The Dish

Peter Boockvar has some bad news:

With 85% of 1st time home buyers who were eligible to collect the tax credit planning to buy a home anyway, the Brookings institute estimates that the $8,000 credit equates to a cost to the taxpayer of $43,000 per home. This is based on the belief that 85% of the almost 2mm buyers are getting free money. Edmunds.com…is estimating that the Cash for Clunkers program cost taxpayers $24,000 per vehicle sold. They estimate that 82% of sales would have happened anyway and thus the handout of up to $4,500 really only enticed 18% of the buyers of 690k vehicles sold under the program.

My own support for the idea is looking less and less valid as the assessments come in.

I was hoping for more details on the accused spy-wannabe and embezzler of government funds in the latest piece. But there’s nothing much there – certainly no mention of this credible report that Nozette had worked for Dan Quayle, or that he had a long history of donations to the GOP. He also seems to have been mightily interested in spying for either India or Israel. I guess I hoped the MSM would get some real data on the guy – even if to debunk some of the web assertions. Wrong again. But is there a way to confirm or rebut the claim that he did indeed work for Quayle? And what are or were Nozette’s connections to the Republican party? Or was he just a supporter?

Calculated Risk worries:

[N]ew home sales are far more important for employment and the economy than existing home sales. When an existing home is sold, the housing stock doesn't change, and the only direct contribution to the economy are the transaction costs. When a new home is sold, the housing stock of the nation increases, and there is a significant amount of spending on material and labor.

During the housing bust, new home sales fell much further than existing home sales (as a percent of sales). I've jokingly referred to the difference in percentage declines as the "Distressing" gap, because of all the distressed sales of existing homes.

His bottom line:

The ratio could decline because of an increase in new home sales, or a decrease in existing home sales – I expect a combination of both.

"I don't have a strict allegiance to "journalism," as much as I have one to the written word. Perhaps there's no difference. But my point is that to the extent blogging makes it possible for more people who are "on fire" to employ the written word, than it's good for the written word. It's true that it creates a situation in which anyone, for $15 a month, can say their piece. But I have more faith in the market of ideas, than in a brain-trust of editors, to separate the wheat from the chafe. Moreover, while there are an incredible number of bloggers out there, with no institutional support, who suck. There are a truly shocking number of writers, who have all the institutional support in the world, and not only suck, but bring nothing save cynicism, incuriousity, and cold poisoned hearts. And the institutions enable them. To the extent that blogging exposes these frauds, I am all in," – TNC.

Jacob Sullum points out other drug sentencing absurdities:

Back in 1993, I wrote a piece for Reason in which I highlighted the ridiculously unjust results of including the "carrier medium" for LSD (typically blotter paper) in calculating the drug's weight for sentencing purposes:

Under federal sentencing guidelines, selling 100 doses of LSD in pure form triggers a minimum sentence of less than a year, but selling the same amount on paper will get you a sentence of at least two years, three months. And if you were old-fashioned enough to drop your acid onto sugar cubes, you will end up behind bars for no less than 15 years, eight months.

Like the Minnesota ruling, this interpretation of the law elicited amazed dissents. "All this seems crazy," the 7th Circuit's Richard Posner wrote in 1990. "To base punishment on the weight of the carrier medium makes about as much sense as basing punishment on the weight of the defendant." The arbitrary, incomplete fix that the U.S. Sentencing Commission devised for that problem—counting each dose in a carrier medium as 0.4 milligram to avoid "unwarranted disparity among offenses involving the same quantity of actual LSD"—is still in force, to judge by this 2006 sentencing manual (PDF).

The Onion reports:

According to sources at the Pentagon, American quagmire-building efforts continued apace in Afghanistan this week, as the geographically rugged, politically unstable region remained ungovernable, death tolls continued to rise, and the grim military campaign persisted as hopelessly as ever.

In fact, many government officials now believe that the United States and its allies could be as little as six months away from their ultimate goal: the total quagmirification of Afghanistan.

Reihan argues against the cap and trade bill, but a study on the costs of conventional pollution makes him advocate for a carbon tax:

I'm struck by the idea, advanced by Randall Parker among others, that a modest carbon tax could make nuclear power far more competitive with coal electric — so much so that, Parker suggests, we'd immediately stop building coal electric plants. Again, I believe that climate change is a serious problem, a stance that not all conservatives accept. But if burning coal is also causing serious health problems, that strikes me as a decent argument for slapping the equivalent of a sin tax on its use.

Agreed on all counts. A small but gradually increasing carbon tax along with serious investment in nuclear and non-carbon energy strikes me as more fruitful and less costly than cap-and-trade.

Gerald Seib thinks that unemployment could be the political story of 2010:

IHS forecasts that a third of the nation’s metropolitan areas will have jobless rates in double digits in the fourth quarter of next year, and that 16 metro areas will have jobless rates exceeding 15%. The pain figures to be worst in California, which will have nine metro areas with jobless rates exceeding 15%. Michigan will have three, and Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Indiana one each.

Things figure to be better by time President Barack Obama runs for re-election, but far from perfect: “By the end of 2012, the jobless rate will still be above historic norms, but it will finally slip below 8% in more than half of metro areas,” IHS says.