My apologies. I screwed up Monday night with the gun poll. Left out the crucial "never owned guns" category, which undoubtedly includes a big hunk of the population. A brain fart. Once published there is no way to edit polls so I was stuck with it. Therefore, I am publishing a new version tonight with a couple of new categories.
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers are, respectively, an assistant professor and an associate professor in the Business and Public Policy Department at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. They write
The U.S. Economic Policy Debate Is a Sham:
Watching Democrats and Republicans hash out their differences in the public arena, it’s easy to get the impression that there’s a deep disagreement among reasonable people about how to manage the U.S. economy.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In reality, there’s remarkable consensus among mainstream economists, including those from the left and right, on most major macroeconomic issues. The debate in Washington about economic policy is phony. It’s manufactured. And it’s entirely political.
Let’s start with Obama’s stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn’t reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.
Or consider the widely despised bank bailouts. Populist politicians on both sides have taken to pounding the table against them (in many cases, only after voting for them). But while the public may not like them, there’s a striking consensus that they helped:
The same survey found no economists willing to dispute the idea that the bailouts lowered unemployment. [...]
How about the oft-cited Republican claim that tax cuts will boost the economy so much that they will pay for themselves? It’s an idea born as a sketch on a restaurant napkin by conservative economist Art Laffer. Perhaps when the top tax rate was 91 percent, the idea was plausible. Today, it’s a fantasy. The Booth poll couldn’t find a single economist who believed that cutting taxes today will lead to higher government revenue—even if we lower only the top tax rate.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2004:
Since the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States released its long-awaited report on Thursday, I’ve heard enough treacle about bipartisanship to fill a Hallmark card tanker. And an equal amount about the full-speed ahead attitude that Congress should adopt in legislating the commission’s recommendations into reality. [...]
Pressure to authorize the independent commission came about in part because many people weren’t satisfied with the conclusions of the 858-page Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
That inquiry completed its work only six months after the kamikaze hijackers attacked the Pentagon and World Trade Center. But it did so without access to millions of documents that were withheld by the executive branch on grounds of national security.
A good deal of the pressure for the new investigation came from families of the victims of the terror attacks. ...
However, numerous federal agencies withheld documents and made interviews difficult.
Tweet of the Day:
America: Where being a white guy with a gun makes you a hero but being a Black kid wearing a hoodie makes you life-threatening.
— @Wolfrum via web
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Very interesting "Kagro in the Morning" show today on Daily Kos Radio. DemFromCT's had a fascinating look at a Vanderbilt University/YouGov's "Ad Rating Project" survey on how the Obama campaign's "Firms" ad impacted the race. 2nd hour: Twitter pal @21law, a Chicago-area business attorney, took us into the weeds on Bain Capital and Mitt's mysterious exit.
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