Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Run Like the Wind, Mr. Skittles! (George Newman/WSJ Edition)

TBogg does not write:

Invasion of the Obama Snatchers: Writing from his negro-proof panic room (which doubles as the laundry room when his wife send him out to get milk) a sweaty, disheveled, and quite possibly drunk George Newman types out a warning, inserts it into a hamster ball with Mr. Skittles the Wonder Hamster and then lobs it through a cracked door in the hopes that, God willing, it is not too late to save America.

Run like the wind, Mr. Skittles!
Godspeed and good luck:

George Newman:

The Markets Are Weak Because the Candidates Are Lousy: A lot has been said about the causes of the drastic drops -- and extreme volatility -- in stock prices and the impending recession.... Investors have heard enough from both candidates in the last month or two to conclude that prospects for a flourishing, competitive, growing and reasonably free economy in a McCain administration are bad, and in an Obama administration far worse....

• Have you thought of what a gradual doubling (and indexation) of the minimum wage, sailing through a veto-proof and filibuster-proof Congress, would do to inflation, unemployment and corporate profits? The market now has.
• Have you thought of how easily a Labor Department headed by a militant union boss would push through a "Transparency in Labor Relations" law that does away with secret ballots in strike votes, and what this would do to industrial peace? The market now has.
• Have you thought of how a Treasury Secretary George Soros would engineer the double taxation of the multinationals' world-wide profits, and what this would mean for investors (to say nothing of full-scale industrial flight from the U.S.)? The market now has.
• Have you thought of how an Attorney General Charles J. Ogletree would champion a trillion-dollar reparations-for-slavery project (whittled down, to be fair, to a mere $800-billion, over-10-years compromise), and what this would do to the economy? The market now has.
• Have you thought of what the virtual outlawing of arbitration -- exposing all industries to the fate of asbestos producers -- would do to corporate liability and legal bills? The market now has.
• Have you thought of how a Health and Human Services Secretary Hillary Clinton would fix drug prices (generously allowing 10% over the cost of raw materials), and what this would do to the financial health of the pharmaceutical industry (not to mention the nondiscovery of lifesaving drugs)? The market now has.
• Have you thought of a Secretary of the newly established Department of Equal Opportunity for Women mandating "comparable worth" pay practices for every company doing any business with government at any level -- where any residual gap between the average pay of men and women is an eo ipso violation? Have you thought about what this would do to administrative and legal costs, hiring practices, productivity and wage bills? The market now has.
• Have you thought of what confiscatory "windfall profits" taxes on oil companies would do to exploration, supply and prices? The market now has.
• Have you thought of how the nationalization of health insurance, the mandated coverage of ever more -- and more exotic -- risks, the forced reimbursement for excluded events, and the diminished freedom to match premium to risk would affect the insurance industry? The market now has.
• Have you thought of Energy Czar Al Gore's five million new green jobs -- high-paying, unionized and subsidized -- to replace, at five times the cost, what we are now producing without those five million workers, and what this will do to our productivity, deficit and competitiveness? The market now has.

I could go on, but you get the point. Nothing reveals Mr. Obama's visceral hostility to business more than the constant urging of our best and brightest to desert the productive private sector ("greed") and go into public service...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

The first real encounter I had with Paul Gigot, now running the WSJ editorial page, was his claim that my bosses and I in the Treasury were "in denial" about how the Clinton tax increases on the rich of 1993 would crush the U.S. economy like an eggshell.

Fifteen years, and Gigot has learned nothing. Rupert Murdoch has learned nothing as well: this isn't good for him either.