Won To 3 Fore

Yglesias: Obama's Five Percent Pay Cut Is Absurd →

This business of President Obama giving himself a five percent pay cut in solidarity with sequester-ravaged federal agencies seems totally absurd to me. Who is better off thanks to this? It doesn’t seem to free up any budgetary funds for anything.

I usually refrain form calling out politicians for grand standing. It’s part of the job. As long as it isn’t too bad, you have to let it slide. But this is such silly grandstanding that it needs to be mocked. How exactly will Obama’s life be different after this 5% cut? Will he have to bring a brown bag lunch on Air Force one?

What Problem Are DC's New Food Truck Regulations Trying To Solve? →

I know some people of a market urbanist persuasion take the view that trucks’ very existence is a sign of the failure of zoning codes and regulations, but I actually think trucks are an important lunch solution on the merits.

I would not be surprised if these regulations are being pushed by the fast food industry.

Prices out of Park Slope: America needs more filtering and less gentrification. →

it’s still possible to step back from the distributive conflict, and say that as long as we’re parceling out a fixed supply of Park Slope someone is going to get stuck with that longer subway ride. But if you can actually make more Park Slope—either by building more houses there or improving the quality of subway access to other parts of Brooklyn—then you’re making progress on a more fundamental level.

Yglesias: the case for a higher minimum wage doesn't strictly require that there be no disemployment effect →

the case for a higher minimum wage doesn’t strictly require that there be no disemployment effect. After all, if you can boost earnings for a huge swathe of low-income Americans at the cost of one guy losing his job that seems like an acceptable price to pay. Two guys? Still acceptable. And so on.

Yglesias: The American economy is simultaneously overregulated and underregulated →

The way I would put this is that the American economy is simultaneously overregulated and underregulated. It is much too difficult to get business and occupational licenses…Business licensing is different. “This city has too many restaurants to choose from” is not a real public policy problem, it’s only a problem for incumbent restauranteurs who don’t want to face competition.

In a nutshell, regulations can make sense in the case of information asymmetry and in cases of negative externality. They usually don’t make sense as price controls. And in many cases, business and occupational licenses, taxi medallions, street vendor quotas and the like act as defacto price controls.

Cop in every school: How much would Wayne LaPierre's proposal cost. →

How will they suggest it be paid for? Taxes on bullets and guns or cutting school budgets? I’m guessing its the latter.

Remember the famous scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones faces off against a guy who unsheathes a scimitar and wows the audience with his fancy swordsmanship—only to get shot in the chest by Indy? The swordsman—that’s House Speaker John Boehner right now on the Bush tax cuts.

— Boehner Is Bluffing Boehner and the fiscal cliff: The House Speaker is bluffing about the Bush tax cuts. - Slate Magazine

The austerity party: At 2012 Convention, Democrats reposition themselves as the party of deficit reduction. →

I couldn’t help but notice something—in their rote lines, Democrats are embracing the role of the party of fiscal austerity.

But that is not going to effect GOP tax and spend talking points in the least. So why do it?

The myth of the libertarian Internet. →

Imagine a world in which airplane technology was advancing rapidly but digital communications technology was stagnating. I think libertarians would have a ready explaination. Aviation, though hardly unregulated, is supervised by the government for basic safety of operations and then firms and inventors are allowed to roam freely. The Internet, by contrast, is a cesspool of government intervention. Rather than founded on the independent spirit of the Wright Brothers, the Internet is literally the bastard offspring of a government civil defense program and European physics research consortium. The Internet consists of a bunch of wires that need to be run underground, generally under city streets, ensuring that construction can only happen with the cooperation of local political officials. The cable and telephone companies who provide access are regulated by both state and federal governments, often with inconsistent and overlapping schemes.

Yglesias exposes the libertarian tactic of pointing to success and chanting capitalism and pointing to failure and chanting Da-Gubment! with little concern about details.

What is the Libor scandal? →

growing evidence that Libor numbers have been deliberately manipulated by banks for years means that millions of people have been paying the wrong interest rate on all manner of financial products. Vast sums of money have been wrongly snatched from innocent people and created equally vast undeserved windfalls for others. The basic structure of the world’s financial system has once again been exposed as fundamentally broken.

And once again, the right says nothing about it, or claims it isn’t a problem because there is no way to fix the problem via tax cuts and deregulation. And if there is no way to fix it via tax cuts and deregulation, it can’t possibly be a real problem.