Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jessica Pare, 31.

And very quickly, some good stuff:

1. Barack Obama's speech on the economy -- which Ezra Klein calls his best on that subject.

2. Jamelle Bouie on the president's speech.

3. John Sides has a preliminary forecast for 2014 House elections.

4. Adrianna McIntyre on Medicaid.

5. And Brendan Nyhan on polarization.

Dogs, Not Barking

An occasional item about things not in the news -- which is, therefore, newsworthy.

1. Why don't we have controversial surgeon generals any more? I had to look to check; turns out it's been (shocker, I know) vacant since mid-July, with apparently no current nominee (to replace Regina Benjamin, who as far as I know mostly stayed out of trouble)...yes, that's a three-month vacancy with no replacement named. I suppose one way to avoid controversy is to avoid nominating anyone, but still...surgeon generals used to be front-and-center in "culture war" issues.

2. The Euro. Or at least the Euro crisis. Yeah, it's been in the general news some, but (at least in the US) it's mostly gone away as an any-day-now kind of crisis story.

3. The Fed board. Yeah, this again. There are basically three openings: one current one, since August; the spot that will open up assuming that Janet Yellen is confirmed (or, I suppose, Bernanke's spot if she isn't); and the one that will be open when Sarah Bloom Raskin goes over to Treasury, assuming that she is confirmed. That's three opening, zero nominees. As Kate Davidson notes in a nice article, there's another potential opening at the end of the year, although presumably Jerome Powell will be renominated when his current term expires.Yes, Fed Chair is a big deal, but the rest of the board matters, too, so it's time to start cranking up the "when is Obama going to get around to this?" campaign. Again.

4. I don't know what to use as the kicker any more. I think fear of a revived Fairness Doctrine is really pretty much dead now (quick googling leads me to more liberals wishing it was back than conservatives fearing it, so I really can't use it any more, I don't think. I certainly can't use gun control; of course the NRA fears of what liberals really wish they could do are silly (not to mention the fears of those who think the NRA are squishes), but Democrats certainly pushed a gun measure, so can't use that. So I'm back to looking for ideas. The idea is something that one party or group is constantly warning that the other party will enact, but in fact the other party has little or no interest in it. Also helps if it's funny in some way.

People Think Crazy Things About Inflation

I don't recall every seeing this one; it doesn't surprise me, but, you know, this is just crazy talk:

Over the next twelve months, do you expect that the cost of living  – that is, what you pay for everyday goods and services  ─ will increase, decrease, or stay about the same?
Decrease........................................... 1
Stay the same ................................... 22
Total increase.....................................77
    Increase 1% to 3% ....................... 23
    Increase 4% to 5% ....................... 18
    Increase 6% to 10%...................... 15
    Increase 11% or more................... 15
    Increase not sure how much............  6 

So more than one in seven believe that inflation will be over 11% next year, and three in ten, total, have it at 6% or more. In real life, it's unlikely that inflation will hit 2% next year.

That's from a Hart/Public Opinion Strategies poll, which also has the somewhat helpful results that people think the budget deficit has become worse in the last year by a 8/66 (better/worse) margin, and that while Obamacare gets a 29/46 positive/negative split, "Affordable Care Act" returns a 24/37 result.

Click through for the long term trends, going back to 2007, on inflation. Just eyeballing it, my best guess is that it basically follows optimism and pessimism about the economy overall; people perceive prices going up more during hard times than good times, even though the truth is roughly the opposite. Unfortunately, all we get here is inflation expectations, not perceptions of how things have changed.

There is a famous finding that Democrats believed that inflation got worse during the Reagan years (contrary to the plain fact that it got much better). Hart/POS don't give us a partisan breakdown here.

I'd like to think that the 15% who expect Carter-level inflation next year are Tea Partiers who actually believe that Fed policies will produce runaway inflation, but it's probably more likely a combination of partisan Republicans who just select the worst possible option and people who have no idea what "11%" means.

No larger point here; just thought it was interesting that fear of inflation, or at least survey answers that look like fear of inflation, are incredibly persistent.

What Mattered This Week?

I'm behind in my reading this week, so I'll just go with the jobs report as something that mattered -- not as far as electoral politics is concerned, but for the economy.

For doesn't matter...well, a lot of the stuff about the ACA employer mandate delay is overstated. I don't know if it "doesn't matter," though.

What does you have? What do you think mattered this week?

Read Stuff, You Should (Plus Housekeeping)

Happy Birthday to Ken Osmond, 70.

And some good stuff:


1. "The people have taken over American politics, and they hate it." Ezra Klein reads Fiorina.

2. Brad DeLong on "normalization."

3. Scott Bland on the DCCC taking sides and getting away with it. Very interesting.

And I'm on the road through Tuesday...I'll almost certainly put up the normal weekend posts, but don't expect much more than that over the next few days.

What Mattered This Week?

Back to basics: the employment report. Nothing great, but no disaster. We're certainly not having anything like Clinton's peace-and-prosperity second term, but at least for the moment it seems we're more in the direction of getting there than we are moving towards George W. Bush's second term. Even if there doesn't seem much hope of actually getting there within four years.

It's good that Obama finally got around to choosing a Secretary of Commerce, but much harder to imagine how a Secretary of Commerce can matter.

What do you have? What do you think mattered this week?

The Single Best Economic Reform for the Next Time

Glad to see that Matt Yglesias is talking about this one again:

3. We should beef up automatic stabilizers in the budget by creating some kind of national rainy day fund that automatically releases unrestricted funds to state governments in times of recession. Some elected officials will use the money to avoid pro-cyclical service cuts and furloughs, while others will use it to finance tax cuts and we'll just live with disagreement about the best way to proceed.

He also wants to make monetary policy work better, but I think he undervalues the ideological resistance to those suggestions (or at any rate, whether he undervalues it or not, I think that strong ideological resistance makes any legislative effort in that area very unlikely to succeed).

However, I continue to believe that countercyclical "automatic stabilizers" for the states should, in principle, be something both sides should be able to cut a deal on. To get Republican buy-in, what's necessary is for those funds to be transfer-neutral in the long run. But if that's the case, with money flowing out of state budgets during good times, I really don't see why conservatives should oppose it in principle. After all, no one really believes that states should massively build up programs during good times and then slash them during bad times, but the incentives contained in state revenue flows make that a likely result. It's also easy to imagine the interest-group coalition that would support this kind of thing, and harder to see exactly which influential interest groups would have a strong incentive to oppose it.

In general, I'm much more willing than Yglesias is to leave things in the hands of legislatures. But I think this is the big missing piece of the New Deal regime of moderating the effects of business cycles via automatic government action.

What Mattered This Week?

Putting aside the horrible shooting in Connecticut...

I'll say that the new actions by the Fed mattered -- not just in terms of the economy, but politically as well.

And for something that I suspect didn't matter, I'll go with the North Korea launch.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

What Mattered This Week?

I'm pretty sure the Romney comments, and even the reaction, go in the "doesn't matter" bin. For something that matters...I'll go with Eurozone developments. To some extent this week, to some extent just remembering it's out there.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Brian Blessed, 76. I'm not sure he's my all-time favorite actor, but he'll do 'til someone else comes along. His Augustus is certainly among my very favorite TV characters/performances; he's wonderful in a weirdly neglected As You Like It; and terrific fun in small roles in Branagh's Henry and Much Ado. I haven't made a point of seeing everything he's in, but I haven't been disappointed yet (okay, yes, there's the Star Wars thing, but hard to blame him for that). I've never seen his Lear; I really should. Anyway: I know I've touted it before, but any of you who haven't watched I Claudius...absolutely must-see.

Meanwhile, plenty of good stuff:


1. Catherine Rampell on why the September - and August - employment numbers might have been what they appear to have been.

2. Good Matthew Dickinson post-debate item.

3. John Sides: "the constant attention to individual polls is hurting America." And a good Nate Silver summary of what the polls, and the election, look like to him.

4. For Mitt Romney's foreign policy speech, you want Fred Kaplan, who is brutal.

5.What's going on with Super PACs and House races? An important question; Nicholas Confessore and Jo Craven McGinty have quite a bit of information. From what they can tell, there's a lot of outside money, and there seems to be at least some partisan balance.

6. Perhaps vaguely relevant to my post yesterday; a Ta-Nehisi Coates "Limited and Self-Serving Defense of Political Punditry." Also makes strong points about Obama and the debate.

7. And Aaron Blake and Sean Sullivan over at the Fix bring us their picks for the greatest political dynasties in every state. Fun!

What Mattered This Week?

An unusually newsy week -- if I had to select out one thing, it's probably the economic news including the jobs report, but there's also the debate, developments in Libya, Syria, and Georgia (among others), and don't miss that report on Homeland Security.

I'm not sure what I have that didn't matter....ah, I've got it: reports of Obama's huge fundraising haul in September and Romney's money surge after the debate. I'm just not believing that even another $100M in the presidential race is going to make any difference at this point.

What do you have? What do you think mattered this week?

Q Day 1: Jobs Report

longwalkdownlyndale asks:

How important is today's jobs report (unemployment fell to 7.8%!) compared to the coverage of the debate? And do you know if this changes the "fundamentals" models in any significant way at all? Or are those sorta set predicting a close election with Obama as a slight favorite? Superficially it seems to me that it will squash the "Romney Won" debate meme and makes his over/under talking point about 8% unemployment look pretty foolish.

Hey, I can outsource this one to John Sides, who has an excellent item up already:

The shortest answer is: probably not much.  In my earlier post on late changes in the economy, I noted this line from Robert Erikson’s and Christopher Wlezien’s analysis of nearly 60 years of economic and elections data:

…one can predict that actual vote from the current income growth about as well in April as in November.  By April, the economic cake is largely baked.
Which is to say, late changes in the economy aren’t that consequential.

If this jobs report matters in any way, it is by shifting the news coverage of the campaign from “Obama bombed in the debate” to “Hey, unemployment fell!”  This report is enough of a departure from previous reports to generate some positive news coverage.  And this will help to displace the positive news coverage Romney was receiving as a consequence of his debate performance.  Given that it’s this news coverage that would boost Romney in the polls, news coverage of the job report could—conceivably, possibly, maybe—limit the boost.

The only caution I'd put on that last point is that press coverage isn't entirely predictable; it's certainly possible that the jobs report could be a blip in the economic reporting but go away by tomorrow while the debate stays in the news for a while, undisturbed.

Generally, I've been saying the same thing for the last few months. The general condition of the economy is a slow, unimpressive recovery, but still a recovery. That probably points to a close race, with Obama having a slight edge. Back in the winter or spring, a good or bad jobs report could hint to that changing, but by now any indications about the future are basically irrelevant to this election, which means that as long as the report is within the general range that we're seeing (anywhere from 0 to 200K) it's likely to have very small effects, mainly (as John said) centered around short-term press coverage. The only change is that short-term press coverage in October is presumably more important than short-term press coverage was in July or August.

What Mattered This Week?

Surely the attack in Libya matters, and not just from the casualties.

The Fed actions? We'll see how important they are to the economy. I'm an optimist on this, but no question about that there's divided opinion from both conservative and liberal economists. I think it's very unlikely to have any effect on the election, however.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

Catch of the Day

To Matt Yglesias, on monetary policy and the Obama Administration:

This is a Fed full of Obama appointees pursuing a disastrous policy trajectory that's creating all kinds of problems for Obama. But I've never read any repoting indicating that the Obama economic team is upset about monetary policy, I've never heard any discontent with monetary policy from administration officials on or off the recod, and Obama's allies on Capitol Hill have basically never called publicly or privately for more expansionary monetary policy. Rather than someting as simple as an error, there seems to be a totally comprehensive systematic  blunder in which Democrats simply ignore the most powerful tool for bolstering aggregate demand while Republicans call for a disastrous tight money agenda. 

Yup.

I do have a slightly different interpretation of the Fed's actions than Yglesias does...I guess where he tends to emphasize how little they've done, I would tend to put a little more stress on how they've at least avoided rushing to tighten any time there's mild good news about the economy. And so I'd overall talk more about a weak or suboptimal policy, rather than a disastrous one. But, you know, his interpretation has a lot going for it, too.

And yup -- it's bizarre. This isn't fiscal policy, where there's Congressional obstacles to action and where Keynesian deficits were are counterintuitive for a whole lot of people. If Barack Obama had appointed a Fed Board full of wild-eyed irresponsible inflation-mad economic expanders, the truth is that no one would have noticed. Except for the effects, that is. I mean, Ron Paul would be very upset, but not noticeably more upset than he is already; the same, pretty much, for the Always 1979 crowd. Now, of course, if Fed policies actually produced serious inflation, you would get some real complaints about that, but presumably it would have accompanied a lot less unhappiness about economic growth and jobs, and that's a trade-off Obama should want. Unless he and the administration generally believes that different monetary policy really wouldn't help...but there's really no sign of that, either.

As Yglesias says, the attitude seems to be one of indifference -- they're neither happy nor upset about it. Which just doesn't make any sense to me, but of course things don't always have to make sense. I sure would like to hear more about it, though.

And: great catch!

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to John Slattery, 50. Was on a Ned and Stacey! Oh, also some other show.

But as much as I'm tempted to check to see if Ned and Stacey is available, I think I better get to the good stuff:

1. Seth Masket passes along research on the effects so far of the new California primary system; parties adapting about as quickly as the Borg.

2. Michael Grunwald has five myths about the stimulus.I suspect his new book is going to be worthwhile.

3. And on Paul Ryan, great items at the Monkey Cage: Eric Schickler on John Nance Garner and the dangers of NOMINATE; John Sides and Lynn Vavrick on independents and Ryan; and John on Ryan as an unnecessary base-mobilization strategy.

The President's Job

Brad DeLong gets it. He's looking at a quote from the upcoming Michael Grunwald book about the early years of the Obama presidency, with the president saying "Look, I get the Keynesian thing. But it's not where the electorate is." DeLong:

If Obama does not understand that his job is not to please the electorate by indulging its prejudices but rather to manage the path to a strong economy, he needs to be told what his job is every hour of every day until he does understand that.

That's exactly right, and it's especially true within the first couple years of the administration, when politically the goal has to be to build the best possible economy for re-election.

Right now, Obama can say any economically illiterate thing he wants, and as long as it doesn't cause the Euro Zone to implode somehow, it probably doesn't matter at all.

I will say one thing in potential defense of Obama...Politico has this quote in the context of the staff wanting Obama to make stimulus speeches. It's not crazy for Obama, in that context, to take into account what he talks about in public, as long as it doesn't prevent him from continuing to do the right thing on policy. I think it's highly unlikely that Obama could generated massive support for Keynesian policies by giving the correct speeches.

On the other hand, I do think that there are two groups who probably could have used additional education in 2009 who might have been receptive to a White House message that was never as clear as it could have been: Democratic opinion leaders, and elite journalists and pundits. Obama might have fully understood "the Keynesian thing," but I think there's pretty good evidence that quite a few "neutral" pundits who were inclined to at least give the new president a chance really didn't understand basic Keynesian concepts. In particular, I suspect that a lot of people really didn't know that there were sound, boring, reasons fully supported by mainstream economics for running very large short-term budget deficits. And I suspect that that group includes quite a few Democratic Members of Congress.

I've also increasingly come around to the idea that the original stimulus probably should have included built-in triggers that would have automatically increased spending (and perhaps tax cuts) based on economic indicators, perhaps along with other triggers to shut things down if the economy was recovering. Perhaps Olympia Snowe and the Benator wouldn't have gone for that, either, but I'd like to know whether anyone thought about trying it.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Romola Garai, 30. Excellent in The Hour, which is well worth your time, but you probably knew that. You'll also want to watch her in Branagh's woefully underseen As You Like It.

The good stuff:

1. Some real pessimism from Brad DeLong.

2. Matthew Dickinson reminds everyone that talk of electoral college near-locks, or even an electoral college advantage, is premature at best. I'm sticking with what I said: ignore state polling until after the conventions.

3. A nice Jason McDonald post explaining "limitation rides." Quick "how Congress works" point: Schoolhouse Rock gets you about 80% of the way to the standard textbook version -- not bad for a 30 year old cartoon! -- but the standard textbook version is only the beginning of how Congress really works.

4. And presidents selling taxes. Carah Ong on the highlights of a Miller Center exhibition.
 

What Mattered This Week?

I'll go with what Nate Silver said -- that the economic news this week was a bit of a plus for Barack Obama. Not so much that it was great, although it did push things his way a bit, but because it made economic disaster before November somewhat less likely, and if things stay as they are, he's probably a slim favorite.

What didn't matter? I don't know...how about the spike up in the polls for Obama in that Q swing states poll and then in Pew. I'm pretty skeptical about both. Toss 'em all into the pot, sure, but I'm not buying it, yet.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

Elsewhere: Replace, Jobs

I've neglected doing these recently; I always feel bad about doing them if I don't have any value added other than the link. But I know several of you have asked for them...it tends to be the thing that I let go if I don't have time. Fortunately, I have a few minutes before whatever I'm supposed to do next, so:

At Greg's today, I did a jobs day preview, mostly saying that we're really overhyping the monthly jobs reports these days and arguing that this one in particular isn't going to be (electorally) important unless it's way off expectations.

And at PP, I talked Mitt Romney and "repeal and replace," which apparently he's going to be the last Republican to stick with. I also made basically the same comment about Romney's tax plan that Matt Yglesias had today, so see what he had to say, too.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Peter Bogdanovich, 73. I just saw Last Picture Show again last week; it's just astonishingly good, isn't it? And I do love Paper Moon. That's not bad.

On to the good stuff:


1. Kevin Drum keeps us up to date on the state of climate denialism.

2. Sarah Kliff on that Federal District judge who isn't sure whether mandating that employers who provide health insurance include contraceptive coverage is kosher or not. Two things: that's a Carter appointee, senior status since 1988. And second: merits aside, gotta love any case called Hercules v. Sebelius.

3. And don't cry for Brad DeLong, Noah Smith. Or something like that. At any rate, Zachary's makes a really good pie, and I miss it a lot, although I actually preferred Rustica -- is it still in business?