Will politicians ever stop lying to the public?

People, maybe we should extend unemployment benefits yet again. The job outlook is bleak, unemployment is high, and lots of people are hurting bad. Maybe it's the civilized thing to do.

But could we please just stop yapping out the bald faced lie that unemployment benefits create jobs?

Please?

Obama and Pelosi were again claiming that yesterday. The closest thing to any analysis of why was Nancy's "it injects demand".

Today, Mark Thoma has found an economist to parrot the company line as well. He offers absolutely no analysis or evidence for the proposition.

You know why there's no analysis or evidence given? Because, even on the crudest of Keynesian grounds, its horse-hockey!

The proposed bill would affect around 1,000,000 workers and we'd be giving them a few hundred bucks a month for what, another year? so thats, say $300 x 12 x 1,000,000 or $3.6 billion passed out in 12 "doses" of $300 million each in a geographically diffuse pattern.

Yeah, I can see entrepreneurs all over the country rushing to hire new workers to handle the massive increase in demand created by this program.

It never seems to enter their heads that at the margin, subsidizing unemployment tends to create more unemployment. There are a lot of studies in economics showing that employment spikes at the time when unemployment benefits run out.

Yes, I know the benefits are small compared to a job. No I am not calling unemployed people lazy. I am perfectly willing to concede that the humanitarian case for extending benefits may trump the marginal incentives they create to postpone taking a job.

What I won't concede, what I'm very very tired of hearing asserted as if it was obvious, is that extending unemployment benefits will create jobs.

Obama and Pelosi remind me of that movie about the bus. It's like if they stop spending money at a certain high rate, they will explode.

My favorite short poems about prison

Prison Ball

They don't negotiate if you are held
Hostage. Don't attempt to take a charge.
If you find a point guard who'll pass the rock,
Help him escape. Let him fastbreak at large.

-Sherman Alexie



Christmas in Prison

It was Christmas in prison
and the food was real good.
We had turkey and pistols
carved out of wood.

-John Prine

Let's start the new year out right

Thanks to Yahoo for collecting an absolutely amazing compendium of diet and health tips to help us roar into 2011.

Here's a sample:

"A tablespoon of semen has your equivalent of steak, eggs, lemons and oranges."

PS. I really dislike how the media always use this "he said, she said" approach to health news.

when people were shorter and lived by the water

I was browsing through Econlog this morning and found just the most amazing bit of analysis ever. I just had to share it with you all:


I focus a lot of my historical reading on the first World War and on the 1930s. I think that people were really stupid back then. I take the Flynn Effect seriously, which suggests that the average IQ several generations back was what today would be considered to be mentally retarded. In my view, this helps to explain how cheerfully the nations went to war in1914. Yes, the war turned out to be worse than what they expected. But how were their expectations not influenced by the Civil War or the Franco-Prussian war?

--Arnold Kling

OMFG, people. World War I happened because world leaders 100 years or so ago were "mentally retarded"? Really?

REALLY?????

So going back another 50 years or so, Abraham Lincoln must have been the intellectual equivalent of a spider monkey?

Go another 100 years back from that. The founding fathers were the mental equivalents of dung beatles?

Adam Smith had an IQ of 13?

Blogger, please.

Thomas Friedman finds a friend in politics

I can only hope PA governor Ed Rendell was trying to be funny when he had the following reaction to the postponement of an Eagles game (but I fear that he was serious):

"We've become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down."

Holy Moly!

I will say this though. If the Communist party wanted the game to go on, it would go on and the people would walk there if ordered to and would do calculus, or even the hokey pokey on the way if ordered to.

KPC is officially "short" on Ed Rendell AND China for 2011.