February 23, 2010

I MEAN, THE MAN HAS HIS OWN CURVE

If you love Art Laffer the way I love Art Laffer, might I recommend watching his ideas for how to fix the ecominy?  He laid them out on Glenn Beck last week; check out clips two and three here at Glenn Beck Clips.

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February 18, 2010

BROKEN WINDOWS

I think the broken windows fallacy makes perfect common sense once you hear it.  Frankly, I don't understand how one could argue against it.

So why do we continue to base policy on it?

The idea that government spending creates jobs makes sense only if you never ask where the government got the money. It didn’t fall from the sky. The only way Congress can inject spending into the economy is by first taxing or borrowing it out of the economy. No new demand is created; it’s a zero-sum transfer of existing demand.

The White House says the $300 billion spent from the stimulus thus far has financed as many as 2 million jobs. Maybe. However, the private sector now has $300 billion less to spend, which, by the same logic, means it must lose the same number of jobs, leaving a net employment impact of zero. But the White House’s single-entry bookkeeping simply ignores that side of the equation.

Even Washington’s transferring money from savers to spenders doesn’t create demand, since the financial system already converts one person’s savings into another person’s spending (as I detail here). A family might normally put its $10,000 savings in a CD at the local bank. The bank would then lend that $10,000 to the local hardware store, which would then recycle that spending around the town, supporting local jobs. Now suppose that the family instead buys a $10,000 government bond that funds the stimulus bill. Washington spends that $10,000 in a different town, supporting jobs there instead. The stimulus has not created new jobs. It has merely moved them to a new town.

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SMART WOMEN

Some recent reading that has made me excited about the task before me and happy that I will finally have a job towards which to apply my meager thinking skills.

I really feel this is the task I was born to undertake.

First, Smart Women

This isn't a politically correct thing to say, but I knew - even at 18 - that I wanted to marry and have children. What's more, I wanted to raise my children myself. It made absolutely no sense to me to place a home and family last on my "to do" list when it was first or second on the list of things that were important to me. And it made no sense to me to spend years and years prepping myself for a high powered career I would have to give up almost as soon as I attained it.
[...]
I raised two fine sons and ran a household well and efficiently. And my support enabled my husband to have a family and concentrate on his career. A lot of folks sneer at that sort of thing, but I always wondered why society would want only the "stupider" sort of women to raise the next generation.

Second, at The Thinking Housewife (a site I might need to read more of).

Teach your daughter that grades will not be the most important factor in her future. It is important for her to learn for the sheer pleasure of knowing too, not just to win approval. Someday she will be a woman and engaged in the project of loving a man and starting a small society together. This is primary. All she learns can be put to use in this task. Every interest she has and every scrap of knowledge will be of value. Let her know how exciting it will be for her.

And thirdly, from an anecdotal history of Abigail Adams:

How could America produce "Heroes, Statesmen, and Philosophers," she wanted to know, if it didn't also produce "Learned women"?
[...]
Abigail never doubted that women were men's intellectual equals. ...  Unlike the radicals, she believed that women found their highest fulfillment within marriage and the family.  With a better education, she said repeatedly, a woman would be a better wife and mother and contribute more in the long run to the well-being of the new nation than if she were uninformed.  Well-educated women, she insisted, could help their husbands safeguard republican liberty; they could also rear boys qualified for leadership in the young republic and girls who in turn could become the devoted mothers and wives of patriots.

Posted by: Sarah at 09:03 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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