jason swadley

A fascinating animation of unemployment spreading across the country during The Great Recession.

Jacob Levy tweets this article from the Times:

But Mr. Skelton, 78, said he was not ready to leave Congress, particularly his post as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, while the United States was engaged in two wars. His district includes Fort Leonard Wood and Whiteman Air Force Base, both of which he has fought to finance and keep open.

“It’s a rare opportunity to help our national defense,” Mr. Skelton said…

Mr. Skelton threw his fund-raising efforts into overdrive a year ago, party leaders said. He has $1.4 million in his campaign account, a large share of which was raised from military-related concerns.

Ol’ Ike Skelton represents the district next to my home district in Missouri (where I still vote).

One odd thing about this article: the sense in the Ozarks is that Skelton is popular for being a pro-life, conservative Democrat… not for being Our Savior of the Bases. All the pork in the world couldn’t save a liberal in that district.

So why would Skelton emphasize only the military credentials that play a minor role in reelection? Posturing? Securing campaign contributions?

Sounds like a smart idea to me.

We’ll laugh at this headline in a decade… and the bulbs will still have another 20 years left in them.

Scott Adams:

When you have a working knowledge of economics, it’s like having a mild super power.

Too often the government powers that should be use [sic] to counteract state monopolies are working overtime to support them.

How true.

Michael Ferguson and Hugh Douglas Witte found that “about 90% of the capital gains over the life of the Dow Jones Industrial Average have come on days when Congress is out of session.” The finding could of course be a fluke but Ferguson and Witte found the relationship to be particularly strong when Congress’s approval ratings are lower. They point out that when Congress in session, companies and investors face “a more uncertain tax and regulatory environment.”

In 14 years atop the SEIU, Mr. Stern pioneered a new labor strategy: Size brings power, so grow at all costs. He bullied and charmed companies to get them to unionize—often, claimed his critics, in exchange for weak contracts for the workers. He raided smaller unions. And he centralized power around the group’s Washington headquarters. In a decade, the SEIU doubled its membership and became the single biggest contributor to the Democratic Party.

Eight dollars for a dozen eggs sounds outrageous, but when you think that you can make a delicious meal from two eggs, that’s $1.50. It’s really not that much when we think of how we waste money in our lives.

Soon after Prop 13 became law, Sacramento decided that, if property-tax revenues were to be limited, the state would have to compensate local communities for the resulting cash shortfall. This assumption opened the floodgates for government largess and, at the same time, centralized spending decisions in Sacramento that had once been dispersed throughout the state—yet another example of the unintended consequences of even worthy political crusades.

If we wish to know, we can. An innovative approach comes from Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University who in April published a peer-reviewed study on the cost of keeping aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf from 1976 to 2007. Because carriers patrol the gulf for the explicit mission of securing oil shipments, Stern was on solid ground in attributing that cost to oil. He had found an excellent metric. He combed through the Defense Department’s data — which is not easy to do because the Pentagon does not disaggregate its expenditures by region or mission — and came up with a total, over three decades, of $7.3 trillion. Yes, trillion.

In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

A recent British study found that the longer couples are married, the less they have to say to each other over the course of an hour-long meal.

Couples who are dating chat for 50 minutes out of the hour. Twenty years into marriage, the average couple talks for 21 minutes of the hour; 30 years in, conversation takes up 16 minutes. And by 50 years of marital bliss, the average couple converses for three minutes in an hour!