Maxine Waters Wins!

Our politicians, on both sides of aisle, have been having a contest to see who can say the dumbest and most outrageously exaggerated thing about the "dangers" of sequestration.

But Maxine Waters, Democrat from Venus, clearly wins.


It may be worth pointing out that the total number of employed people in the U.S. is just south of 135 million.  So for 170 million people to lose their jobs would indeed be catastrophic.  100% of the US labor force would have to lose its job (including Ms. Waters, which is not a bad idea, now that I think of it).  And then another 35 million people who aren't even employed would have to find jobs, and then lose them, all in the same instant.

No WONDER we are afraid of sequestration.

Ms. Waters' mouthpiece says that was an "obvious slip of the tongue."  Really?  So from now on when someone says something that is clearly wrong, Ms. Waters is going to say, "Don't criticize that poor fella; it was an obvious slip of the tongue!"  Somehow, when Mitt Romney said, "Binders full of women," it was a big deal.  Clearly a slip of the tongue.  Sauce for the goose, Ms. Waters.

UPDATE:  This is a remarkable statement.  Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is worried about bad people, "nameless, faceless bureaucrats," paradoxically the very same people Rep. DWS thinks should run everyone's lives.  Are these bureaucrats really smart, or not, Debbie?  And then, she suggests that the Republicans should go "to see the wizard."  It's hard to know what that even might mean.  I recognize that the Congressional Democrats believe in magic, but "the wizard"?

Not the Onion: Grand Game Self Service!

Grand Game Time! Smart people do it in the comment section...

Brazilian woman wins legal "right" to surf porn and masturbate at work.

Excerpt: Ana Catarian Bezerra, 36, suffers from severe anxiety and hypersexuality - something that makes her "compulsion orgasmic," reports Gather.com.

A single mother of three children, Bezerra works as an accountant - a seemingly buttoned-up profession for such a buttoned-down condition, reports Guanabee.com.

In the past, Bezerra would need to masturbate as much as 47 times a day. Her physician, Carlos Howert, has prescribed her a "cocktail" of tranquilizers to help curb her condition. Now she only has to masturbate around 18 times a day, according to Guanabee. One word? Yikes.

Bezerra had to take her employer to court last April, where she won. Now, she will get 15 minute breaks every 2 hours where she can surf porn and get her release, AOL reports.

Don't get too excited though - remember that this is in Brazil, and here in the U.S. there are no court-mandated masturbation breaks available.

ATSRTWT

This would have been excellent news for Anonyman. He was laid off for three months a while back. Turns out that in Brazil his activities during this time would have counted as "employment," and he could have gotten paid for it. Now THAT is progress!

Jobs!

A good but not great jobs report. 216,000 new non-farm jobs last month and the January and February jobs numbers were revised upward slightly.

Unemployment rate drops from 8.9 to 8.8. Manufacturing employment continues to rise.

Average hours worked (34.3) and average hourly earnings ($22.87) were unchanged from February.

Not exactly a V-shaped recovery.

Broken Window Fallacy

In the Stone Age, unemployment was 0%. For some reason, Paul Krugman wants to go back there. The objective is not full employment, P-Kroog. The objective is prosperity.



(Nod to Craig Depken on DoL)

So near but yet so far

Dean Baker gets a lot of stuff right early, but then heads off the rails again Ozzie-style:

China's government is saying is that it has no better use for its money than subsidising the consumption of people in the United States and other wealthy countries, by propping up the value of the dollar. That may seem surprising since per capita income in China is less than $8,000 a year, while it is over $45,000 a year in the United States, but if this is what China's leaders insist, who are we to argue?

In effect, China is subsidising its exports to the United States. This is very generous of the Chinese government, since the United States can take advantage of China's generosity to enjoy a higher standard of living. Currently, our deficit with China is equal to 2% of GDP. This means that China is handing us goods and services that are worth roughly $280bn a year more than the value of goods and services we give them in exchange.

I wouldn't put it exactly this way, but kudos, Dean, you're nailing it!

Then there's this:

While this displaces a large amount of domestic production, we can ensure that the displacement does not result in unemployment by simply shortening working weeks. If everyone's working week was shortened by 2.0% (the equivalent of one week per year of vacation), we could keep the workforce fully employed even in the case of reduced demand.

People, the idea that every $ of the trade deficit with China represents a $ of lost domestic production is risible. Does Dean really think the next cheapest producer of Walmart products operates plants in the USA? What about Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, even Mexico? Bilateral trade is not a leak-proof iron pipe. Reductions in a trade deficit with a single country does not guarantee reductions in the overall trade deficit. That's just econ 101.

Dean is also a bit confused about where most low education workers in the USA work:

At present, China's trade policy primary hurts non-college-educated workers, since those with college and professional degrees are largely protected from the same sort of competition that manufacturing workers face. It is important to eliminate the barriers that protect doctors, lawyers and university professors from competition with their lower-paid counterparts in the developing world. This way, trade with China would put downward pressure on the wages of professionals, not just manufacturing workers.

First, most non college educated workers do NOT work in manufacturing. Manufacturing employment is a small fraction of overall employment. Many non-college educated workers work in the service sector and thus are largely "sheltered" from import competition.

Second, as Dean knows full well, American university professors in the USA face tremendous competition from foreign workers. In our small department in Oklahoma we have a Greek, an Argentine, a Turk, and three Chinese professors; about one third of the department lived abroad before starting grad school. Go look at the home page of the Harvard economics department and count the foreigners.

I fully support increased immigration for professionals (and indeed for almost everyone), but Dean just does not have his facts straight here.