Stable Genius Liberal

Something economists thought was impossible is happening in Europe

Something really weird is happening in Europe. Interest rates on a range of debt — mostly government bonds from countries like Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany but also corporate bonds from Nestlé and, briefly, Shell — have gone negative. And not just negative in fancy inflation-adjusted terms like US government debt. It’s just negative. As in you give the owner of a Nestlé bond 100 euros, and four years later Nestlé gives you back less than that.* In my experience, ordinary people are not especially excited about this. But among finance and economic types, I promise you that it’s a huge deal — the economics equivalent of stumbling into a huge scientific discovery entirely by accident.

This the exact opposite of a the sovereign debt crisis that the austerity crowd has been warning about. The demand for debt is so high that people are willing to lose money to purchase it.

Rand Paul has a victim complex

Paul’s problem is that he doesn’t really see anything wrong with what he said – or at least he won’t admit it. In the tweet showing his booster shot, he commented, “Wonder how the liberal media will misreport this?” It’s the same victim complex he displayed the last time he jousted with the media. In late 2013, multiple reports pretty clearly showed plagiarism in Paul’s speeches and book. Paul’s response? Play it off, blame the “haters,” and issue a non-apology apology.

The people who quoted him correctly and in context are haters.

Vaccine Skepticism Isn’t a Conservative Problem, but It’s a Problem for Conservatives

The two most straightforward ways to increase vaccination rates or otherwise reduce the risk of losing herd immunity are: Imposing government mandates and stigmatizing the white, affluent people who comprise the core of the anti-vaxx movement. Hectoring white people and imposing mandates on their families doesn’t fit comfortably in the GOP wheelhouse these days, and Christie’s awkward walkback underscores the bind that places on conservatives exquisitely.

Plus there is the issue of recognizing that big government stuff like the CDC and health care are actually good things that save actual lives.

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Photo from Obama’s India trip looks exactly like a Wes Anderson movie

Those Radical VSPs

although many of the press reports describe Syriza as “far-left”, it’s actually preaching fairly conventional economics, while the supposedly responsible officials of Brussels and Berlin have been relying on radical doctrines like expansionary austerity and a growth cliff at 90 percent. The same has to a certain extent been true in the US context. Once again: textbook macroeconomics says that focusing on deficit reduction in a depressed economy, where the zero lower bound constrains the effectiveness of monetary policy, is a very bad idea. And although nobody will believe it, textbook macro has actually been a very good guide to the economy since the financial crisis, as Jared Bernstein also emphasizes.

Krugman points out how current right of center economic theory isn’t based on conservative economic or on textbook mainstream economics. Its based on very radical and very untested ideas that aren’t working out.

Obama’s bank tax is a big idea that might actually get done – Vox

What Obama proposed was a 0.07 percent tax on borrowing by America’s largest banks. The way this works is that banks with over $50 billion in assets (which is about 100 banks) would need to pay a 7 cent tax to the federal government on every $100 that they borrow. That has two goals — raising revenue and restraining risky debt from bailout-prone institutions. And Congress isn’t going to pass it.

This would both make a bailout less likely, it would create a fund that would pay for a bailout. And it would fall onto the banks directly. Why is anyone against this?

Two Contradictory Arguments That Dodd-Frank is Crony Capitalism | Next New Deal

I’m pretty convinced that the term “crony capitalism,” as deployed by the right, is useless as a political or analytical tool. I keep a close eye on how conservatives talk about financial reform, and according to the right, Dodd-Frank is crony capitalism. Oh noes! But what does that mean, and how can we stop it? Here’s a fascinating case in point: two AEI scholars with different publications argue that we need to stop Dodd-Frank from enabling crony capitalism, and then proceed to describe two opposite, mutually exclusive sets of problems and solutions.

I missed this the first time around, but I’m glad I got a chance to read it. This is worth a read. There are a few words that are now meaningless in political discussion because they are used to mean different things, even contradictory things. Crony Capitalism joins Socialism as a term that means something I don’t like and has lost all other meaning.

Patton Oswalt on political correctness

That idea of context doesn’t matter is a scary thing. Especially because the oppressive, racist, homophobic forces in the world don’t have comedy as a weapon. We progressives do. If we’re going to start giving that up and start policing progressives twice as hard as we do the conservatives and homophobes and haters, then we’re fucked. Then they get to be the rebels and they’ll find a way to make homophobia and racism look cool. Because all we’re doing is attacking each other.

Patton Oswalt nails it.

American transit activists need to speak up about exorbitant construction costs

But the problem hits transit the hardest because the basic fact of the matter is that political and economic elites don’t rely on mass transit. The clearest case is the growing popularity of mixed-traffic streetcar projects. These are much cheaper than grade-separated light- or heavy-rail, but still far more expensive than a conventional bus without actually moving people any faster. In terms of offering a transportation service, spending money on a streetcar is much worse than spending the same amount of money on multiple new bus routes or upgrades to existing ones. Soon this bus will have a streetcar in its way | Elvert Barnes/Flickr Streetcars appeal, however, because those high costs create construction jobs and because the aura of classiness around them appeals to real estate developers and other would-be drivers of gentrification. So cities across America are opening stub streetcar lines rather than investing in improving the transit experience of bus riders.

The Strange Tale of a New Species of Lizard

In the 1960s, scientists noticed that some whiptail lizard species had a strange genetic makeup. They have two copies of each chromosome, just as we do, but each copy is very different from its counterpart. The genes look as if they come from different species. Perhaps stranger, many species produce no males. The eggs of the females hatch healthy female clones, a process known as parthenogenesis. Normally, unfertilized animal eggs have only one set of chromosomes. The second set is derived from a male’s sperm following fertilization. But parthenogenic female whiptail lizards can duplicate the chromosomes in their offspring without males. These findings led scientists to a hypothesis for how these strange species came about: Sometimes individuals from two different species of whiptail lizards interbreed, and their hybrid offspring carry two different sets of chromosomes.