The ticking deficit bomb

Shouldn't we worry that this damn thing will explode like crazy?

NY Times:

Economists generally agree that annual deficits should not exceed 3 percent of the G.D.P., and that is the level President Obama had vowed to reach by the end of his first term in 2013.
But subsequent spending and tax cuts to stimulate the economy, and lower-than-expected revenues as the recession deepened before bottoming out, combined to push the administration’s deficit forecast to 4.6 percent of G.D.P. for the fiscal year 2013.
At 10 percent of the gross domestic product, the 2009 deficit is the highest since the end of World War II, when it was 21.5 percent. At that level, it already has become a bigger economic and a political issue than any time since the late 1980s.

A "Christian Sharia" in Texas? OMD!

According to this news item from the Times (HT),

A Texas man is due to be executed next month despite admissions by jurors that they consulted biblical passages advocating death as a punishment to help to decide his fate.
Before sending Khristian Oliver to his death after he was convicted of murdering his victim — who was bludgeoned with a gun barrel — jurors read passages of the Old Testament, including one that states that a killer who uses an iron object to kill “shall surely be put to death”.

Note that there was no reasonable doubt regarding the guilt of the accused.  So, the issue is not with establishing whether or not the accused was indeed guilty.  But, it is with the punishment--even though capital punishment is legal in Texas, and even though "the jurors were instructed by the judge not to refer to anything that was not presented as evidence in the courtroom" the jurors' decision to go with the death sentence was guided by passages from the bible :-(

Amnesty International called on the Texas authorities to commute Oliver’s death sentence because since his trial, jurors had admitted that they read the Bible while they decided whether he should live or die. In particular, they said that Bibles were passed around with specific passages highlighted, and that one juror read aloud to his fellow jurors the passage, from Numbers XXXV, 16: “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.”

This is not a new case--the homicidal act was in 1998.  And apparently the consultation with the bible was known soon after, which is why the death sentence had been appealed:

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said last year that jurors had wrongly used the Bible and that it had amounted to an “external influence” prohibited under the US Constitution. Yet the court said there was not enough evidence to show they were prejudiced when they decided to send Oliver to death row.
In April the US Supreme Court — the final chance Oliver had to appeal against his death sentence — refused to hear the case, despite being urged to do so by 50 former and current federal and state prosecutors.

Hmmm ....refused to hear the case?  How awful!  So, does the refusal legitimize jurors consulting the bible to award punishments?  What if a few other juries decide to follow this "precedent?"  Isn't the role of the Supremes to essentially make sure we have the correct constitutional precedents for law?  Oh wait, according to Chief Justice Roberts their job is only to call balls and strikes.  Yeah, right!  And this is not a case where he didn't have to worry if it was a ball or a strike :-(

BTW, what an odd coincidence that the Christian jurors consulted the bible to arrive at the death sentence for the accused whose name sounds the same as the faithful, with one difference in the lettering: Khristian!!!

Superfreakanomics: Quote of the day

if you find yourself writing, in all seriousness, as a practical proposal, the phrase "pumping large quantities of sulphur dioxide into the Earth’s stratosphere through an 18-mile-long hose, held up by helium balloons", it is probably time to take a step back and ask yourself if something has gone a little bit wrong with your life.

That was via Brad DeLong on Superfreakanomics, which was featured earlier today on NPR.

Did Levitt and Dubner not learn from Hollywood that most sequels to highly successful movies do not do well, neither at the box office nor with the critics?

A Diwali greeting from President Obama

U.S. President Barack Obama celebrated Deepavali by lighting the ceremonial lamp at the White House amidst chanting of Vedic mantras seeking world peace, becoming the first U.S. President to personally grace the occasion.

“I think it’s fitting that we begin this work in the week leading up to the holiday of Diwali -- the festival of lights -- when members of some of the world’s greatest faiths celebrate the triumph of good over evil,” Mr. Obama said in his remarks on the occasion at a White House function held at its historic East Room on Wednesday.

This is for the first time that a U.S. President attended and celebrated Deepavali at the White House -- thus giving an official recognition to the festival of lights celebrated across the world by millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Jains.

 That was from The Hindu.  And here is a cool YouTube video of Obama wishing a happy Diwali. Cool!

Unions, wages, inflation, and deflation

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers
 (CPI-W) decreased 1.7 percent over the last 12 months 

So, here is a question: if a big reason for unions to negotiate a wage increase is to keep up with the uptick in the Consumer Price Index, will unions now negotiate for a wage decrease?
Just asking :-)

Bloggers against hunger

NY Times or the Onion? Hard to tell :-)

Remember the Large Hadron Collider?  Remember all the hoopla that it would track down the mysterious particles that physicists are looking for?  And how the gigantic collider came to stop almost as soon as it revved up?  How about this for an explanation for what happened?

the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

So, let me get this.  This tiny, tiny, particle whose theoretical existence needs to be validated travelled back in time and threw a spanner in the works, so to say, because it is so abhorrent to nature.  Oh my! 
Guess what?  it is not from the Onion.  It is NY Times science report, which adds:

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.
According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

I suppose it is only a very fine line between wisdom from a genius and crap from a nutcase :-)  And, yes, the report addresses that too:

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

More on Team Obama v. Faux News

John Batchelor has these wonderful words to say, even while chiding the Obama people for going after Faux News:

The decision by the golden-hearted crank Bill O’Reilly to attack the warm-hearted crank Glenn Beck over the latter’s swine flu denial spiel is at once first-rate showbiz and slapstick teamwork. Not since Abbott and Costello have two guys in suits, one tall and impatient, the other chubby-cheeked and childlike, had more fun debating “I Don’t Know’s on Third.”
None of what goes on in the evening has anything to do with government. The president and the Congress are discussed as omnipresent villains in a fairytale that begins with a happy kingdom of worthies, introduces an ogre, a witch, and a curse, and then interviews champions to come forward to rescue the frightened children and save the USA. All the while, Ming the Merciless, aka Rupert Murdoch, rakes up the ratings and the bucks.

CNN: "we will leave it there"

The Daily Show in all its glory :-)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
CNN Leaves It There
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

China-India relations deteriorating fast

I really hope that Obama and his people are closely following the simmering Sino-Indian tensions over Arunachal Pradesh.  Now, apparently China is upset that India's prime minister visited Arunachal Pradesh--which is a state in India, but which is a "disputed territory" according to China:

China is “deeply upset” over Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit to Arunachal Pradesh, an official said on Tuesday in a statement that is bound to further heighten tensions on the long-running border dispute between India and China.

“Despite our grave concerns, an Indian leader went to the disputed area,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ma Zhaoxu told reporters here on Tuesday in a regular press briefing. “We hope the Indian side does not create problems on the border area so as to benefit the sound development of China-India relations.”

Election campaign

Mr. Singh visited Arunachal Pradesh on October 3, ahead of the State Assembly elections which were held on Monday. The Chinese statement comes 10 days after his visit. A likely reason is many government offices here remained closed last week on account of an eight day national holiday.

China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted on its website on Tuesday, Beijing was “strongly dissatisfied with the visit to the disputed region by the Indian leader”, not directly naming the Prime Minister.

“We demand the Indian side address China's serious concerns and not trigger disturbance in the disputed region so as to facilitate the healthy development of China-India relations,” the statement said.

Saudi Arabia's crazy logic

I am not making this up--it is from the NY Times, not from the Onion:

Saudi Arabia is trying to enlist other oil-producing countries to support a provocative idea: if wealthy countries reduce their oil consumption to combat global warming, they should pay compensation to oil producers.

What a twisted logic, eh!  Here is the NRDC person quoted in the NY Times story:

“It is like the tobacco industry asking for compensation for lost revenues as a part of a settlement to address the health risks of smoking,” said Jake Schmidt, the international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The worst of this racket is that they have held up progress on supporting adaptation funding for the most vulnerable for years because of this demand.”

Why would the Saudis put forward such a crazy proposal?

The chief Saudi negotiator, Mohammad al-Sabban, described the position as a “make or break” provision for the Saudis, as nations stake out their stance before the global climate summit scheduled for the end of the year.
“Assisting us as oil-exporting countries in achieving economic diversification is very crucial for us through foreign direct investments, technology transfer, insurance and funding,” Mr. Sabban said in an e-mail message.

Uh, hello, isn't that what the Saudis should have been doing while they were raking in all the dollars?  WTF!

Finally, Obama delivers :-)

You ought to read this one on Obama's White House versus Faux News; an excerpt:

In the most significant exchange on CNN, Dunn stressed that President Obama now personally views Fox as a partisan opponent, rather than a journalistic organization. "When he goes on Fox he understands he is not going on it as a news network at this point," she explained, "he is going on it to debate the opposition."

That's a big departure from how most of the Democratic establishment engages Fox. It's been a long time coming.

Finally! You go, BHO :-)
But, what took Obama and other Democrats this long to reach this point?

It is also because of the Faux News connection that I want NPR to ditch Juan Williams and Mara Liasson--how could any self-respecting journalist collect a paycheck from Faux and then deliver expert comments on NPR?  Worse, how does NPR allow this?

Measure the region’s stability by what’s cricket in Pakistan

With bombs bursting in air and suicide bombers exploding at ground level, Afghanistan continues to be a dangerous place. After eight years of military engagement, we are more than a little behind schedule on finalizing our plans to exit Afghanistan.

The unrest and violence in Afghanistan is intricately linked to Pakistan’s. So, is there any simple metric that we could employ in order to understand whether things are getting better or worse in Pakistan, such that it can then feed into the decision-making process regarding Afghanistan?

Yes, there is: All we need to do is keep track of the game of cricket in Pakistan. As simple as that!

Cricket is played worldwide, mostly in countries that once were Britain’s colonies. In terms of a global following for a sport, cricket is second only to soccer. In the South Asian countries of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, cricket can, and does, trigger passion among its peoples that can make even the most boorish college football fan here seem very tame.

Pakistan has a rich history of outstanding players who were admired for their skilled art by fans and opponents alike. One phenomenal player — Imran Khan — successfully cashed in his popularity to become a significantly successful politician.

For a number of years, Pakistan and India — both with millions of cricket fanatics — did not play each other because of political tensions. I barely had stepped into my teenage years in 1978 when India and Pakistan resumed playing cricket after a gap of 18 years. Watching those games on television was a transformative moment when it dawned on me that the “enemy” team comprised players who looked and talked just like those playing for India.

It became difficult to understand why the people and cricketers from Pakistan were demonized. Thereafter, it was nothing but sheer pleasure for me to watch the talented ballplayers from the neighboring country.

Those were the relatively calmer days before terrorism became a household word. Yet even as conditions in Pakistan started spiraling down, India and other cricket-playing countries continued to send their teams there, but with increasing levels of security.

No more. Now, no country is willing to visit Pakistan to test its cricket mettle because of the immense security risks.

Pakistan was to have hosted a prestigious international tournament — the Champions Trophy — in September 2008. But one country after another withdrew because of worries about safety for players and fans. It was then rescheduled for 2009, but in a different venue altogether — in South Africa.

Sri Lanka was the only brave country that ventured out to Pakistan to play a series of matches there, perhaps having been conditioned by the 25 years of civil war in the island. This visit in March 2009 broke a dry spell since October 2007, which was the last time Pakistan hosted a cricket team from another country.

In a way, that decision by Sri Lanka immediately provided enough tangible evidence regarding the terrorists’ stronghold on the country. The Sri Lankan team’s bus was ambushed in the city of Lahore, resulting in the deaths of six policemen and injuries to players.

Naturally, the Sri Lankan team returned home right away.

As a result, there is now no team that will dare to visit Pakistan, which is a huge loss for the game itself, and for the cricket-crazy fans there. Imagine how Brazilians would feel if they could not host soccer tournaments and if their carnival were canceled. Double that sense of utter disappointment and frustration, and I think we might get close to understanding the loss of international cricket play in Pakistan.

This yardstick of cricket suggests that normalcy might not return to Pakistan for a while. In that case, it might not be realistic to expect that the chaotic situation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas will settle down any time soon.

Therefore, I am all the more worried that we might be stuck in Afghanistan for many more years to come. And that is not cricket!

For The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009

Buffalo Soldiers

The different ways in which people have served this country; my thanks to all of them.  From the WaPo's report on the annual reunion of the Buffalo Soldiers:

Hairston is a Buffalo soldier, one of thousands of African Americans who served in a segregated U.S. Army during World War II. This past weekend in Silver Spring, Hairston joined dozens of other Buffalo soldiers at the annual reunion hosted by the Washington-based 92nd Infantry Division (Buffalo) Association, founded in 1982 as a means of preserving the division's history.
The 92nd was formed with African American soldiers during World War I and reactivated during World War II. The nickname traces to the one given black soldiers who fought in the 19th-century wars on the western frontier. Historians say the nickname of Buffalo soldier was given by the Indians to their African American adversaries because of their curly hair and as a sign of respect for their valor and prowess.

And here is Bob Marley's take on this and more ....

Memo to students: you are screwed :-(

I have blogged quite a few times here that one of the biggest scams--for want of a better word--in this country is, yes, higher education.  Which is why I did not care much for Paul Krugman repeating the same old lines about the economic returns on higher education.  We are way overselling higher education.  We promise them--sometimes implicitly--that once they get a college degree, well, that they too can begin to live the high life.  This is far from the reality, and increasingly so in this highly competitive globalized economy.

Higher educational professionals do not suffer from such a sales gimmick though; in fact, they gain a lot by catering to a market demand that should not exist in the first place.  Students end up paying for it, and often through huge loans and no job after graduation.  It then becomes grandiose disillusioned :-(

In the context of a WSJ report on how the Great Recession and the credit crunch is affecting the low-income group, Mike Konczal writes:

Now we are currently asking children, 17, 18 or 19 years old, to try and assess how much of a student loan debt burden they can handle vis-a-vis their future income over their entire lives. But, especially compared to their grandparents, uncertainty is so much greater now. The consumption smoothing line invokes a world where everyone with a college degree will get a stable, solid job with certainty (and your employer will, of course, pick up the health care tab).
The person in the Wall Street Journal article almost certainly had no realistic idea for what would be awaiting her on the other side of the associate's degree, and she misjudged this terribly. And, from an efficiency point of view, it's what makes this more perverse than the indentured servitude contract - people under indentured servitude had the job waiting for them. The clock was ticking for the firms who had set up the contract, and they needed to get their value. With student loans, they can sit there for decades, never dischargeable, always getting paid regardless of recession or job market.

On my part, all I can do is keep yelling that the emperor has no clothes!

More on the Nobel Prize for Peace

The nominations were due way back in February:

February – Deadline for submission. The Committee bases its assessment on nominations that must be postmarked no later than 1 February each year. Nominations postmarked and received after this date are included in the following year's discussions. In recent years, the Committee has received close to 200 different nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. The number of nominating letters is much higher, as many are for the same candidates.

Is it all the fault of "market fundamentalism?"

Economists have started examining their discipline, and how much the market can truly deliver.  To criticism from Nobel laureates like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, in a thoughtful essay, Jagdish Bhagwati reminds us, again,  that hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty in India and China only because of liberal economic policies.  He then writes:

Capitalism works best when those who do not succeed, and are buffeted by the vicissitudes of life, still believe in success—believe that those who do succeed put their wealth to good use, and do not merely engage in self-indulgence. Remember that the Calvinists and the Jains of Gujerat accumulated wealth but spent it not on themselves but on promoting social good.

Capitalism works well when those who lose feel that one day they might also win. This is the great American dream: even when mobility has been less real than imagined, the belief matters.

Today, in the United States, both “stabilizers” of capitalism have taken a hit. There has been far too much flaunting of wealth, even as working-class incomes have stagnated, with magazines on “How to Spend It” in the Financial Times and displays of the insufferably rich glitterati in the Style section of the New York Times. 

I have only one question: why does he spell it as "Gujerat" when in India it is spelt "Gujarat?"  Bhagwati has his reasons, I am sure.  I wonder what those reasons are!  HT

Guns don't kill. Ergo, sodas don't fatten!

We have heard a gazillion times from the NRA that guns don't kill people.  (yeah, right!)  Consistent with Jorge Luis Borges' observation that all we do is retell stories, now Coca Cola offers its own variation of guns don't kill people. This time, it is "Coke didn't make America fat" .... aww, how "sweet" that sounds to my gut :-)  Before I head to the fridge and get myself a can of soda, let me also note that this argument was presented as an op-ed by Coke's CEO in the Wall Street Journal. I tell you, the joke could not get any better.

Now, when I am opposed to federal taxes on soda, it is not because I think sodas are some super-health drinks.  I oppose taxation because (a) this is the kind of policy issue that is best left to state and local governments, (b) the tax has to be very, very, high in order to provide a strong disincentive, and there is no way we would impose that level of a tax anyway, and (c) getting rid of the subsidies for corn and sugar itself will increase the price of soda by an amount comparable to any tax we might add.

So, you see, one does not need a fake argument on sodas and obesity in order to oppose a tax on sodas.  I wish the Coke CEO had not attempted some crazy arguments.

The global Muslim population

The web and blogging are simply fantastic when it comes to getting updates, discussing policies, ..... Many academics have also taken up blogging big time.  I suspect that in many cases, blogging provides a lot more interactive discussions than a journal article can.  Juan Cole is one of those academics who has blogged a lot--on the Middle East in particular.  Here, he responds to the news item that a quarter of the world's population is Muslim:

I don't think most people in the West realize the implications of the likelihood that one-third of humankind may soon be Muslim. We don't have a real sense of scale in the US. We don't realize that Brazil alone is nearly as big as the US in area, or that the US could be fitted into East Africa. We don't realize how huge Iran is, or what it implies when we call India a subcontinent.

One of the implications is that the US is a little unlikely to thrive as a superpower in the 21st century if its more venal and bloodthirsty politicians go on barking about "Islamo-fascism" (they never said Christo-Fascism even though Gen. Franco in Spain was a good candidate for the label) and denigrating Islam and Muslims and seeking to militarily occupy their countries and siphon off their resources. That kind of behavior may have worked in the 19th century before Muslims were mobilized, but it does not work now.

The Muslim world is the labor pool of the next century, and is also the custodian of much of the world's fuel. New American crusades of the sort favored on the right of the Republican Party may finally induce imperial overstretch and deeply harm the US. Some 5 percent of the population cannot dominate by force 25 percent of the globe and what may eventually be 33% of the globe.

You know, I would never have guessed that there are an estimated 16 million Muslims in Russia.  HT

Public pension crisis slowly unfolds

Basing my thoughts on different analyses I had read, even more than a year ago I was worried that public pensions could be in serious--I mean serious--trouble.  But then the curse of Cassandra's was that nobody would listen to her, how much ever her predictions were correct.  A lesser mortal like me would obviously fare worse than her; but then is there anything worse than what Cassandra experienced? :-)

Consider this news item about the small little state where I live:

State and local government agencies, school districts and municipalities across Oregon face a major hike in their pension costs because of last year's financial market meltdown.

How big? Contribution rates to Oregon's Public Employees Retirement System differ widely by employer. But systemwide, they will increase by an average of 8.4 percentage points starting July 1, 2011, according to a new report from the system's actuary.

It is just one tiny example of how public pensions are n serious trouble.  Multiply this story across the country and across the millions of currently retired and soon to retire public employees, and this Washington Post story becomes a statement on the obvious:

Within 15 years, public systems on average will have less half the money they need to pay pension benefits, according to an analysis by Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Other analysts say funding levels could hit that low within a decade.

After losing about $1 trillion in the markets, state and local governments are facing a devil's choice: Either slash retirement benefits or pursue high-return investments that come with high risk.

So, is anybody listening to Cassandra?

China @ 60 ... continued

China's 60 years neatly falls into two 30-year periods--from 1949 until 1979, when Deng Xiaoping opened up China's economy and proclaimed that "to get rich is glorious."  The second thirty years have been about China's rapidly growing economic strength and the millions who are no longer poor and starving.
But, as Perry Link at the NY Review of Books writes:

Defenders of the Communist Party’s record argue that “the second thirty years” are very different from the first. “Reform and opening” has brought economic growth, higher living standards, integration with the world, and greater flexibility in daily life. These indeed are important advances over the Mao period, but to “credit” them to China’s ruling elite, rather than to the billion or so people who are ruled, is a bit perverse. Imagine things from the point of view of an ordinary Chinese worker: a brutal regime has its foot on your neck for years; then it relents, but says “now you may make money, but only that—no politics, no wayward religion, no trouble-making.” So you take the one category of freedom you are offered and pour everything into it.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese have taken this deal, and have worked long and hard, for low wages, often in sweatshops, with no unions, no medical insurance, no workers’ compensation, no recourse to independent courts—and have made money, at least more than they had before. About a quarter of the population still lives in dire poverty, while the ruling elite, now leaders of a large political-economic interest group, has been catapulted to wealth and even to gaudy opulence. Economic polarization is now greater in China than in the U.S. (where it has been growing). The Communist Party credits itself with “lifting millions from poverty,” but it is more accurate to say that the millions have lifted the Party.

I like the way Perry Link describes it.

The 3am phone call Obama didn't get :)

Remember that campaign commercial about the White House getting a phone call at 3:00 am?  It was neat how SNL wove that into Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Comedians worried that they might not be able to have fun with Obama as the president as they had when W and Clinton were in the White House.  Turns out not to be the case, fortunately for democracy.  Of course, Obama himself has been quite in the clear and no jokes about his individual self.  But, there is a theme emerging--while the jokes are about the events surrounding him, Obama is in the center of those jokes.