ a bit before being the face of the party again.
Baud
@MattF: Apparently, Chris Christie is being talked about again. It’s fascinating how invested the media is in ensuring the “right” person wins the GOP nomination.
Baud
@efgoldman:
I’m not sure why that matters if Trump is in fact speaking to them and piquing their interest.
Baud
Obama is so divisive.
MattF
@Baud: Yeah, George Will sez so. Piece-of-shit with a bowtie.
Amir Khalid
Feh. Liverpool is losing 2-0 at West Ham.
PurpleGirl
@OzarkHillbilly: Yes, and why is flood insurance a federally run program…
wait for it…
because the insurance companies stopped writing flood insurance because it became just a money looser.
The invisible hand of the market at work and people who refuse to accept it.
Schlemazel
@Baud:
It does if it means they can’t be bothered to show up in caucus states or if when they show up they don’t know the rules and get steamrolled by the folks who know what they are doing. I said this a month or so ago, Trump could win most of the primaries & still not have enough delegates to win the nomination outright. If the part can control who is winning caucuses they can control the nomination. Its what I am hoping for!
The big roadblock for them is they have to have a single candidate and they have to beat Ayn Paul’s tru-belibers, who almost made a mess of 4 years ago by knowing how to beat the caucus system in several states.
OzarkHillbilly
@Schlemazel: That is what was proposed following ’93. They even had a few buy outs (most notably of one entire IL town whose name escapes me just now.) And there are levees along the MS and MO rivers that are actually designated by the Corps of Engineers to be blown when flood waters threaten a town.* In the meanwhile more low lying areas are developed for uses other than farming** and existing levees are built higher and higher (in an attempt to make the high water “somebody else’s problem”) because we have a broken system that does not look at the rivers as a whole but as singular parts.***
As the article stated:
There are number of things the Corps of Engineers and FEMA (not to mention Fish and Wildlife) do that are at cross purposes, and it is not even their fault. Congress has passed laws that mandate what these agencies are to do and they do them even if one negates another. It is insanely stupid.
* back in ’11 Cairo IL was about to go under so the Corps blew the Birds Point levee upstream to relieve the pressure. A black DJ on a Cairo radio station said something (probably a little insensitive) about how it rare it was for some white farmers to have to sacrifice for a majority black city. Yeah, the racial shit hit the fan around here. LA has a somewhat similar system.
**not just housing. chesterfield bottoms is entirely a commercial development with a few hold out farms, and there are many industrial developments as well (the coal ash waste dump being one)
***the MO river is a classic example. it is channelized for all but nonexistent barge traffic (but MO legislators DEMAND sufficient water levels anyway), SD has a # of reservoirs that were built for the purpose of flood control but are now far more valuable as fishing destinations (tourist $s), and the NFWS is trying to reinvigorate the endangered sturgeon populations in the river by having spring floods that reestablish natural breeding areas. The infighting between farmers, fisherman, shipping, power companies etc etc ad infinitum
MattF
@PurpleGirl: Ah, the invisible hand. There’s a wealth of metaphors that come to mind here but I’ll resist temptation, this time.
OzarkHillbilly
@OzarkHillbilly: Not to mention the many state and county agencies who also have jurisdiction over parts of it.
Dmbeaster
One without any starters, which is why it is so deep.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Have to work today, but it’s all good :)
Schlemazel
@OzarkHillbilly:
I know they also did this up by Fargo a few years back but didn’t know it was wide-spread. The problem then becomes they have to stop the development on flood plains. But we have known that for a long time. The same with the coastal shores but that isn’t happening any time soon either I bet.
Schlemazel
@Dmbeaster:
I love that line & am so gonna steal it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Schlemazel: Some pundit somewhere said that the financial crisis of ’08 will be nothing compared to the financial crises that results when Miami and environs are no longer viable. Meanwhile we can’t even learn this one small lesson right here in the heartland:
It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.
Calouste
@SRW1: The establishment candidates that are left (Rubio, Bush, Christie, and Kasich) have a combined total of 22.1% at the pollster aggregates, a percentage that has been pretty stable over the last few months. That is 16.5% behind Trump, and Trump/Cruz/Carson/Fiorina are at 65.8%. Even if the establishment gets behind one candidate, they have to hope really hard that the actual voting doesn’t match with the polls.
In 2012 by comparison, the establishment consisted of Romney, Perry, and Huntsman, and they were polling in the mid 30s combined. Undecideds were in the high 10s, Ron Paul was in the low to mid 10s, and Gingrich polled well at times, but he wasn’t really an anti-establishment candidate compared to Trump.
Schlemazel
@Calouste:
That reminded me, Newt ran on the promise of gas at $2.50 a gallon. I mentioned that to a Newt-lovin cousin the other day (gas is about $1.80 here) and asked if he was thankful Obama was elected instead of Newt because gas prices were so much lower under Obama. Oddly, he ignored my question.
MattF
@Schlemazel: And, in the event that gas prices rise this year, he’ll blame Obama, no doubt.
OzarkHillbilly
@Schlemazel: They always ignore questions involving how Obama has “outperformed” GOP promises. (in quotes because as Krugman says:
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: This is probably the number one reason I’m a Democrat rather than an independent. History has shown that, if Democratic have any negative effect on the economy at all, it’s negligible compared to the immence benefits they offer. And that’s being generous to the GOP, since I believe that, on average, Democratic policies are better for the economy.
bystander
More than the fact that the skywriting stunt yesterday was bankrolled by one of Rubio’s owners, I like that “ANYBODY BUT TRUMP” looks like “ANYBODY BUTT RUMP”. Or maybe it’s just me.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: And GOP policies seem, on average, to be worse for the economy. Krugman has posted a number of rather illuminating graphs at his blog this past week. Among them is one that shows that since Obama’s election, MORE THAN TWICE as many private sector jobs have been created than were during W’s Presidency BEFORE the great recession began.
schrodinger's cat
Predicting what GOP will do is like predicting what the inmates of the lunatic asylum in One Flew over Cuckoo’s Nest will do. An exercise in futility.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: And the only reason the economy isn’t even better is because the country gave the GOP veto power Congress and control in several states beginning in 2010.
Call it the Kansas/Kentucky syndrome, but my sympathy level for people’s economic plight has deteriorated significantly over the last several years.
Zinsky
As I have said before, don’t expect or even consider the demise of the GOP. My biggest fear is that it will mutate into something even more malignant and ugly than it already is. When Muslims are required to wear yellow crescent moons on their clothing, we are almost there…
Roger Moore
@Baud:
That any you need to be a Democrat to run for the nomination.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The detailed breakdowns are really illuminating. Under Democrats, every group gets better economic growth than under Republicans, even the ultra-rich. But under Republicans, the 1% does better relative to the 99%, and whites do better relative to blacks, while under Democrats the 1% doesn’t get as big a boost, and minorities catch up with whites. I think it shows that the people who favor Republicans care more about their relative position than about their absolute position.
Baud
@Roger Moore: I became a Democrat long before I had aspirations for the presidency.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
Not really. It’s hard to predict what the GOP will do right away- there’s always a different shiny object to chase today- but it’s easy to predict what they’ll do in the big picture. They’re always going to enact tax and spending policies that exacerbate inequality, and they’re always going to try to screw minorities. Those are their real priorities, and that’s what they’ll always go back to.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore: Agreed about the plutocrat friendly policies. I meant predictions about who they will nominate and the speculation about a brokered convention.
schrodinger's cat
Happy Caturday and New Year.
ruemara
What am I doing today? Floating on the feeling of completion, grabbing a home workout and going to see Star Wars. Maybe a little planning on what festival submissions I’ll do and which project goes into the work queue next.
Felonius Monk
@Baud:
Probably not a good position to take for Baud 2016.
jeffreyw
Mrs J’s secret dog food mix ingredient is moar Ginger.
feebog
@Calouste:
Assumes facts not in evidence, namely that all the Cruz/Carson/Fiorina voters would migrate to Trump if and when each of them drops out. A sizable chunk of the Cruz/Carson voters are Christian evangelicals; I’m not at all sure a significant portion would back Trump. That will be apparent soon however, as the Carson campaign is imploding before our eyes, and he may be gone within days.
Baud
@Felonius Monk: Hey, an opportunity like me doesn’t come around every day. Not my fault of people don’t want to take advantage of it.
Felonius Monk
@Baud: New campaign slogan: Baud’s way or the highway?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Baud:
I think that’s about 75% of the reason, but at least 20% (or so) is due to the fact that the big name economists in 2008-2009 were working with data that had a big lag and they weren’t accounting for that and weren’t clear enough in their public warnings.
Even Krugman.
If you go back and look at his columns from back then, yes, he was saying that the stimulus should be bigger. But he wasn’t saying, “Look, we need stimulus to fill a $2.5T hole“. He was saying that $800B over 2 years (with a large fraction being tax cuts) wasn’t enough.
By the time people had a good idea of how big the hole was, the stimulus bill had passed and was obviously (in hind-sight) far too small.
Krugman’s right that there would be no “second bite at the apple” and that should have been recognized. But it’s naive to think that Congress would have approved, say, a $2T stimulus plan over 5 years when the data on the table indicated that unemployment wasn’t going to exceed, say 9% even without a stimulus. (It ended up hitting 10% with the stimulus.)
Economists needed to scream that better data and models are needed. Peoples’ lives are being destroyed because ideologues with megaphones are able to scream “know in my gut” nonsense that crowds out actual measurements and models with some science behind them.
Yes, the Teabaggers stopped anything that Obama tried to do to improve the economy. But he and his advisers bought into the “families cut their budgets so the government has to as well” meme (at least to some extent). And Krugman didn’t scream about the size of the problem and his recommendations clearly enough. At the time, PK consistently pooh-poohed the necessity of getting some sort of consensus to get anything sensible passed. If he had come out more clearly, and more strongly, with posts that said, “look – this recession has the possibility of being horrible; the data lags so we won’t have hard numbers for a while, but we need to plan for it being huge. We need something twice the size or more of what’s being talked about…” then it would have helped a great deal. Would it have passed? Maybe not. But without public discussion it didn’t have a chance.
So, yes, let’s blame the Teabaggers. But let’s learn from the mistakes on our side, also too.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Seanly
Oh, the GOP has a deep bench. It’s just that they are all complete and utter assholes. And also that the ideas and goals that they support and espouse are horrible, horrible ideas.
Baud
@Felonius Monk:
Oh, good question. What would you choose?
I need more focus groups.
GregB
It’s deep and shallow.
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: Ginger is all growed up! Can you get all your kittehs in one pic?
catclub
@OzarkHillbilly: And the increases in prices – which were to get premiums slightly closer to costs – was postponed. I am not sure for how long.
Roger Moore
@Felonius Monk:
It’s going to be hard to top Frankensteinbeck’s “Baud 2016: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” as a true summary of the campaign.
jeffreyw
@schrodinger’s cat: Given the antipathy between Homer and Toby, a group photo is highly unlikely short of caging them all. Thinking about it, the most I can remember in any one shot is two. I’ll have to review my archive and I’ll get back to you.
Baud
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I never believed this. I think if the Dems had been supported and won in 2010, then we would have seen more stimulus attempts.
catclub
@OzarkHillbilly:
true, but there were many more government jobs created under Bush! The real reason for the long- bad jobs numbers under Obama was government employment – teachers, firemen. Bush had a big stimulus for government jobs in the early 2000’s.
catclub
@Baud:
But the only way they were going to win was if the economy had sprung back tremendously – if it is still bad 2 years later, the voters want a change. And if it had sprung back tremendously, then no second bite is necessary.
OTOH: why the stimulus cannot be adjustable – based on ongoing conditions (like if unemploymnet goes to 10% make it bigger) – is both too sensible and too hard.
Ruckus
@OzarkHillbilly:
There is a good reason it’s called the invisible hand.
No one has ever been able to see it. Or shake it, or get slapped around by it…….
sdhays
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Are you seriously saying that Paul Krugman, who basically did everything you say he needed to do, bears a little bit of responsibility for the stimulus being too small because he wasn’t “clear enough”? I think he was pretty clear (and I remember him saying that the stimulus needed to be over a trillion dollars at the time), and I think the problem was his position was pretty lonely and Congress took the fear of Fox News and Republicans screaming about deficits too seriously. Republicans always scream about deficits if Democrats are in charge; if the economy had been improving at a much faster rate, 2010 might have been a very different year for Democrats regardless of Republican squealing about the deficit.
Assigning some blame to Paul Krugman for not being convincing enough or herding economists into some sort of consensus in the early weeks of 2009 I think greatly overestimates the power that a humble NYT columnist has. It has taken years for him to browbeat the naysayers into submission (and they still won’t admit that he’s been right all along); are you saying that we should have waited for all of that to shake out before expecting Congress to act? I really don’t understand your point here.
Baud
@catclub: No chance the economy could have turned around that quickly. The stimulus could have been $10 trillion, and the economy would still have been poor by the time of the 2010 elections.
Heliopause
So far it’s been a bad cycle for conventional wisdom. It’s true that there hasn’t been a “brokered convention” in forever. It’s true that the early frontrunner often fades right before Iowa and New Hampshire, with an attendant surge by the eventual winner. All that is true, and may yet happen this time around. But it’s also true that the GOP electorate has been evolving and is not the same as it was even four years ago.
If Trump is still in good polling shape the last week of this month we’re going to have to seriously rethink some of this CW.
Goblue72
@Gimlet: Proving once again that the majority of Americans are blithering morons that can be sold in the delusion that the BoogeyMan is real.
The Other Chuck
Considering that the rule that would allow a brokered convention has to be voted in by the very same delegates to that convention, said delegates may as well change their votes on the candidate themselves instead. If they can — most states have binding primaries now.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
Lizza’s still running with a, shall we say, pre-Citizens United mindset. As long as there are Sheldon Adelson’s and the like throwing money at candidates, they don’t run out of money and they can keep on campaigning indefinitely. And with the GOP having nobody pre-ordained and still unable to settle on an ‘electable’ candidate as of freakin’ New Year’s Day, well. Buckle up, kids, its going to be a fun ride to Cleveland.
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: I was thinking of the group photos of Shiro and company.
Anoniminous
Bullshit. The Establishment candidate was JEB! and he flopped.
Lurking Canadian
@Baud: Are they going to use the Super-Sekrit “The Senate doesn’t count if you say ‘No backsies'” clause in Article XXX of the Constitution to get it to Obama’s desk?
Anoniminous
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
To get better Models of the economy we first have to move Economics into congruence with Reality and that demands we get rid of 80% of economists. One influential school thinks Supply and Demand are identical. The Neo-Classicals think economic actors can foresee the future. The Downward Tricklers are cognitively insane. And no major school includes Feedback Loops in their theory.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@sdhays:
Yes, I’m saying he wasn’t clear enough.
What dollar figure was he advocating in that post? How long was he advocating that the stimulus last?
It’s fine to say that $300B = 1% drop in unemployment. It was a “wonkish” post – he should have been willing to pick a number for the size and duration that he thought was necessary and say why.
But he, more than anyone, knew the dangers at the “zero lower bound” based on his work on Japan.
He knew as much as anyone that econometric estimates for the economy lag by 3 months or more. As bad as it looked in January 2009 (based on September 2008 numbers), he had to know that it was likely to get much worse than even the early numbers indicated. The econometric numbers don’t catch big rates of change well at all.
He understood that rates of change are what’s important for the economy as a whole (rather than absolute levels). Arguing for a bigger stimulus of necessity means that you’re arguing for a longer duration (because turning off a stimulus suddenly means a huge downward rate of change and thus a huge risk of causing another recession).
I understand his reluctance to stick his neck out and say that the evidence and the history indicates that a stimulus of, say, 10% – 5% (NAIRU) = 5% x $300B = $1.5T was needed and it needed to be over 4-5 years rather than 2, just to get out of the employment hole (but even that would have been too small given the bursting of the ~$6T housing bubble). Nobody wants to stick their neck outside of the herd and risk being wrong – that’s human nature and even moreso in one’s profession. But he had the stature and the knowledge to say, “Look, here are some numbers that sound big but it’s what’s needed based on conventional economics. If you believe Dean Baker and Bill McBride about the size of the housing bubble and damage it did when it burst, and if you understand the risks at the ZLB, then even that is too small.”
He didn’t do that.
Again, I don’t think his lack of clarity and lack of hair-on-fire screaming is a large part of the reason why we’ve still suffering with a far too weak economy. I do think, though, that he could have done better. His Rolling Stone piece on Obama getting the politics right on many issues was nice. It would also be nice if PK would recognize that his “I told you so” about the size of the stimulus wasn’t as strong as it should have been. DeLong’s “smackdown” posts are refreshing. PK should consider them once in a while. ;-)
His “Let’s hope I got this wrong.” conclusion to his NYTimes blog post (that I cited earlier) is hardly a full-throated yell that a disaster is coming…
I like PK a lot. His columns and blogs are a daily read for me. But he can do better. It would help the profession if he would argue more strongly that better data, better models, and better transferring of that information to the public.
Us just saying “The Teabaggers did it!” doesn’t help us move the economics forward. We need to fix the things we can while also trying to change the politics.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tehanu
“Normal” isn’t much of a factor in their brains, either.
Mr. Poopy Butthole
“And he & his supporters would burn that convention to the ground. It would destroy the GOP.”
The GOP was destroyed by extremists and know nothings long ago. The corpse just keeps twitching on.