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Tuesday, May 17, 2011
I don't know what happened to sportswriter Sally Jenkins to make her so virulently anti-NFL owner, but in most (if not all) of the examples she cites in trying to depict the owners as greedy, she consistently overlooks one little point: the money the public spends on the NFL is done willingly.
Nobody is forced to attend an NFL game; those paying $200 for standing room only at Cowboys games are doing so willingly. Nobody who goes to an NFL game is forced to buy food or beer there; those paying the (according to Jenkins) 'involuntary' service fee are in fact doing so voluntarily. Communities are willingly (at least the elected officials of those communities) spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep 'their' teams from leaving town. While it is human nature to want to spend less for something, the public obviously prefers to spend those billions of dollars on the NFL than to do something else with that money. No owner is holding a gun to their heads. What Jenkins doesn't (or, perhaps, just won't) accept is that it takes two to tango, whether on the dance floor or in commercial transactions. If someone is willing to pay a bunch of money for something they deem of value, the other party is under no obligation to accept less. If Jenkins doesn't like the fact that so many billions of dollars are spent on things-NFL, perhaps she ought to focus her ire on those who do the spending... if the public wasn't willing to pay so much for a ticket, the owners couldn't charge that much for a ticket. If the public didn't care so much about having a team somewhere in the vicinity of where they live, then the teams couldn't get those communities to kick in so much money for stadiums and tax waivers. Monday, May 16, 2011
First, I am glad International Monetary Fund executive Dominique Strauss-Kahn isn't getting away with sexually assaulting a NYC hotel maid. It's nice to see that even the international elite have to behave while in the United States.
Second, I am really bothered that the IMF, an organization which receives more money from the United States than any other single country, is headed by a Socialist. Is it too much to ask that the person who takes the lead in deciding where our tax dollars go is in sync with our belief in a capitalistic, free-market economic system? Thursday, May 12, 2011
Value isn't determined by the number of hours worked, but rather by what one does in those hours...
It's a shame that this web photographer works all that time for roughly $50 a day. But that is apparently all his pictures are worth. If they were worth more, someone would be paying him more. If not his current employer, someone else. But as no one else is paying him more, the only - yes, the only - conclusion to draw is that $50 a day is all that his work is worth to someone else. The guy's real complaint is that others don't value his work as highly as he does. He wants someone else to ooh and aah over his work. But they don't. It isn't his employer's fault that his work is only worth $50 a day. And thus it isn't his employer's obligation to pay him any more than that. The guy picked a career in which people just don't make a lot of money. He may not have known that at the time he was getting started, and it may not have been the case at the time, but that, as the expression goes, is tough cookies. People have to live with the consequences of their decisions in life. And if he doesn't like taking pictures for only $50 a day, he can do one of a couple things: One, he can start taking pictures of things that others would pay more than $50 a day. Instead of taking pictures of DC neighborhoods, perhaps he can start taking pictures of celebrities gone wild. Maybe that's beneath him, but if it is, that is his choice and he can live with the results. Or two, he can go do something else with his life. He can pour coffee at Starbucks and make more than $50 a day. His life, his choices. He can do what he wants. But he has to live with the consequences... and not try to make someone else pay more for something that just isn't worth as much as he'd like to get. Wednesday, May 11, 2011
The story goes something like this:
Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds? Socialite: My goodness, Mr. Churchill! Well, I suppose – we would have to discuss terms, naturally. Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds? Socialite: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?! Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price. Now let's shift the focus of that story from sex to torture... Would it be permissible to waterboard an admitted terrorist if doing so saved the lives of 5 million innocent people? I would say yes, and I believe that approximately 99.9999% of Americans would agree. Well then, how about saving the lives of just 1 person? I would still say yes... and I believe most Americans would likewise still agree... and even if their families and friends were not among those to be saved. As with Churchill's story, once you say it is okay to torture someone in order to save lives, we've established what you are.... namely, someone who cares far more about saving the lives of innocent people than the psychological well-being of terrorists. I don't care - as Jacoby seems to care - that waterboarding can leave its victims with psychological trauma that can last for years. What I care about is keeping my friends and family and neighbors and other Americans safe from those who would do them harm. If I were President, the last thing I would want to do is to have to meet with the relatives of the victims of a terrorist attack knowing they died because I didn't do everything that could be done to keep that from happening. Back in 1988, Dukasis lost the Presidential election in no small part because he wouldn't come out and say he'd want to execute the criminal who (in the hypothetical question) raped and murdered his wife. I expect our Presidents to be people who would do anything to save their family from harm, I don't want a President who would let his family die so he could take the supposed high ground of being 'anti-torture'. As bad a reputation Obama has among the right, I believe that, if push came to shove, he wouldn't stand by and let his wife and kids die from a terrorist attack that he could have prevented by allowing a bit of what is euphemistically referred to as 'enhanced interrogation'. And if our President is someone who would allow torture to save the lives of his family, then as Churchill would have noted, we know what kind of guy he is. All I ask is that his price goes low enough to include the families of people who didn't vote for him.
Hint: the reason the public lost confidence in the financial markets wasn't because of people like Raj Rajaratnam... and thus, and counter to the assertion of this clueless business reporter, his conviction isn't likely to do anything to restore our confidence in those markets.
There are a couple of reasons we lost confidence in the financial markets. One is that stuff we had bought - stocks, bonds, houses - was suddenly much less valuable than we were told the stuff was worth when we were being pushed to buy it. And Raj Rajaratnam had nothing to do with that. Second, we saw those working on Wall Street not only being allowed to keep their jobs and their bonuses... but being given access to hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to help them do so. And Raj Rajaratnam wasn't one of the guys we were reading about. One thing we weren't worried about is whether some guy was bribing people to give him a heads-up so he could buy or sell in advance of the general public. We know people like this exist, they have for a long time and notwithstanding today's conviction, will continue to do so. And while we might not like what they're doing, their actions are a pimple on the rear of things that we worry about. So it's well and good that the feds caught some crook and got themselves a conviction. Hopefully, these prosecutors will have done so properly, unlike prosecutors in other high-profile cases. But there is no one - absolutely no one - that is now thinking this conviction is a reason to plow some money into the markets. Other than the clueless business reporter, that is. Tuesday, May 03, 2011
Here's a question for anyone who would agree with Ezra Klein's claim that the 2001 and the 2003 tax cuts were the two biggest contributors to the federal budget deficit...
How in the world do you justify that position? The 'deficit' is the amount by which spending exceeds revenue ('surplus' is the amount by which revenues exceed expenditures, a condition never to be seen again). Government revenues were higher in 2010 than they were in 2000, the year before the 2001 cuts. Not a whole lot higher, but higher nonetheless. Given that revenues went up, the only way that we could have ended up in a deficit situation is if spending had gone by an even larger amount. And that is exactly what happened. The ONLY way one can rationalize Klein's view is by starting from the position that increases in spending are both a given and always justified and thus revenues have to go up by at least the same amount to keep pace... and if revenues don't go up by that amount, the fault lies with the revenue side of the budget and not with the spending side. Now how screwed up a view is that?
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