Noted for Your Morning Procrastination for October 15, 2013
- "In his 1987 essay, 'The Ethics of Debt Default', Buchanan made an argument often repeated by libertarians and Tea Party members: if the Treasury were to default, no one would ever lend it money again, thus imposing a balanced budget…. Buchanan also argued that much debt-financed federal spending is immoral and that it was immoral to tax people to pay for it. 'On balance, the moral arguments against default on the debt do not seem so strong as seems to be assumed in the observed neglect of the question', he wrote": Bruce Bartlett: For Many Hard-Liners, Debt Default Is the Goal
- "I’ve been doing some reading about John Kennedy, and what I find startling, and even surprising, is how absolutely consistent and unchanged the ideology of the extreme American right has been over the past fifty years, from father to son and now, presumably, on to son from father again. The real analogue to today’s unhinged right wing in America is yesterday’s unhinged right wing in America. This really is your grandfather’s right, if not, to be sure, your grandfather’s Republican Party. Half a century ago, the type was much more evenly distributed between the die-hard, neo-Confederate wing of the Democratic Party and the Goldwater wing of the Republicans, an equitable division of loonies that would begin to end after J.F.K.’s death. (A year later, the Civil Rights Act passed, Goldwater ran, Reagan emerged, and we began the permanent sorting out of our factions": Adam Gopnik: The Right Wing Fifty Years Later: The John Birchers' Tea Party
- "I need to start off by saying I am a big fan…. [But] how can a man who believes human nature is magnetically drawn to stories over facts, momentum over mean reversion, believe, for example, that encouraging the average person to hedge his/her home value in a futures market will not likely, at some point, end badly? If markets do fail, and if the frequency of market failure seems to be positively correlated to financial innovation, why would anyone want to give people even more weapons with which to hurt themselves?": Mark Dow: Robert Shiller's Own Cognitive Dissonance
- "Recent data… provide scant evidence that health reform is causing a significant shift toward part-time work… there’s every reason to believe that the ultimate effect will be small as a share of total employment…. Raising the law’s threshold… from 30 hours a week to 40 hours would make a shift towards part-time employment much more likely… place more than five times as many workers at risk of having their hours reduced": Paul van de Water: Health Reform Not Causing Significant Shift to Part-Time Work
- "David Riesman: 'The Administration… can gain the leeway on the domestic front… only by combatting the radical Right rather than seeking itself to move onto rightist ground--an illusory operation since the Right can always go still further right and will'": Corey Robin: Same As It Ever Was
And:
Plus: Long:
Alan Bennett: The History Boys: A Play |
Plus: Short:
