Month: January 2012

From TPM. It's a – 32. Romney is only – 5.6. Santorum is – 7.9. Paul is – 12.9. Obama? + 2.1.

Hot Air has grappled with the substance of my essay for which I am grateful. Let me first address Karl's point on jobs. I wrote:

Since [the beginning of 2010], the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration.

Karl says it's not fair to compare Obama's post 2009 job gains with Bush's net job gains. McArdle echoes by saying I'm "puffing up Obama's record by comparing gross to net":

An economist who arbitrarily decided to start a job count comparison at the beginning of one president's term, and in the middle of another's, would be laughed out of peer review; a freshman who turned in such work would flunk the assignment.  Whether or not Andrew intended to do so, he is cherry-picking, and as a result, the comparison is worthless.

It wasn't my main point in the passage cited, but it's a fair argument. So let's unpack the Bush and Obama record on job creation. Krugman had two very helpful graphs of total employment under Bush and Obama recently. Here's Obama's record:

As Krugman notes:

Does this look to you like a president who “lost jobs”, or like a president who inherited an economy in free fall? You can accuse Obama of not doing enough to promote recovery — and I have (although the biggest villain here was Romney’s own party). But to claim that Obama caused the job loss is indefensible.

Here's Bush's, again with the recession shaded:

If you just look at the first terms, Bush's job growth, after his mild recession, was more anemic than Obama's after his near-death experience in the first month of his presidency. Of course, the sheer depth of Obama's recession made the possibility of a sharp recovery higher. But recessions caused by crises in the financial sector tend to be deeper and take longer to recover from.

Nonetheless, at this point in their respective terms, Obama's job creation after his recession beats Bush's after his. Indeed, Bush's tax cuts gave us no long term acceleration in growth or employment. But they did turn a fragile surplus into the worst debt since the Second World War – a debt the GOP now blames entirely on Obama!

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

"Predictions are dangerous, but I'm going to go ahead and make one right now: By November, the Obama campaign will have torn Mitt Romney into tiny little pieces, put those pieces into a wood chipper, and fed the dust that came out the other end to the worms. He'll end up the kind of failed nominee that no one wants to associate themselves with when it's over. Think Bob Dole after 1996, or Michael Dukakis after 1988," – Paul Waldman, The American Prospect.

A reader writes:

Sorry Andrew, but I can not agree with your thoughts about Newt’s private sex life.  IF it had been a one time thing, maybe, but he cheated on TWO wives, and I don’t think it a “bitter” thing for his second wife to come out on the campaign trail and tell the world the facts.  The man is a lying, cheating hypocrite and certainly gets no sympathy from me. He sure showed no sympathy, charity or forgiveness to Clinton. I am a practicing Buddhist and it is what we call karma.

Another writes:

I know you don’t consider ABC’s piece a scoop because it was covered a while back by Esquire, and you are technically correct.  That said, most people don’t read Esquire and have no idea Gingrich had been so cheeky as to ask for an open marriage. And nobody has actually seen Newt’s ex-wife tell all, an act that will have a very different emotional impact than reading an article in a magazine.

Another:

I’m a subscriber to Esquire magazine and even I missed the Gingrich profile. So, when you say, “We know this already,” I’m not sure to whom “we” applies?  Is it the same “we” who knew that President Obama was born in the U.S. long before Donald Trump? Is it the same “we” who knew that Ron Paul published a newsletter that contained racist opinions before he was asked about them repeatedly last month?

Another is pissed:

I am so angry with you right now*. Did you really (really?) use the words “bitter” and “hell hath no fury…” to describe the ex-Mrs. Gingrich’s motives? You rightly decry when Newt uses dog-whistle signals about race, but then you fall prey to the same tactics in relation to gender?  COME ON!

I would ask you:  if you had been married to someone whose truest colors (the hypocrisy) hadn’t really been dissected, and years and years later your ex-husband was somewhat this close to becoming leader of the free world, would you stand by idly?  Would you not feel a responsibility to shed some light on his…awfulness?  I suspect you would.  But because she’s a woman she’s bitter and furious?  So very unfair, and surprising, from you.  Stop it.

*My real life boyfriend (I’m female) calls you my “Internet boyfriend” because I am always pointing out to him how right you are about most issues.  So I guess this is our first fight.  He’s very happy right now.

Another:

If Marianne is “bitter”, which I doubt from my reading of the Esquire interview, then we need more of her type of patriotic bitterness. Her interview went far beyond the hypocritical adultery. She disclosed symptoms which look like sociopathy or mental health issues. She doesn’t believe Newt is fit for the presidency and I’m grateful she has the courage to come forward. Hopefully, ABC’s interview takes the right tone and puts the emphasis in the right place. Hopefully, the inevitable attacks against Marianne, the messenger, won’t dissuade the media from aggressively pursuing the very real possibility of Newt’s incompetence.

Another:

This isn’t about a ‘private consensual sex life’ at all. It’s about breach of contract. Gingrich didn’t just take a public, religious vow of sexual fidelity; he committed to an economic and emotional partnership, ‘for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.’  And twice he flagrantly violated that vow as soon as the “sickness” clause kicked in. He abandoned his first wife when she was diagnosed with cancer, and his second after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. That’s not about libido; he cheated on his wives for years before filing for divorce. The far greater betrayal is the selfish, narcissistic willingness to abandon a partner just when they stand most in need of support.

Another seems to agree with Palin, heard hovering above:

I don’t think Newt could ask for better fortune than ABC going forward with his ex-wife’s story tonight because if there’s one thing we know about the “conservative” electorate it’s that they will rush in to support any “conservative” that is perceived as being attacked by the mainstream media. Newt will quickly pivot this story into an unfair attack on him by the liberal media and gladly climb up onto the martyr’s pedestal.  And if there’s one thing the Republican base relishes, it’s putting on the cloak of victimhood.

One of the oldest arguments we had in the old gay rights movement – back when it was a monolithic captive of the New Left – was whether discrimination could be countered more effectively by private choice or public mandate. My view was that the government should not discriminate against gay citizens in any way, but that the private sector and anti-gay religious communities should retain more freedom. The market would eventually win over bigotry, I argued. That's me and my libertarianism.

The consensus view was that federal anti-discrimination laws were much more vital, and the top priority of the Human Rights Campaign. That was in 1988. Such a federal law remains out of reach more than two decades later, despite massive support from the general public. But without such a law, we've been able to test whether the free market logic of non-discrimination can work. Today, we hear this news:

For the first time ever, all 100 firms on Fortune's Best Companies To Work For list this year have non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation.

This is not because they are somehow being noble. It is because they are serving their shareholders by employing the absolutely best people for the jobs they have and do not want to miss someone's talents because of something irrelevant like sexual orientation.

Hence capitalism enables equality. And the last entity to get with the program is the government.

According to Nate Silver:

The good news for Mr. Romney is that while voters often like to defy expectations in the early-going, they usually make fairly rational choices in the end. (Let me be bold enough to suggest that Mr. Gingrich, whose favorability rating is just 27 percent in an average of national surveys, does not ultimately have the stronger side of the electability argument.) Probably not since George McGovern in 1972 have voters nominated a candidate to whom the tag “unelectable” might be fairly applied. And Mr. McGovern’s victory came in part because of his superior understanding of the Democrats’ brand-new nomination system, which he had helped to design.

PPP latest poll still has Gingrich ahead:

Things look good for Newt.  He has the lead, his support seems to have more room to grow than Romney's, and so far he's not seeing any ill effects from his ex-wife going to the media.  It's important to note though that many average South Carolina voters- the non-political junkies- will get their first exposure to the Marianne Gingrich story in the morning paper or on the news sometime [today].  That may or may not end up having a big impact on his numbers. But it's important to keep in mind. 

(Chart from 538.)

Krugman claims "the low tax rate on capital gains is bad economics." Jared Bernstein is on the same page. Brad Plumer looks at the evidence:

Troy Kravitz and Len Burman of the Urban Institute have shown that, over the past 50 years, there’s no correlation between the top capital gains tax rate and U.S. economic growth — even if you allow for a lag of up to five years. “Moreover,” they add, “any effect is likely small as capital gains realizations have averaged about 3 percent of GDP since 1960 and have never been more than 7.5 percent.”

Reihan counters:

If Trabandt and Uhlig are right and Cowen and Bernstein are wrong about capital gains taxes, the consequences for growth could be very significant. Denmark and Sweden are, according to this framework, growing despite their level of capital income taxation, not because capital income taxation has no impact or a negligible impact.

Yglesias's view:

Capital-gains tax cuts are extremely regressive, so if you really are a big believer in the growth-sparking impact of lower rates, the reasonable thing to do is offset the budgetary impact of the cut with a big progressive hike in ordinary income tax rates. If you're not willing to do that, then you're really just offering rich people a giveaway. Incurring the massive direct dissavings involved in a deficit-financed tax cut in exchange for some very-possibly-not-there incentive effect is crazy.

First they compared Newt's marriage(s) with Oscar Schindler's. Now a more familiar angle from National Review:

I wonder whether Newt’s "personal" record will hurt him, electorally. When you think about it, betrayal and divorce are as American as apple pie.

Via Mike Konczal, who captions:

The economy is terrible for all Americans right now and we desperately need action to both expand the economy and repeal attempts to contract it. But it is worth remembering that the unemployment misery all Americans are experiencing right now is equal to what it was like during the best two years of the 21st century for African Americans.