Disqus - Latest Comments for JRBehrman

Re: Jones Tells McChrystal to Be Quiet

JRBehrman — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:52:48 -0000

Brown would not say anything, that would really be stupid. But, his people would have talked to Obama's people, right?

Re: Jones Tells McChrystal to Be Quiet

JRBehrman — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 09:52:59 -0000

Spencer,

I think the gag from Jones may just be a matter of whining from Brown over Flt. Lt. Anderton's catty remark and competition w/in the White House for celebrity status.

Re: The Case for Spending More

JRBehrman — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 01:10:10 -0000

Will check out the NBER work. It is important to combat right-wing attempts to revise history and trash the New Deal. Here are two things that worry me today:

First, progressive states, which back then included Texas, had laid quite a solid foundation for spending money in ways that bear scrutiny today. They were not terribly scalable inasmuch as they could only build one courthouse per county and were constrained on hospitals by the supply of Protestant doctors and Catholic nursing sisters. The farm-to-market road had not been invented yet.

Still, the land-grant colleges and their agricultural agents and research stations were a fabulous template for, well, the now-taboo "industrial policy".

Only with "Military Keynesianism" did military-patriotic patriotism do quantitively what mere progressivism had not done enough of. (Note the great hydroelectric damn projects, the TVA, Bonneville, and so on, became mostly "cover stories" for, in fact, the Manhatton (bomb) Project.

Sadly, in the interest of military efficiency and actual preparedness, we need to actually cut the defense budget, unwind the Edwardian/Stalinist Pentagon, and open the now wholly corrupt "black budget".

So, can we realize necessary fiscal aggregates and employment objectives with "green energy" or ... what?

Do we really want to build more roads and McMansions, SUV's, and suburban shopping malls?

That is all most senior Democratic office-squatters and the Congressional Democrats know how to do!.

Re: The Case for Spending More

JRBehrman — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:48:14 -0000

There is no question about the aggregates to my mind. And, third- or fourth-best is fine for starters. But, Gingrich can come back hard in just two years from now, if all Obama can do is stuff the federal government with corporate lawyers who will do nothing but hand out money to corporate lobbyists styling themselves as experts on this or that.

The federal government is little more than public management silos bargaining with private management silos over how to avoid risks or, failing that, to diffuse responsibility, all the while blabbering about their three dozen top priorities. So, let's spend-up on this or that. But, look at America's Defense Meldown. The people who know how to cut a budget are the ones who know how to spend money on something besides financial engineering.

Re: The Case for Spending More

JRBehrman — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:16:46 -0000

I agree w/ JKG about the fiscal aggregates and abstractions, but not nostalgia for what are now rotten political foundations and managerial "silos". Concretely, as we still say ...

The "Shovel-Ready" projects of local governments today are mostly artifacts of recent trends in land-speculation and arms-barter: "The Wrong Stuff". They will increase urban sprawl, energy consumption, and import of civil engineering goods and services. That would be "Toll Roads", "Bridges to Nowhere", and "Goverment-Owned, Crony-Operated" (GOCO) Prisons, Sports Palaces, and Convention Centers. These are not conceived by Lucius Clay, Jesse Jones, Herman Brown, or "Major" Parten but by "merchant bankers" and "offset hustlers" like the Carlyle Group and Booz, Allen, and Hamilton.

Public Utilities today are "financial institutions". They are run by bond-lawyers, not by engineers. Their plans are absurd from energy conservation, technology development, and public health or safety perspectives. Those plans mostly reflect (a) cheap energy, (b) cheap credit, and (c) imported civil, chemical, and electrical engineering goods and services ... also land-speculation, debt-pyramids, and discriminatory pricing -- what used to be called "bunko", "charging whatever the traffic will bear", or, most recently, "Enron".

So, too, industrial infrastructure today involves robust planning and standards that the "academic-military-industrical complex" has not updated in a half-century, or more. In fact, it is an agro-military complex that has produced the wrong army, navy, and air force for today's military challenges and that props up an "industrial mobilization base" that still reflects the WWII "Arsenal of Democracy" (Military Keynesianism) or, in the Southern states, the union-busting and land-speculation of the early Cold War period. Here, folks, is America's Defense Meltdown". Here is my own little ditty on our Navy, "Arrgh ... Pirates".

That is a huge challenge for a majority political party that must operate effectively at every echelon of government. Do not be surprised if Newt Gingrich steps up with a credible-sounding alternative to the DNC/DSCC/DCCC kludge by 2010. If Obama, Reid, and Pelosi fail to do much more than "Stick a Windmill On It", -- the lobbyists' energy policy -- the self-proclaimed strategic Genius from Georgia will hand the cringing, "Hold Harmless", check-list liberals in Congress their walking papers again.

Re: The Ugly Politics of Financial Bailouts

JRBehrman — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:54:49 -0000

But, then, there are differences. This is Anglo-America, not France or Germany:

For one thing, destabilization of US credit and banking institutions was not an exogenous problem caused by, say, the Versailles Treaty. It was wholly the product of our very own political-economic elite, including polite and gracious collaborators of Alan Greenspan's like Alan Blinder. So, do the Princeton endowments challenge corrupt and self-indulgent corporate governance practices or rely on insider information from facluty and alumni? No.

The events of recent days are the predictable and understandable result of political ideology (Rep) and expediency (Dem). There is conspicuously no accountability at all for it. The revolving-door between GS and TSY just keeps on revolving with responsibility for allocating a nearly blank check for 700 $MMM now devolving on yet another GS crony of the GS Secretary.

The buffoons responsible for chairing and staffing Congressional committees based on their ability to get and redistribute lobby money are all still in place. Congressional leaders are just not leaders, they are pretty much the same as "rainmakers" in a large law-firm. They collect money from the lobby and redistribute it to other members. It is what they do and all they do. They are essentially Whigs, opposed to Slavery, perhaps, but solicitous of the rights of property-owners and, of course, the wealthiest households, what in Russia are called the nomenklature.

What if "financial bailouts need to be depoliticized"? How does one do that within an anglophile elite that (a) routinely subverts accounting standards that would inconvenience wealthy alumni and legatees, (b) maintains a "black budget" even after the Great, World, and Cold Wars ended, and (c) has as many nationalities as bank accounts in tax havens, yachts and houses in pirate havens?

So, where are the patriotic/professional institutions that a "depoliticized" response to this or any crisis requires? All I see are chickenhawks, tenured cowards, clubmen, and sycophants.