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Urbi et Orbi
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Eschaton (featured blog Nov 28-Dec 4)MorningNot gonna mention the heat. Not gonna mention the heat. Not gonna mention the heat...
plus ça changeNo deep thoughts for the late night, just occasionally look back and marvel at how much things have changed and yet... how much they haven't.
Apocalypse NowI'm sure future historians will recognize THE TRUTH, that there are actually plenty of jobs and lots of lazy people, and will name this era The Great Shirk, or The Long Time Of Funemployment, or something similar. But meanwhile, people are still losing their homes.
Fifty-six percent of all home sales in Riverside County in the first three months of the year involved foreclosure or bank- owned properties, according to RealtyTrac, an online service that monitors distressed property.
Supply And Demand And ZombiesHave not read, but did read some of it in progress over at the blog.
  
... Read the rest of "Supply And Demand And Zombies"US Public Health SpendingA point which is not made often enough, though I have made it, is that not only does the US spend a stupid amount of money in total on health care, we also beat a lot of countries in the amount of public money spent on health care (bottom graph).
Not sure we get a lot for that money, but we spend it.
Plan BThe administration is not big on Plan B, and while they occasionally admit error they seem to do it without actually changing direction.
I think they genuinely believed the economy was turning around this winter despite the fact that signs of that were paltry at best.
Job Fair In A BoxThis sounds like an especially bad idea. People who show up to town meetings because they're concerned about jobs are going to be the people who, you know, don't have any goddamn jobs.
False ChoicesI generally don't bother to engage Kotkin, but there is no stark choice between suburban and urban* and urban living does not equal condo in a skyscraper. More than that, there are a variety of preferences out there and it's dumb to read polls on issues like this in the way he does. There is no one way.
Anyway, for the billionth time, the urban hellhole revolution I promote does involve improving certain elements of infrastructure and it also involves getting rid of the creeping suburbanization policies which make urban hellholes difficult to build even in urban hellholes, but for all of you suburb lovers it just involves reducing some of the worst elements of recent suburban design by removing policies which mandate those elements. Nice, walkable, if still largely car-centric, neighborhoods with good transit links are desirable and command a premium in many area... Read the rest of "False Choices"
Eschaton Assignment DeskPerhaps some enterprising reporter could look into the case of the missing Social Security Trustees report.
Make Some NoiseOne of the mysteries to me is why state lawmakers with budget and unemployment problems aren't putting more pressure on federal officeholders to do more. I guess the answer is that they just don't have any real influence over them.
Remember That Foreclosure Crisis, A Lovely Thing Of The PastActually not a thing of the past. People withhout jobs or unemployment benefits can't pay their mortgages.
As Philadelphia economist Kevin Gillen sees it, "The recession that started with the bursting of the housing bubble has come full circle.
"Whereas housing led us into the recession, the recession is now leading housing."
The big myth is the crisis was "averted" because the financial system was "saved." The reality is that they saved the banksters, but left the unemployment and foreclosures crises in place.
Eliminating Saturday MailNo strong opinion, just throwing it out there for discussion.
Truly DepressingKrgthulu.
I was on Good Morning America this not-so-good morning, doing what I could. But I was struck by something that George Stephanopoulos said: he claimed to have been speaking to an administration official who asserted that what we need to get businesses investing is for business to know that the government has stopped — presumably, that means no new spending, no new regulation, whatever.
I have no idea why any sentient people think this makes any sense. Businesses have no incentive to invest if they have slack demand and are producing under capacity. The only reason businesses would care what government was doing is if government borrowing was causing interest rates to spike which, you know, isn't happening. We're getting into underpants gnome territory.
I SEE THE FUTUREDepressingly, the script for the autumn is already easy to see. Dems will lose seats, in part because it was inevitable and in part because the economy sucks completely. All the very serious people will tell us that Obama "overreached" and was this crazy marxist hippie, and if only he'd be "center right" like the country supposedly is then Dems would be popular again.
They should unveil a major new jobs plan like today, and then spend the next few months talking about it nonstop even if they can't pass it. I have no sense that there's anything like that in the pipeline.
heckuva jobNobody could have predicted, yada yada...
In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day.
MorningIt's now official. Reporters and photographers going pretty much anywhere BP doesn't want them can face criminal charges and/or fines of up to $40,000. While the big news corporations may be willing to bring it to court, this new rule will certainly stifle smaller, independent news outfits that don't have deep pockets. So much for that freedom of the press thingy.
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