links for 2009-08-29
-
Secret Service stops by for a chat with Arizona pastor who preached about praying for President Obama's death. Remember, this was the sermon attended by the guy who a day later went to Obama's event with an assault rifle.
-
Pieces like this actually evoke more of a sense of wonder than anything else — not merely at the banality and evil so neatly conjoined in its content, but at the astonishing reality that anyone who routinely writes such…how to put this…bonecrushingly stupid; water-her-twice-a day dumb; the wheel is spinning but the hamster’s dead material, still has a job, much less an apparently appreciative audience. Actually, I think I have to credit McArdle with some cleverness here. Her post is so full of different instances of nonsense, bad faith argument, sheer failure to understand what she seems to think she is talking about that she achieves a certain effect: by seeding her post with so much to be debunked, she increases the odds that one whack-a-mole notion or another will slip past the defenses of rationality and real-world experience.
-
Which brings me to a question a number of people have raised: maybe we can pay the interest, but what about repaying the principal? Jim gets scary numbers about the debt burden by assuming that we’ll have to pay off the debt in 10 years. But why would we have to do that? Again, the lesson of the 1950s — or, if you like, the lesson of Belgium and Italy, which brought their debt-GDP ratios down from early 90s levels — is that you need to stabilize debt, not pay it off; economic growth will do the rest. In fact, I’d argue, all you really need to do is stabilize debt in real terms. So where Jim Hamilton has us paying $1 trillion a year to service $9 trillion in debt, I have us paying $225 billion — 2.5% real interest on that sum.
