Help us Divided Government; You're our only hope!

People, one thing I know for sure is that I really really don't want either of the two leading fools running for president to have any chance to enact their policy agenda.

It's currently popular to argue that voters are ignorant and biased, but hell, so are the candidates!

So as my title indicates, I'm making a plea for our good friend Divided Government to save us yet again.

If you are so messed up that you are gonna vote for HRC, then please please please vote Republican in your congressional race(s) (House and maybe Senate).

If you are so moronic that you are gonna vote for Trump, then it's kind of your moral duty to vote Democrat in the congressional races.

My own preference would be for HRC to be prez but the republicans continue to hold both legislative branches. Her brand of lawlessness I think is more amenable to congressional checks than the Trumpster's.

If you vote for Gary Johnson (and if I vote, that's who I'll vote for), please please please vote for the party that you think is going to lose the presidency when you vote for congress!

So that's it. Pretty simple. You don't need a lot of information. If you somehow conquer your gag reflex and make it to the polls, split your ballot.

Some Awesome/Creepy/Unintentionally Funny Pol Ads

I have a student (I'll call her "Brigitte," because that's her name) who is working on the relative influence of TV vs Youtube as an effective medium for political campaigns.  An interesting topic, though a hard thing to measure accurately.

But the great thing (for the present) is all the truly strange and/or wonderful ads she has come across.
Here's a sampling:

Chuck Grassley's twitter

Beware the Insider-asuarus

Hosed

Hotdog

Big Bad John

Economics for Five Year Olds

But then I can't resist adding my own effort, from 2008.

Jump in the Ocean  (notice the campaign sign.  That kind of production value is what really makes a video.  Okay, not.  Thanks to Barbara H for all that driving, and filming.)

Dean Greco: The All Day Breakfast Party

Released soon:  the MOVIE!  100 Signatures.

Trailer....

Robin Hood? Nope, Just Another Bunch of Thugs with a Good Press Agent

It has never been clear to me why the right chooses to fight about whether "we" (whatever that means) should "help" (whatever that means) the "poor." (whatever THAT means).

The two questions should be:
1.  Is it possible to help the poor?  That is, can even the best-designed program, implemented correctly, actually do anything to help the poor and to reduce poverty?

2.  Is there any reason to believe there is a substantial probability of actual politicians, the kind of people actually in the world, not in the fevered imaginations of statist zealots, will actually do anything like what is required if #1 is to be satisfied?

I think the answer to #1 is largely "no."  Attempts to give away money create rent-seeking contests that dissipate most, or all, or perhaps even more than all, the amount of resources "we" (what does that mean?) try to give away.

But the answer to #2 is clearly and robustly "no."  This is the public choice critique, in its simplest and starkest form.

Which leads me to "Munger's Law," which I use in class all the time.  It goes like this:

Start with this statement:  "The [state / government] should do XXXX, because people can't choose for themselves and I trust that the [state / government] will do a better job."

Maybe the reason that people can't choose for themselves is that they don't have the resources, so we'll use Food Stamp programs to give them more.  Or maybe people can't choose for themselves because they are too stupid and weak, so we'll have laws against drugs and prostitution.  Or maybe people can't choose because there's a collective action problem, like zoning or pollution problems.

All I ask is that the person making this statement make the following change:   "Politicians I actually know, who live in the world, should do XXXX, because people can't choose for themselves and I trust that those politicians will do a better job."

It's almost impossible for that to be true, in most cases.  People want "the state" to be in charge, but then when it's George W. Bush they say, "Oh, I didn't mean HIM."  People want "the state" to control policy, but when politicians support Amendment One (banning gay marriage in NC) we hear, "Not that!  That's not what we wanted!"

How about taking from the rich and giving to the poor?  Should the state be Robbing Hood?  Can the state be expected to do that?  Well, you get reelected by appealing to....the very poor, right?  No, you get eleected by appealing to the very MIDDLE.

I give you (courtesy of WH) ....Milton Friedman and "Director's Law."


Think that's wrong?  Our Prez threatened to veto "Plan B" NOT because it did too little for the poor, but because it imposed ANY cost on the middle class.  You give things to the middle class, if you want to get elected.  You don't give to the poor.  That's nonsense.  What politicians do is pester the bejeezus out of the poor, and shovel cash to the middle class.  That's electoral politics; it couldn't be any other way.

After the Election: Five Things I Think Are True

1.  Barack Obama is a pretty bad president.  Not apocalyptically, George W. Bush bad, but bad.  And he will be remembered as a bad president.

2.  Barack Obama is a pretty effective candidate.  Certainly better than Mitt Romney.  But then George W. Bush was a pretty good candidate, too.  Bush was a failure as a President, and Obama's failures have much (though not everything) to do with his being coopted by the defense-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex.  There are ways in which Obama is no better than Bush, because he is no DIFFERENT than Bush.  Obama lied about Gitmo, no wars, and drug policy.  Just flat lied.  As a candidate, you can do that.  As a leader...well, he got away with it.  Because....

3.  Romney is the Republican Kerry.  They are both even from Massachusetts.  Kerry was richer, of course, because he slept his way to great wealth.  But in both cases there was a weak, largely ineffective incumbent who had some campaign skills and was not afraid to lie in order to win. And in both cases, the Kerry / Romney character in this little play lost a race he should have won.  And lost a race that a competent campaigner would have won easily.  If you think I am saying that this makes Obama the Democratic George Bush... I'm not ready to be THAT insulting.  Obama is only incompetent and woefully uninformed about policy, and the way economies work outside of Chicago.

4.  Gary Johnson did NOT cost Romney the election.  There is no story you can tell, even assuming 100% of Johnson voters would have voted for Romney (which is asinine!), where Romney could win the Presidency.  Maybe Florida.  But not Ohio.  Romney lost this by being a goofball, not because of Gary Johnson.

5.  Now, it is quite true that I wish that Johnson had gotten 5%, and that the race had been close enough that Johnson did plausibly cost Romney the election.  Because I still don't think the Republicans get it.  They think that people actually agree with their bigotry, their religious prudery, and their barbaric foreign policy.  And they got enough votes this time to allow them to continue to believe that.  Darn it.

The Economy & Presidential Elections

There's a lot of talk about how the relatively weak economy is not hurting President Obama's re-election chances from top pundits like Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, & Will Wilkinson. It's either just stated or said that "models show" this to be the case.

But, one thing about statistical models of elections is that they kind of suck. There aren't a lot of observations so people often use data from the distant past to predict the future without testing to see if the data generating process is constant over the time period.

Also people use a lot of strange and potentially endogenous explanatory variables. As a rule of thumb, if you let me pick the dependent variable and also allow me to create my own made up right hand side variables, I'm going to get a pretty good in sample fit for my model.

So lets just look at the relatively recent  raw data and see what we can see. This graph is from my 2008 Public Choice paper. It shows that from 1961-2004, there is a pronounced difference in economic performance over the second half of the election cycle between cycles where the incumbent party wins and when it loses.

I used Fred to update the results through 2008, and average growth over the last half of the election cycle when the incumbent party wins is 4.6%. When the incumbent party loses, it's 2.2%. That difference is significant at the 0.001 level.

For the relevant period of the Obama cycle for which Fred lists data (2011 q1 - 2012q2, 6 quarters), the average growth rate is 1.9%

In recent times, the incumbent party will, on average, lose with such a low growth rate in the second half of the cycle.

Why do I care about this? Well, I want to question the idea that the economy is helping (or at least not hurting)Obama. I want to question the assertion that campaigns don't matter because the economy is everything.

BHO is going to win in November DESPITE the economy, largely because Romney is a terrible candidate who is running an undisciplined, juvenile, brain-damaged campaign.

And that matters.

Hitler Finds Out Ryan is GOP VP Candidate

The "Hitler Finds Out ____" is pretty played out.  Usually, it's enough just to hear the premise; you don't need to watch the thing.  You know, "Hitler Finds Out the DC Metro Closes at Midnight," "Hitler Finds Out Chicken Tikka Masala is Not Really an Indian Dish, But Was Invented in London," that sort of thing.

But this version, about Paul Ryan, is pretty funny.

Links

1.  Women who really like politics have more frequent....um, fun.

2.  The US should bury its power lines.  Because Germany does.  (David Frum is an idiot, in other words.  Germany has a population density of 600 per square mile.  The US has a population density of 83 per square mile.  Even the state of Virginia, where Mr. Frum is whining about missing his AC, has only a pop density of 196 per square mile.  It's just not economical, not even close to it...)

3.  Election determined by...100 million year old coastline, and geology of soil.  Closer to the Annales school, which is little known in US outside of history depts.

4.  In Korea:  Fan Death.  Yes, really.

5.  If Assange should be prosecuted for espionage, then the NYTimes should be, also.

Romney is not a shoo-in for the flip-flopping gold medal

Barack Obama, March 2011:

"With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed,"