Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Chickens Already Coming Home To Roost

3 Comments

Megan McArdle says that we may already be having a problem with sovereign debt risk:

Obama’s spending plans are extraordinarily ambitious. His projected deficits for the rest of his possibly presidency are higher than the “runaway” deficits that plagued most of the Bush administration–and after the first few years, that’s not stimulus, that’s ordinary spending outstripping revenue. For a while now, I’ve been asking people at conferences, on and off the record, what America’s sovereign debt risk is? That is, how long until people stop treating treasuries as the “risk free” securities, and start demanding a premium for the risk that we might default.

The answer from the right has been a nervous (perhaps hopeful) 2-3 years. The answer from the left, and professional Democratic wonks, is some unspecified time in the future. Probably, there will be a Republican in charge. Markets hate Republicans.

But last Thursday, the Treasury auction was . . . well, descriptions vary from “weak” to “horrible”. This raises the unpleasant possibility that markets are, as my business school professors insisted, “forward looking”. Voters may believe that getting a bunch of special interests to agree in principal that costs should be cut is the same thing as actually cutting costs. Bond markets don’t…

…Obama can assure voters that he inherited these deficits. But bond markets pay closer attention to the fact that Obama has already increased the projected deficit he inherited by 50%.

Let’s hope that the voters figure it out soon, and before Treasury has to start paying high interest on T-bills.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

You’ll Be As Shocked As I Was

15 Comments

…to learn that the president has no class:

Wanda Sykes isn’t of any interest to me. The fact that the American president was five feet away from her and had to laugh about her joke was of interest. A comedian wishes a citizen dead and the president laughs?

I can’t imagine such a “joke” being told about (say) Michael Moore during a Bush WHCD. I thought that the idea of the WHCD was supposed to be a “roast,” with those being lampooned in attendance, not a vicious attack on the president’s absent political enemies. And had such a thing had occurred, I can’t imagine the former president laughing at it. But with this president, we don’t have to imagine it. In many ways, it’s a return to the juvenile antics of the White House during the Clinton years. But it apparently gave Chris Matthews an extended leg tingle (shameful that, too, because Rush used to let him guest host for him back in the nineties), so I guess that’s all right.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Obamacare

28 Comments

And your doctor:

Doctors will consolidate into larger practices to spread overhead costs, and they’ll cram more patients into tight schedules to make up in volume what’s lost in margin. Visits will be shortened and new appointments harder to secure. It already takes on average 18 days to get an initial appointment with an internist, according to the American Medical Association, and as many as 30 days for specialists like obstetricians and neurologists.

Right or wrong, more doctors will close their practices to new patients, especially patients carrying lower paying insurance such as Medicaid. Some doctors will opt out of the system entirely, going “cash only.” If too many doctors take this route the government could step in — as in Canada, for example — to effectively outlaw private-only medical practice.

These changes are superimposed on a payment system where compensation often bears no connection to clinical outcomes. Medicare provides all the wrong incentives. Its charge-based system pays doctors more for delivering more care, meaning incomes rise as medical problems persist and decline when illness resolves.

So let’s expand Medicare to everybody. Great.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Obviously, The Answer Is “No”

12 Comments

Madam Speaker, have you no decency?

It’s kind of hard to run a witch hunt when you’re the lead witch.

[Tuesday morning update]

Some questions for the Speaker:

You said that you concurred with the letter written by Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) that raised concerns about waterboarding. Is there any documentation to back that up? Did you sign the Harman letter? Were you aware of it in real time, or only later, when it was declassified? Did you send your own letter? Did you ever express your concerns with President Bush during any of your meetings with him between 2002 and 2008?

As I say in comments, I’m all for a truth commission, as long as it’s a whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth commission. Bring it on.

[Bumped]

Media Criticism, Space, Technology and Society

The Myth That Won’t Die

6 Comments

Once again, scramjet proponents are touting them for space access:

Officials hope the engine eventually will provide a speedier transition between conventional aircraft in the atmosphere and rockets in outer space for deployment of satellites, and reconnaissance or strike missions.

“The long-range goal of this for the Air Force is access to space,” said Charlie Brink, an Air Force Research Laboratory propulsion directorate official who manages the X-51 program from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

I wonder if he’s actually done any systems studies to see whether that’s going to pan out? I have.

I’m all in favor of scramjets — they have lots of interesting and useful military applications, but it is very unlikely that they will be helpful for space access. I won’t repeat what I wrote the last time this issue came up (geez was it really five years ago?), but you can go read it here:

Proponents claim that by allowing airbreathing up to high Mach numbers, there is no need to take along as much oxygen for the rocket engines, because they can gather it for “free.” This argument assumes that space transportation is expensive because propellants are, but those aren’t the cost driver. If they were, space would already be affordable, because liquid oxygen is actually about as cheap as milk. Propellant costs are such a tiny fraction of launch costs that they’re down in the noise. If we ever get to the point where they become a real issue (as they are for airlines), we’ll have solved the problem.

Their argument also fails on the grounds that collecting oxygen isn’t really “free.” As the old joke goes, there’s no free launch.

If your space transport were to be single stage, you’d now need three propulsion systems — conventional jet, scramjet, and rocket for when you left the atmosphere (which you must do by definition to go into space). It may be possible to have a scramjet lower stage and a rocket upper stage, but the bottom line is that time spent in the atmosphere (necessary to utilize the scramjet) is time spent fighting drag, defeating the purpose. Rockets want to spend as little time as possible in the atmosphere, and carrying two other kinds of engines along and spending enough time in the air to utilize them, just to save on a propellant as cheap as oxygen, just doesn’t make design sense.

In addition, a scramjet engine is designed to operate at a specific vehicle speed, and has poor performance in “off design” conditions, rendering it a poor propulsion choice for an accelerating vehicle.

Henry Spencer debunked airbreathers to orbit earlier this year as well.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

I Like The Rail Option, Myself

2 Comments

Thoughts on how to pay for Obamacare.

Also, Tigerhawk on taxes:

I’ve clipped some inflammatory excerpts for your morning indigestion, but it is worth scrolling through to get a sense for the breadth and nature of the proposal. The short version is that President Obama is pushing absolutely staggering increases through the corporate and business tax systems. Direct taxes on business are, in general, inefficient and economically disruptive, but they are also peerless in their complexity, which means that few voters and essentially no reporters will make the effort to understand what is being done to them.

Trust me on this: something awful is being done to you.

That rail option’s looking better and better. With tar and feathers, of course.

[Update a few minutes later]

Obama Trek: the search for more money.

Boldly going where no American fascist president has gone before.

[Update]

They just keep on spending:

If not treated promptly, FSD, like alcoholism, leads inevitably to complete physical breakdown, loss of homes, jobs, cars, respect, everything. The breakdown is not limited to the sufferer, however. Like the alcoholic who must drink hard liquor every waking moment, massive budget deficits are the key symptom of late-stage FSD. The alcoholic dies, but with FSD, the nation, not the spenders, goes bankrupt. Even today, with Obama just beginning to manage the government, Geithner’s Treasury department must offer higher interest rates on bonds it sells to finance planned deficits because bondholders worry about Washington’s future repayment ability if taxes are not soon hugely increased. But those increases would kill economic growth, sending government revenues spiraling downward and eventually leaving Washington only one choice – repudiation of debt or bankruptcy. Either way, American prosperity will be a distant memory for generations to come. Intervention cannot come too soon.

But at least we’ll all be equal in our poverty. And that’s what’s important, right?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Uncategorized

$1.8T

47 Comments

That’s the size of the current projected budget deficit for this year:

The deficit for the current budget year will rise by $89 billion to above $1.8 trillion — about four times the record set just last year. The unprecedented red ink flows from the deep recession, the Wall Street bailout, the cost of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill, as well as a structural imbalance between what the government spends and what it takes in.

As the economy performs worse than expected, the deficit for the 2010 budget year beginning in October will worsen by $87 billion to $1.3 trillion, the White House says. The deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps.

For the current year, the government would borrow 46 cents for every dollar it takes to run the government under the administration’s plan. In one of the few positive signs, the actual 2009 deficit is likely to be $250 billion less than predicted because Congress is unlikely to provide another $250 billion in financial bailout money.

So it’s not all bad news.

Obama didn’t inherit most of this deficit. He created it (or rather, let Pelosi and Reid create it) with the insane porkulus bill, which wasn’t about stimulation at all, but paying off Democrat constituencies. So it’s not surprising that it’s not working. And to the degree that it’s not working, and we get less tax revenue from a shrinking economy, that’s his deficit as well.

Just for contrast, consider that 1.8 trillion was the entire federal budget in the year 2000. This is economic madness.

[Late morning update]

Obama fails the fact check:

-His assertion that his proposed budget “will cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term” is an eyeball-roller for many economists, given the uncharted terrain of trillion-dollar deficits the government is negotiating.

-He promised vast savings from increased spending on preventive health care in the face of doubts that such an effort, however laudable it might be for public welfare, can pay for itself, let alone yield huge savings.

-He pitched a remedy for Social Security’s long-term crisis that analysts say won’t fix half the problem.

Glad someone at AP is finally doing their job.

[Mid-afternoon update]

More thoughts:

President Obama continues to distance himself from this “inherited” budget deficit. But the day he was inaugurated, the 2009 deficit was forecast at $1.2 trillion — meaning $600 billion has already been added during his four-month presidency (an amount that, by itself, would exceed all 2001-07 annual budget deficits). And should the president really be allowed to distance himself from the $1.2 trillion “inherited” portion of the deficit, given that as a senator he supported nearly all policies and bailouts that created it?

The president also talks of cutting the deficit in half from this bloated level. But even after the recession ends and the troops return home, he’d still run $1 trillion deficits — compared to President Bush’s $162 billion pre-recession deficit. In other words, the structural budget deficit (which excludes the impacts of booms/recessions) would more than quintuple.

It’s a good point. What did then-Senator Obama do, if anything, to prevent any of this year’s deficit? If he’d been in charge, it would probably been even bigger, and last year’s as well.