Jacob Davies

by Jacob Davies Smells like … snow job: The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide. The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their 401(k)s or individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and … Read more

by Jacob Davies Two stories on net neutrality today; the first that Google & Verizon have been in talks over priority tiers for traffic, and the second that (thankfully) the FCC chairman Julius Genachowski opposes any such deal. The Google story is quite strange. Google has been one of the largest names pressing for net … Read more

by Jacob Davies I’m in Milwaukee visiting in-laws, and we took a trip to the Wisconsin State Fair today. Among the crowds and bustle, the hawkers of food and drink and strange plastic balloon animals, the lowing (okay mostly sleeping) cows and all the rest of the pastoral scene, and also the Miller Lite tent, … Read more

by Jacob Davies If you, like me, were completely dumbfounded by the way Democrats jumped on board the Iraq War train prior to the invasion, seeming to have lost their minds in their blind acceptance of the blatantly fabricated evidence and deeply unconvincing threats that were being put out by the administration, this little snippet … Read more

by Jacob Davies There’s an op-ed in the NYT today by David Stockman with what Barry Ritholz calls a “brutal critique” of recent Republican fiscal policy. Ritholz provides a convenient summary of it: • The total US debt, including states and municipalities, will soon reach $18 trillion dollars. That is a Greece-like 120% of GDP. … Read more

by Jacob Davies You can tell from the first sentence that this story isn’t going to end well: Timothy McCollough freely admits that he stopped making payments on his Chase Manhattan credit card in 1999. He says he did not have the means to pay after he was disabled by a head injury that cost … Read more

by Jacob Davies Back on the Well (in the stone age of the Internet), there was a tradition of having an introductions thread when a new forum was opened. The hosts and the regular users would introduce themselves and invite any new members to do likewise. The nice thing about it was that even if … Read more

by Jacob Davies I’m often surprised to read or hear from Americans who believe that the US has fallen behind other industrialized countries in output or standard of living. Sometimes people even believe that China is about to eclipse the US in standard of living. Now, anyone who’s read what I have to say knows … Read more

by Jacob Davies Via Ezra Klein, a novel argument from the hydraulic-fracturing natural-gas industry: if you knew what we were doing, you wouldn’t let us do it… so we have to keep it secret. Here’s the industry’s appointed spokesman: Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma said the new requirements could effectively end onshore natural gas production. … Read more

by Jacob Davies You have to hand it to the New York Times: they really know how to pick a perfect link-bait case study. This one is a classic: Tremaine Edwards, 35, a former computer technician who had been unemployed for two years before he was hired in May by Gallery Guichard, a private gallery … Read more

by Jacob Davies We may not be the New York Times, but we can still have fancy interactive features: The gradual squeeze of everyone but the upper 10% is like trying to get out the last of the toothpaste from the tube. Now I know that income share isn’t the whole story: in theory, at … Read more

by Jacob Davies There’s a schizophrenia over Social Security among those who would like to see it done away with. On the one hand, the payroll taxes that fund Social Security – and have been subsidizing the rest of the budget for 25 years – don’t count as “taxes” when it comes to asserting that … Read more

by Jacob Davies Optimism is a fine thing, even in dark times. Things generally will return to getting better sooner or later, and despair is useless in helping get there faster. But there is optimism and optimism; “One day I’ll get a job so I won’t stop looking” is the good kind. “We can’t pay … Read more

by Jacob Davies Chicago, in 1948: (Via the Ebert Club; no link.) This video reminds me of driving through St Louis on the way back from Milwaukee. Unexpectedly, knowing nothing of what to expect, downtown St Louis was a spectacular metropolis rising out of an endless plain; the civic buildings rival the Parthenon, as if … Read more

by Jacob Davies (We just moved over the weekend and we’re still buried in boxes, so I haven’t had a chance to post here the last few days, but this is a quick* post on some issues related to taxation.) * Quick, and therefore not short. Pithiness is hard. (Pissiness, on the other hand…) In … Read more

by Jacob Davies The last post was a little dry, so I thought I’d try to illustrate the scale of the problem and the strange indifference in our response with a dramatic illustration. Plus, the last zombies post had stopped being about zombies, and I think it’s important that we have at least one zombie-related … Read more

by Jacob Davies I am not a fan of the word “stimulus”. I am not a fan of many of the things done by the previous stimulus bill. When largely-conservative critics of the stimulus complain about the waste inherent in the government borrowing money to do things not worth doing, I sympathize – even as … Read more

by Jacob Davies First, some disclaimers. I think Barack Obama was clearly the best choice of the Democratic primary candidates, and because I wasn’t repeatedly dropped on my head as a baby, I think he was clearly better than the McCain/Palin ticket, in much the same way that a nice hot cup of tea is … Read more