It is Outlandish

[Note: There are five updates - including additional rebuttals to the posts at The Economist's blog from others - at the end of this post.]

The Economist blog, Free Exchange, criticizes me in a post called "Outlandish," but it's based on a false assumption about who said what.

We need to go back a bit. On June 27, I posted something from Stephen Gordon's site, a graph along with a sentence of two he had written about it. No comments of my own, just the graph, Stephen's comments, a link to the original, and the title "Social Spending and GDP per Capita" which is fairly neutral.

Free Exchange responded by implying the comments were mine, and though I could have been clearer about who said what than simply using the standard blockquoting to indicate the comments weren't mine, just a minute or two of investigation back to the original would have revealed that the implication in their post "Trompe l'oeil" that those are my comments is wrong. Stephen Gordon made it very clear in comments on the post at Free Exchange that he was the author of the graph as he defended it.

Today, in their post "Outlandish" they say I should be embarrassed for:

what seemed like an embarassing error on his part*

* To wit, illustrating a point with a graph which on not-particularly-careful examination shows exactly the opposite of what he was claiming

But, of course, I never claimed anything at all, and as I noted Stephen has defended the graph so whether it shows the opposite or not is open for debate. They also say I implied "that since we are a classical liberal paper, we endorse the Wall Street Journal's supply-sidism" when I can find nothing in my post that does anything of the sort. My point was about outliers.

As I said in comments over there, if anyone ought to be embarrassed by all of this, it is Free Exchange, not me. I think in the rest of their post they defend throwing out Norway as an outlier to support their contention about the graph, but to be honest I just skimmed it since there was no reason to believe that the quality of the post would be any better and hence no good reason to read carefully any further.

I was already planning to say a little more about outliers, the rest of the post at Free Exchange is responding to Kieran Healy's comments at Crooked Timber on this topic, so hopefully I can get some time to do that at some point. This paper of mine with Jo Anna Gray, "Financial Market Variables Do Not Predict Real Activity," though a bit dated, shows how outliers can influence estimates and conclusions, so it might be of interest. (Prior to publication there were a few emails back and forth with Ben Bernanke since part of this paper comments on work he did with Alan Blinder that brought the federal funds rate into prominence as a policy variable, e.g. see footnote 2. At the time the paper was written there was a "horse-race" between monetary aggregates, interest rate spreads, and the federal funds rate, with the federal funds rate eventually coming out on top, and part of the paper comments on how a particular outlier might influence the race).

Update:  In comments, Economist Blogger responds. Instead of taking responsibility for mis-attributing comments to me, then taking me to task for them, they have decided to take a cue from the Bush administration and remain aggressive, throw out falsehoods to support their case, and blame me for their mistake. The argument is, as far as I can tell, that because I didn't explicitly say I disagree with something, I must agree, therefore it's my fault they said I agree. My reply is in brackets:

1) Since you posted the link with no comment, I took it to be an endorsement of said argument. I'm not familiar with any blogger who posts links and graphics they think are wrong without pointing out that they're, eh, wrong. Have you posted, say, links to supply side arguments without comment?

[Response: Yes, I post lots of things for discussion, often with just a "so and so says" or very little comment. I didn't take a position whether it was right or wrong, as I said, it was for discussion. However, when people make obviously false claims, or distort things as in the Laffer curve graph, that is pointed out. But sure, things on the supply-side and other work are presented without much comment, rebuttal, etc., routinely, that's almost always true of academic work, e.g. NBER papers.

You seem to continue to want to hold me responsible for what Stephen said. If I didn't explicitly say I disagree, then I must agree, is that the argument? Sorry, but I can't take responsibility for his writing and his graph. And just so you know, I will continue to bring things up for discussion and, with any luck, we will all learn more as a result. For you, it's pretty simple from here on - if I don't actually say something, then don't say that I did, and don't attribute the position of the author of the piece to me. Attribute the opinions of the author to the author. Pretty simple.]

2) The words "feels like a strange jab at us" were intended to cover the possibility that you did not mean it that way; but that is certainly how it came across to us. Apologies if we were mistaken.

[Thanks. Again there's nothing I said that implies you endorsed the Laffer curve, nothing at all. If that's how it came across, maybe you are too sensitive on this point (being lumped together with the WSJ editorial page). I will leave it to you to figure out why that might be.]

3) Your commenters seem to be under the misimpression that we defended the Wall Street Journal, probably because you didn't excerpt any of the offending post. Allow me: ...

While we did not join Mr Thoma and others in branding Kevin Hassett a liar--we try to refrain from that sort of debate--we made it abundantly clear, I hope, that the chart is nonsense.

[I never called Kevin Hassett a liar. In fact, I thanked Max in comments for pointing out he wasn't sure Hassett was even the one who drew the line. Again, quit putting words in my mouth I didn't say. I don't generally call people liars here, even when they falsely accuse me of saying things I didn't say as you have. As for quoting you, why would I quote a source that makes false attributions or allegations?]. ...

Finally, on Norway: in this case, commenters who share Mr Thoma's general ideological cast, you <i>want</i> Norway gone. Norway doesn't help your case.

[Please quit implying my ideology drives my economics, it doesn't. You were the ones who threw Norway out and made a big deal out of something that disagreed with your ideology and continue to do so, not me. The point is to learn and move forward, not defend a position, and part of that is being able to discuss things without ideological blinders.]

And in this case, as almost ever when talking about the relationship between GDP and public policy, Norway <i>should</i> be gone. ...

I want to throw Norway out in both cases, because it isn't relevant. ...

[We have actual evidence and research papers on this - that was Stephen's point in his first comment on your first post. You can say what you think about this all day, fine, but at some point you might consider actually addressing the work Stephen has cited to support his case instead of eyeballing charts - something I was trying to make fun of in the post that got this all started - including the linear line I drew. There's also a whole lot more than just a chart in Stephen's post, but that has all been conveniently ignored with your continued strange refusal to actually engage the author of the graph and comments.]

Update: Brad Delong comments:

...Megan is trying to take a middle position between Mark Thoma's sensible criticism and Donald Luskin's idiotic defense of the clown show that is the Journal editorial page.

I see three misrepresentations by the Economist here:

1. The WSJ line is not "draw[n] through noisy data." It is drawn above noisy data.
2. To say that the WSJ line is "not... the obvious" one to draw implies that there might be some non-obvious reason to draw it. There isn't.
3. The claim that the WSJ line is "not the only... one to draw" is a statement that it is one of the lines that one might draw with some justification. It isn't.

All I can say is:

Questo misero modo/ tegnon l'anime triste di coloro/ che visser sanza 'nfamia e sanza lodo./ Mischiate sono a quel cattivo coro/ de li angeli che non furon ribelli/ né fur fedeli a Dio, ma per sé fuoro./ Caccianli i ciel per non esser men belli,/ né lo profondo inferno li riceve...

This is indeed the behavior of the banner-chasers of Dante's Inferno: those who did not have the morals to be worthy of heaven but also lacked the guts to sin enough to be worthy of hell, and who were thus rejected by both.

One more point, with respect to "omitting Norway": Personally I see no need to omit Norway. I do see a need to plot the Norway point on the graph correctly. The revenues plotted on the vertical scale include oil excise taxes levied on corporations. The tax rates plotted on the horizontal scale do not--hence the Norway "tax rate" of 28% rather than the correct 52%. Move Norway out to its proper position--with the same tax concept on both axes--and everything is fine.

Update: Stephen Gordon responds in "The social spending and GDP per capita graph redux:

For reasons unknown to me or to Mark Thoma, The Economist blogger doesn't seem to be willing to engage me directly in the interpretation of the following graph from this post...

My original comment on this graph was: 'These are countries whose per-capita incomes are greater than the OECD average. The point here is that there's no trade-off between high levels of national income and high levels of social spending.'

Now, it seems obvious enough - to me, at least - that

• The Nordic countries are rich, and
• The Nordic countries spend lots more on social programs than do Canada or the US.

I could have left it at that, I suppose, but I also wanted to illustrate the range of variation of the horizontal axis. To my mind, the variation in the GDP per capita numbers says more about the vagaries of cross-country GDP data than it does about comparing living standards: the countries plotted in the graph are rich, and that's pretty much all you need to know.

The interesting question is *how* the Nordic countries accomplish this feat, and that's what the post was about.

Update: Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber also responds. He's not happy either:

Dept of Being Savaged by a Dead Sheep, by Kieran Healy: Someone I believe to be Megan McArdle weighs in at the Economist blog on the laughable graphic run by the WSJ the other day. Brad DeLong is not impressed, nor is Mark Thoma (in part because comments are misattributed to him in the post), and nor am I. She singles me out for membership in “a special category of wrong,” I think mostly because my Ph.D is in sociology and not economics.

In his own special category of wrong is Kieran Healy, who vindicates an old professor’s precept that “sociologists rush in where angels fear to tread.” In this case, he lectures a bunch of economists (and economics journalists) on their temerity for throwing Norway out of the set: … [...]

Megan doesn’t like me much in part because she’s has a long history of making an ass of herself on the topic of economics and its status as a social science. Again, just bear in mind that the original post was prompted by people saying “I want to see this graph/regression estimate but with Norway (or some other country) removed as an outlier.” After the inevitable snipe at sociology, she concedes most of the point I was making, which was just that when working with small cross-national datasets—e.g., of broadly comparable rich industrial democracies—deleting some countries as outliers in order to make the quantitative analysis go more smoothly is generally a bad idea. It typically doesn’t make much theoretical sense and it also usually isn’t technically necessary because you can use more robust estimators than OLS if you need to. This is just a corollary of a more general principle that one shouldn’t throw away observations to make your life easier. The post was intended as a corrective to the several commenters on various blogs who seemed to think that picking which cases to drop was the starting point of a quantitative analysis.

This simple point applies to the debate about the WSJ graph, but the fact that the figure was basically a dishonest piece of rubbish sort of drowns it out. The original graph included Norway, but probably for the dishonest reason that you could draw the ridiculous curve around it as a result. When discussion started about what the “right” line should be, some people began with the assumption that Norway should be left out just because it was well off the main cluster of points. My post gave some reasons why that wasn’t really necessary, theoretically or methodologically, although—as I said—the basic stupidity of the graph meant that this was something of a subsidiary point.

Megan asserts that Norway’s status as an oil producer means that “economists, on left and right, are often willing to agree to ‘Omit Norway’ as a first order of business when discussing developed economy GDP” because “’find oil’ and ‘experience a rapid appreciation in fossil fuel prices’” are not replicable policy recommendations.” But what exactly is the claim here? If we’re talking about discussing the determinants of GDP in general in developed economies, then every rich industrial democracy has a raft of important, specific, non-replicable features of this sort. A policy of discounting them would quickly mean your “first order of business” would leave you with no cases to discuss. Such features might include, “Have No Feudal Past,” “Have a very large proportion of your population under 25 at the right time,” “Be an island with big coal deposits and start growing rapidly in 1780,” “Have a lot of nice ports and alluvial plains,” “Have a lot of Protestants,” “Be in the middle of Europe,” “Have three to twenty times as many people as the other guys,” or what have you.

Norway certainly isn’t ruled out from consideration for its oil any more than the particular features of other countries rule them out of play. (Besides, Norway is not Nigeria—clearly its government is managing its oil endowment in ways that are within the domain of policy, as opposed to gifts of nature.) It’s facts like this that give rise to what Stephen Gordon, in a related post calls the “vagaries of cross-country GDP data.” My original post, which Megan quoted at length but seems not to have understood, made that point. When generalizing across countries you will want to be clear about your scope conditions, which can include stuff like Norway’s oil industry if it’s relevant. This is different from dispensing with the case altogether. Moreover, demanding a restriction of discussion on GDP growth to only those variables that are strictly within the reach of policy might make it easier to believe that policy-makers can control the world, but you will certainly be ignoring a lot of information about the much more important question of why certain countries are rich—especially those that stubbornly do not fall into line with your favored policies. Of course, such considerations are far from the minds of believers in the Laffer Curve As Economic Law. Nor are they much to the fore in Megan’s mind, her oft-stated belief in the scientific content of economics notwithstanding.

If we’re just talking about the Laffer Curve as policy in particular, rather than GDP growth in general, I presume Norway was included in the original figure precisely because of its apparently high corporate tax rates, which allowed a curve to be dishonestly drawn around it. But as subsequent discussion has shown, in the end there’s really no reason to “throw out” or “drop” Norway in order to say why the curve is stupid, or to calculate a sensible and robust regression estimate for the relationship at hand, in contrast to what some people were originally saying when they saw this ridiculous figure.

I also believe Megan wrote this, but do not know for sure as they don't have bylines on their blog posts. That generally indicates the opinions are those of the publication itself, not the individual, so it is The Economist (or at least the Free Exchange staff) that is saying these things, not any one person. For example, Megan (I think) has stated that she talked over the first post with others so as to deflect responsibility for her post and statements onto the whole group.

Update: One more (and with any luck the last) thought on all of this. Stephen Gordon has not been given the respect he deserves as all of this has unfolded. One of the complaints from The Economist is that I didn't take exception to Professor Gordon's graph when I posted it.

I would no more trash him or his work when presenting it here, or simply dismiss it before investigating further, any more than I would trash someone or dismiss their work when introducing them at an academic seminar. There are many who have not earned or have given up that sort of a priori respect, but he is not one of them.

The graph I posted came from a presentation he did at the Canadian Economics Association meetings (by invitation) based upon work he had presented on his blog in the past. It's not just a graph, it's a whole set of material, including comments from a discussant and the sources he used for the analysis. I read everything he posts and my experience is that the work is analytical, often data based, and employs the tools and techniques of a professional economist. His work is worthy of asking questions and giving him a chance to respond before simply jumping to conclusions one way or another.

While not everyone will get this respect, Professor Gordon has it, and I will continue to post his work, as I have in the past, when it addresses interesting and relevant questions for the visitors here. I may raise questions when I post something, or I may simply let him speak for himself as I did last time, but I won't automatically dismiss anything.

I encourage all of you to follow his blog, or to go take a look around. He doesn't post often, but it's more than "Worthwhile" when he does (the name of the blog is Worthwhile Canadian Initiative).

Comments

[pgl]

Glad you cleared that up. OK Free Exchange has a point on the supply side silliness. Oh wait, that was your point.

[gordon]

Storm in a teacup. The worst Prof. Thoma could be accused of is straying into a minefield of controversy (social spending, which is hotly contested ground) without donning his bulletproof underwear. Maybe it was at the cleaners. So what.

[Chris]

Free Exchange must be written by someone who stopped at Econ 101, and thinks markets are perfected clockwork social optimizing machines. I swear all that libertarian stuff is about taking easy shortcuts. It's the alternative medicine of economics. It's just embarrassing.

(I stopped reading Free Exchange a while ago, so maybe it's improved since then.)

(In case no else has mentioned it, Norway had huge oil reserves too.)

[archer]

I would like to echo Chris' point (Free Exchange often reads as if it is written by no-nothing Oxbridge twits) and add that looking at Gordon's original post, what he said was correct: there is not tradeoff because if you look at the data points, they are all over the map. Any line through them would be arbitrary.

[anon/portly]

"Their interrogators are also, in my opinion, wrong, at least insofar as they have concluded that the WSJ's wrongness means that overall tax revenue therefore does vary significantly with changes in the rate of corporate tax. Corporate income taxes raise rather little of the tax take of most countries; they are positively correlated with the percentage of GDP raised as federal tax revenue only because countries with relatively high corporate tax rates tend to have rather high levels of other sorts of tax."

If I read this correctly (50-50 at best, probably) they seem to be thinking the vertical axis of the "Kevin Hassett" graph is total tax revenue as percentage of GDP rather than corporate tax revenue as percentage of GDP. Their point in the last sentence of the above quote would seem to be a good point if that interpretation were correct - and if the graph were actually showing positive correlation. (The pattern of the points looks horizontally symmetric to me - I assume, in the absence of anyone pointing out otherwise, and perhaps just because I'm dense, that the true meaning of "corporate tax rates" varies too much from country to country for a sample of size 28 to be of much use).

[anne]

Oh heck, the Wall Street Journal editorial was absurd and deceiving, the data presented laughable, the curve drawn worse than laughable. Any person knowing anything about relationship and not wanting to deceive would have drawn a linear relaqtion as Mark Thoma did. The significance of the data is obviously minimal at best, and the inclusion of the United Arab Emirates which is an administrative entity only and Norway which has a completely distinct revenue structure as focal points for the WSJ graph is risible.

Free Exchange is idiotic, but why should that be the least surprising?

[Stephen Gordon]

Colour me perplexed as well...

[anne]

Though this argument is not interesting as such, since I know Mark Thoma is right, as Brad DeLong knows, I have been paying attention to Norway's use of resources and resource revenue for several years, and have been thoroughly impressed by how Norway has used resource revenue to build infrastructure, encourage alternate domestic corporate investment, and build an investment portfolio for future use when resource revenue declines. The self-insuring of Norway could not be more impressive.

[anne]

Norway, however, as the other Nordic countries, has long been routinely ridiculed by wild conservative economists, ridiculed all the while the Nordics have been stunning investment destinations. Not paying attention to the Nordics has been a social-economic mistake, of course, but for those foolish enough not to understand the market potential a foolish investment mistake. Sweden, by the way, showed a markedly helpful way of strengthening Social Security returns that save for notice from Princeton economists was repeatedly ignored.

[anne]

We are family....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/washington/15child.html

July 15, 2007

Bush Is Prepared to Veto Bill to Expand Child Insurance
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — The White House said on Saturday that President Bush would veto a bipartisan plan to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program, drafted over the last six months by senior members of the Senate Finance Committee.

The vow puts Mr. Bush at odds with the Democratic majority in Congress, with a substantial number of Republican lawmakers and with many governors of both parties, who want to expand the popular program to cover some of the nation’s eight million uninsured children.

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said: “The president’s senior advisers will certainly recommend a veto of this proposal. And there is no question that the president would veto it.”

The program, which insured 7.4 million people at some time in the last year, is set to expire Sept. 30....

[Economist Blogger]

1) Since you posted the link with no comment, I took it to be an endorsement of said argument. I'm not familiar with any blogger who posts links and graphics they think are wrong without pointing out that they're, eh, wrong. Have you posted, say, links to supply side arguments without comment?

[Response: Yes, I post lots of things for discussion, often with just as "so and so says" or very little comment. I didn't take a position whether it was right or wrong, as I said, it was for discussion. However, when people make obviously false claims, or distort things as in the Laffer curve graph, that is pointed out. But sure, things on the supply-side and other work are presented without much comment, rebuttal, etc., routinely, that's almost always true of academic work, e.g. NBER papers.

You seem to continue to want to hold me responsible for what Stephen said. If I didn't explicitly say I disagree, then I must agree, is that the argument? Sorry, but I can't take responsibility for his writing and his graph. And just so you know, I will continue to bring things up for discussion and, with any luck, we will all learn more as a result. For you, it's pretty simple from here on - if I don't actually say something, then don't say that I did, and don't attribute the position of the author of the piece to me. Attribute the opinions of the author to the author. Pretty simple.]

2) The words "feels like a strange jab at us" were intended to cover the possibility that you did not mean it that way; but that is certainly how it came across to us. Apologies if we were mistaken.

[Thanks. Again there's nothing I said that implies you endorsed the Laffer curve, nothing at all. If that's how it came across, maybe you are too sensitive on this point (being lumped together with the WSJ editorial page). I will leave it to you to figure out why that might be.]

3) Your commenters seem to be under the misimpression that we defended the Wall Street Journal, probably because you didn't excerpt any of the offending post. Allow me:

The Wall Street Journal is wrong; their line is not the only, or even the obvious, one to draw through noisy data, even without omitting Norway; and as we said before, Norway should be omitted from these sorts of comparisons. More generally, while the Laffer Curve undoubtedly holds at very high tax rates, it has been fairly conclusively proven not to do so at the levels of taxation currently prevailing outside Scandinavia. And while we're on the subject of the WSJ's wrongness, will someone please tell me what the hell the United Arab Emirates is doing on a list of developed economies? It's barely a government, much less an economy. The only thing the UAE has developed is . . . oil. Lots and lots of oil.

Their interrogators are also, in my opinion, wrong, at least insofar as they have concluded that the WSJ's wrongness means that overall tax revenue therefore does vary significantly with changes in the rate of corporate tax. Corporate income taxes raise rather little of the tax take of most countries; they are positively correlated with the percentage of GDP raised as federal tax revenue only because countries with relatively high corporate tax rates tend to have rather high levels of other sorts of tax. That's why America is so far below Mark Thoma's line; it has a very high rate of corporate income tax compared to its other taxes. Even if corporate income tax was a large contributor to overall government revenue, comparing the rates wouldn't necessarily tell you much, because the effective tax rate would vary significantly depending on what each government allowed countries to deduct from income.

While we did not join Mr Thoma and others in branding Kevin Hassett a liar--we try to refrain from that sort of debate--we made it abundantly clear, I hope, that the chart is nonsense.

[I never called Kevin Hassett a liar. In fact, I thanked Max in comments for pointing out he wasn't sure Hassett was even the one who drew the line. Again, quit putting words in my mouth I didn't say. I don't generally call people liars here, even when they falsely accuse me of saying things I didn't say as you have. As for quoting you, why would I quote a source that make false attributions or allegations?].

As for Archer, I don't know where you took statistics, but on the original Gordon graph (not the corporate tax one), the line is distinctly non-arbitrary; indeed, the cluster is surprisingly tight for something as noisy as GDP. Again, I do not claim that this means there is a straight tradeoff between social spending and GDP growth. But using that graph, which clearly shows a downward-sloping line even if you omit the US and Ireland, as an illustration of the precept that there isn't a tradeoff seems to show a distressing inability to read basic charts. It was so surprising, in fact, that I showed it to multiple people, all of whom had either their masters or their doctorate in economics, before I wrote the post. The chart was so obviously wrong that I felt I must be missing some subtle point. If I was, no one has so far pointed out what it is.

Finally, on Norway: in this case, commenters who share Mr Thoma's general ideological cast, you want Norway gone. Norway doesn't help your case.

[Please quit implying my ideology drives my economics, it doesn't. You were the ones who threw Norway out and made a big deal out of something that disagreed with your ideology and continue to do so, not me. The point is to learn and move forward, not defend a position, and part of that is being able to discuss things without ideological blinders.]

And in this case, as almost ever when talking about the relationship between GDP and public policy, Norway should be gone. Norway is a very bad guide for anyone else's tax or economic policy, because the lion's share of government revenue, and a huge hunk of GDP, comes from a resource (which I agree, they are managing very well) over whose price and output they have little control. Norway's rate of economic growth, and its tax revenues, are largely determined by changes in the price of oil and natural gas. Because those changes can be very large, they swamp smaller things, like say deadweight loss from taxation. When the price of oil is rising, Norway will seem to vindicate progressive ideas about policy; but those who live by the sword, die by the sword, and should the price of oil decline progressives will have to explain why Norway's recession is suddenly not relevant.

I want to throw Norway out in both cases, because it isn't relevant. No other developed country has the option of getting 15% of its GDP, and IIRC, more than a third of its government revenue, from oil leases. So they are useless as a model for anyone else. If you want to hold up a Scandinavian model for the rest of the world, try Sweden or Denmark.

[We have actual evidence and research papers on this - that was Stephen's point in his first comment on your first post about this. You can say what you think about this all day, fine, but at some point you might consider actually addressing the work Stephen has cited to support his case instead of eyeballing charts - something I was trying to make fun of in the post that got this all started - including the linear line I drew. There's also a whole lot more than just a chart in Stephen's post, but that has all been conveniently ignored with your continued strange refusal to actually engage the author of the graph and comments.]

[Note: Due to an editing error, there was a time period today when part of The Economist's blogger's remarks were truncated as in the main post. The remarks have now been restored in full - apologies to all.]

[robertdfeinman]

Mark Thoma:
Congratulations! You know you have arrived when neo-cons have to resort to ad hominem attacks on people they disagree with rather than discuss the issues.

Jerome a Paris on the European Tribune blog makes a hobby out of pointing out the ridiculous and even contradictory remarks that appear regularly in the "Economist" and the "Financial Times".

The scary thing is that this muddled thinking also is common in government both in the US and the EU. "Faith based" has now extended from the social and moral sphere to fiscal policy.

[bakho]

out·land·ish (out-lăn'dĭsh)
adj.
Conspicuously unconventional; bizarre. Strikingly unfamiliar.

It is unconventional to speak truth to power. Even if the conventional claims of this administration are "false", the unconventional but true claims can still be considered "Outlandish".

George Orwell wrote about this.

[anne]

Notice the meanness of the Economist Blogger, which I assume is typical of the Economist Blogger being, well, mean. I imagine though that meanness is the particular cast of the Economist Blogger. Notice how much I care a fig.

[anne]

Now, notice that the Administration has successfully added $44 billion to the military budget for the coming year, that is without Iraq counted, another few billion dollars are being added for our State Department needs internationally, but the Administration is determined not just to cut domestic social benefit spending but to prevent 8 million eligible American children gaining access to government health insurance.

[anne]

There is, of course, no truth to the typically absurd and mean-spirited Economist Blogger comment, but about Norway so that the slow-thinking Economist Blogger will understand, or, better, we will understand, Norway has been insulating itself against a significant price decline in oil for years and the insulation will be successful. We should attend to Norway's far-sighted development and investment programs. Of course, with my cast, I, like, investing successfully. Duh.

[anne]

The tragic game that is playing through is to force continual massive military spending increases, even wage war and occupation, with a minimal tax structure that simply throws taxes to the future, while ignoring and worsening even so shameful a domestic problem as 8 million children who have no health care insurance even though eligible for government insurance.

The President who has vetoed only 3 bills in 6 1/2 years, 2 on stem cell research and 1 asking for minimal guidelines to the occupation of Iraq, the President is going to veto an attempt to increase health insurance coverage for millions of children for the cost of about 10 days of occupying Iraq for a year of health insurance for millions.

So, in a budget of $933 billion, with about $624 for the military before Iraq and the nuclear arsenal are included, a piddling $5 billion in spending could cost millions of children health care insurance. And we have the nerve to criticize the French or Spanish or the Nordic peoples.

[anne]

http://www.cbpp.org/6-21-07bud.htm

June 21, 2007

The Fight Over Appropriations: Myths and Reality: Most of the Growth Would Go for Military and Homeland Security; Increases Planned for Domestic Appropriations Are Small.
By Richard Kogan

....

Also, the Economist Blogger is even too slow-thinking to have figured out that Sweden and Denmark are not both, well, dread Scandinavian cast countries. There is a peculiar sort of person who has a need for ridiculing what the Nordic people have accomplished. Imagine me, mentioning the French.

[anne]

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/07/caccianli-i-cie.html

July 15, 2007

Caccianli i Ciel per Non Esser Men Belli,/ Né lo Profondo Inferno Li Riceve...
By Brad DeLong

A correspondent directs me to the following bizarre comment by the Economist, starring Megan McArdle, on the latest atrocity from the Wall Street Journal.

Here's Megan:

Outlandish | Free exchange | Economist.com: The Wall Street Journal is wrong; their line is not the only, or even the obvious, one to draw through noisy data, even without omitting Norway...

Megan is trying to take a middle position between Mark Thoma's sensible criticism and Donald Luskin's idiotic defense of the clown show that is the Journal editorial page.

I see three misrepresentations by the Economist here:

The WSJ line is not "draw[n] through noisy data." It is drawn above noisy data.

To say that the WSJ line is "not... the obvious" one to draw implies that there might be some non-obvious reason to draw it. There isn't.

The claim that the WSJ line is "not the only... one to draw" is a statement that it is one of the lines that one might draw with some justification. It isn't.
All I can say is:

Questo misero modo/ tegnon l'anime triste di coloro/ che visser sanza 'nfamia e sanza lodo./ Mischiate sono a quel cattivo coro/ de li angeli che non furon ribelli/ né fur fedeli a Dio, ma per sé fuoro./ Caccianli i ciel per non esser men belli,/ né lo profondo inferno li riceve...

This is indeed the behavior of the banner-chasers of Dante's Inferno: those who did not have the morals to be worthy of heaven but also lacked the guts to sin enough to be worthy of hell, and who were thus rejected by both.

One more point, with respect to "omitting Norway": Personally I see no need to omit Norway. I do see a need to plot the Norway point on the graph correctly. The revenues plotted on the vertical scale include oil excise taxes levied on corporations. The tax rates plotted on the horizontal scale do not--hence the Norway "tax rate" of 28% rather than the correct 52%. Move Norway out to its proper position--with the same tax concept on both axes--and everything is fine.

[anne]

Perfect, and I should have understood this in the beginning:

"The tax rates plotted on the horizontal scale do not--hence the Norway 'tax rate' of 28% rather than the correct 52%. Move Norway out to its proper position--with the same tax concept on both axes--and everything is fine."

[anne]

http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/comedy_hc/dante_mandelbaum/inf03.html

And he to me: "This miserable way
is taken by the sorry souls of those
who lived without disgrace and without praise.

They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.

The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them-
even the wicked cannot glory in them.

[anne]

Never ever mess with Brad DeLong, who pleases me by being annoyed as I was but who responds better even though I can even do the Italian. I wish I knew Hebrew, but Rabbi K. is afraid of what might happen.

[pgl]

I hope Economist Blogger is still paying attention as I have two things to add to Mark's reply:

(1) The WSJ oped and graph were not from Kevin Hassett. See Max Sawicky for confirmation. Geesh - you fellows do get a lot wrong re attribution>

(2) Since you asked - I have posted without comment some incredibly stupid comments from the free lunch supply-side
campers. Reason? Let my Angrybears rip the shreds out of their nonsense so I don't have to. This comment of yours was REALLY feeble.

[donna]

This is why we read real economics bloggers instead of so called "real journalism" blogs.

[anne]

[Thinking of being truthful....

http://www.juancole.com/2007/07/few-foreign-fighters-in-iraq-many-are.html

July 15, 2007

Few Foreign Fighters in Iraq; Many are Saudi
By Juan Cole

Ned Parker of the LA Times reports that of 19,000 "insurgents" held by the US military in Iraq, only 135 are foreigners.

Think about that when you hear Bush say that the US is fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq or that "al-Qaeda" would take over Iraq if the US left. The foreigners just are not that important to the guerrilla war. Only .7% of detainees are foreigners, and unless they run faster than Iraqis, that is likely their percentage share in the "insurgency," too....]

[anne]

What bothers me continually about the tragic lunacy of Iraq, is how transparently absurd or impossible how much of what we were supposed to believe has always been.

[John Doe]

I have to wonder about this "Anne," who spams blogs like this with irrelevant comments but who purports to have a "harvard.edu" address.

Anyway, what Mr. Thomas never seems to get around to doing is one thing: He posted, without comment or disagreement, a graph that purported to show that "there's no trade-off between high levels of national income and high levels of social spending," when any competent eyeballing shows that if the chart proves anything, it's the precise opposite.

Why is Mr. Thomas so strenuously evading this substantive point? He's certainly found time to write about everything else.

[Mark Thoma]

I have directed people time and again, and will do so again for those who seem to have missed it or avoid acknowledging it, to Stephen Gordon's discussion and defense of the point he was making. With one click to the original post, you can find a link to comments from a discussant (and a plea for additional discussants to provide their remarks), links to the underlying sources, and if you look around you will find later discussions of this, as well as discussion in earlier posts of the same topic. The bases for the claims that were made by Professor Gordon have not been avoided, but I am deferring to him as this is his point, not mine. As he keeps saying, his blog takes comments.

[Stephen Gordon]

Heck, you can even post your comments in French!