You know who's the worst?

This guy!

Newt! He's probably running for President, I guess, and he has between 1 and 2% chance of winning the republican nomination and between .1 and 1% chance of winning the presidency, according to my based-on-nothing-but-probably-true-calculations.

Some people take Newt seriously. They think he has cool ideas or something. He's a "big thinker." I don't know where that meme has come from, but he hasn't said anything too useful in pretty much the 10 years that I've been paying attention to the world. He's really good at saying a LOT of things, but basing them on absolutely nothing. And he's clearly just making shit up.

Exhibit A: (from last week)
VAN SUSTEREN: What would you do about Libya?
GINGRICH: Exercise a no-fly zone this evening, communicate to the Libyan military that Gadhafi was gone and that the sooner they switch sides, the more likely they were to survive, provided help to the rebels to replace him. ...The United States doesn't need anybody's permission. We don't need to have NATO, who frankly, won't bring much to the fight. We don't need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we're intervening. And we don't have to send troops. All we have to do is suppress his air force, which we could do in minutes.

Exhibit B: (from this week)
GINGRICH: I would not have intervened. I think there were a lot of other ways to affect Qadhafi. I think there are a lot of other allies in the region we could have worked with. I would not have used American and European forces.

Then he said that Libya is the worst-executed military intervention since WWII, which means that it's worse than Bay of Pigs, Guatamala, Iran hostages, Iraq War, Afghanistan etc. even though not a single American or allied person has yet to die, we've probably killed the bad guy's bad son, and have already neutered the Gaddafi's army. NEWT 2012!

Reelection

Yesterday Dick Morris said there is no way Obama gets reelected. For background's sake, Dick Morris maybe sort of helped Bill Clinton get reelected in 1996, but was caught cheating on his wife with a prostitute (she may have been underaged, I can't remember) and there was some creepy business involving feet. He's gross. Look:

Anyway, he now hates Democrats for some reason and is all over Fox making dumb predictions. He's an idiot.

Anyway, Obama will probably be reelected. The only reason he wouldn't is if the economy craters again. That's possible! This Middle East revolution business and Japan super-catastrophe can only hurt. But the fundamentals of the economy are looking much better. Anyway, to buttress that point, check this out:

Pew survey finds 47% of registered voters would like to see Obama reelected, vs. 37% who want a GOPer.
More: In better shape than either 43, 42 at same points in presidency.


Not bad, not bad. Sorry, Romney!

I have a lot of work

So I guess I should blog while I talk to Westlaw. Oh wait they're gone so I guess I'll work again.

Elizabeth Taylor died. She always kind of weirded me out. RIP though.

Charlie Sheen or Gaddafi?

We report. You decide. Take the Quiz.

Sample: I have defeated this earthworm with my words – imagine what I would have done with my fire-breathing fists. 

Who said it?! I don't know.

Jobs

When thinking about problems, you gotta think short, medium, and long term. The deficit is a big problem in the medium and long term, but not the short term. America is by a huge margin the largest and most stable economy in the world. If our deficit continues to rapidly expand, it's possible that we will lose that status in 7-10 years (medium term), but that is some way off.

But there are about 11 million people who are unemployed right now. That's an immediate problem, both morally and fiscally. If half of those could find work, they would also consume a lot more goods, thereby helping the economy, pay a lot more taxes, thereby raising revenue, and cost less spending on things like unemployment insurance, reducing spending. That should be the #1 immediate focus of the government.

Obama's tried to get as much fiscal stimulus done as he could, which helped a lot, but there is a lot more to be done. Almost all of the Republicans proposals address the medium to long-term problem - the deficit - but I haven't seen anything they've proposed that will actually help job growth. Actually, by cutting spending and social services, they will almost certainly cost us more jobs! Backwards and dumb. It's like your doctor removing a precancerous tumor instead of operating on your gunshot wound.

The Chart to End All Charts!

There's so much good stuff here that I barely know where to begin. (This is from the Congressional Budget Office, the best place to find budgetary information) Take a second and look at it carefully...

The black line is how much revenue (tax money) the government takes in. The bars represent the amount of spending the government does each year, and it breaks it down by type of spending. If the black line is higher than the bars, that means we raised more money than we spent -- budget surplus (like in 2000, under Clinton). If the black line is lower than the bar, budget deficit -- we're in the red, that is our deficit.

Ugh, I don't even know where to begin. First, you can see under Bush that revenue went down (bc he cut taxes), but spending went up. This is pretty irresponsible. BUT! He started doing much better in his second term -- the black revenue line almost catches the spending. Who knew? I didn't. Not sure what's going on there, but it should be noted (I think this is right) that this chart doesn't take into account war-spending, so the actual spending under Bush was significantly higher.

The second point is more important -- what happened to revenue between 2008 and 2009? It PLUMMETED. Why? Recession! Recessions make people poorer, and poorer people pay less taxes, so the government collects less money. At the same time, government spent a lot more on entitlements than in previous years, because we were paying more unemployment insurance, medicaid, and the stimulus. That is economics 101 - not having the government step in and pay for those things would just lead to more poverty and misery. But, as we start to grow again, revenue shoots back up, as it's doing now.

Third, and this is in direct response to Max (finally found the chart I was looking for!), you can see pretty clearly that defense spending and non-defense discretionary spending (basically, everything but entitlements like social security and medicaid and all the other stuff) are pretty flat. You can cut military spending in half and you'd still have a budget deficit. Same for cutting the non-defense discretionary spending -- that's what Republicans in the House are cutting now. Chump change! The cause of the increase in the deficit mirrors entitlements and interest on the debt. As those green and purple lines jump up, so does the deficit. That's where we need to be focusing on for real cuts -- the other stuff is all smoke and mirrors.

Brothers Koch

Don't really get the left's concern about them, to be honest. There are big fundraisers on the left and on the right (Koch Bros., meet Soros). I think partisans on both sides feel that generally, this is a bad thing, except when it's not. Democrats like that Soros money (although he hasn't been donating to candidates lately), and Republicans like that Koch money. This isn't a partisan problem - money is corrupting both sides of the equation.

The left is happy for some reason that the Governor Walker of Wisconsin accepted what turned out to be a prank phone call from one of these Koch brothers, while apparently refusing to talk to the union he was attempting to bust. This proves...I don't know what. That Walker takes phone calls from (a) people who give him lots of money and (b) who he has spoken with before. OK! It's not much of a surprise that he wasn't taking direct calls from the union, considering that he is trying to break them up. Compromise is not Walker's goal. Is that why liberals are gloating? Newsflash: lots of people don't like unions, public sector ones especially. I think those people are wrong, and should be responded to on the merits. But the whole Koch thing is a distraction.

Conservatives do this too with Soros. I don't get it.