Author: Joshua Hedlund

Correlations In Job Creation and Political Parties

Last night at the Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton said, “Since 1961, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private sector jobs. What’s the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 million.”

The fact-checkers have said it’s a fact, end of story. But I’m feeling especially wonky tonight, so I dug a little deeper. First, I pulled up the BLS data to see if I could duplicate the stats. I couldn’t figure out how to separate private jobs from government jobs, but I analyzed the full data and found 32 million jobs during Republican years and 48 million during Democratic years. If you add the private and public numbers from the Bloomberg article, that gets you there, and when you calculate the average per month, it looks pretty good for Democratic presidents. (The number in parentheses after the party initial indicates how many years of data are in that sample size)

jobs-added-president-party-1961-2012But I wondered if 1961 was a cherry-picked starting point, so I went all the way back to the beginning of the BLS data in 1939:

Continue reading Correlations In Job Creation and Political Parties

Another Reason To Vote Libertarian

Last week the Republican establishment wanted to change some rules to make it harder for grassroots candidates like Ron Paul to gain traction in future campaigns. The power grab was stark enough to anger delegates who weren’t even Paul supporters, and the “Nays” drowned the “Ayes” on the voice vote. Nevertheless, the chair ruled “The Ayes have it” without doing an official count.

The Democratic establishment played the same game last night. Earlier this week the party had voted to remove references to God and Jerusalem from their party platform. I’m not sure whether it was the conservative heckling or the threat of losing rich Jewish donors, but the establishment realized it was a dumb move that risked alienating independent voters, so they tried to put it back in. Unfortunately, they had to break their own rules to reverse course. The chair ruled “The Ayes have it,” clearly without a two-thirds majority, resulting in Booing (about the power grab, not about God).

Reason has the relevant video clips. Both parties claim to desire the will of the people but are more than willing to subvert that when it threatens their grip on power. For all we know, this sort of arbitrary voice counting happens all the time in these parties, preserving the illusion of democracy while the leaders really call the shots (I’ve even personally experienced a fraudulent “The Ayes have it” at a local caucus). It just reinforces the notion that the establishment of both parties are corrupt, caring more about preserving their power, whether it’s closing the doors on candidates they don’t like or overriding platform decisions. If the party leaders don’t care about their own delegates’ voices, what makes you think they care any more about yours?

Continue reading Another Reason To Vote Libertarian

Why I Don’t Watch Party Convention Speeches

The primary reason I don’t watch party convention speeches is that there are a lot of them and the opportunity cost is too high for me. There have been a few occasions where the opportunity cost was low enough (for instance, I happened to be in my car and the speeches were on public radio) that I’ve given a few minutes to a few lucky speechers, and those speeches generally remind me why I don’t watch the rest of them: I don’t like most of the things they say.

Continue reading Why I Don’t Watch Party Convention Speeches

The Fact-Checking Fallacy

The media is obsessed with subjecting the Republican National Convention speeches to “fact-checking,” which as everyone knows is a special kind of media report that contains completely helpful, accurate, objective, independent, non-partisan analyses of things candidates say, as opposed to the usual slanted reporting of things candidates say.

Continue reading The Fact-Checking Fallacy

Thursday Links

1. Obama did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit, which in theory is a pretty big deal, illustrating the way modern technology allows a sitting president to cut through layers of separation and communicate directly with citizens all over the country (We have come a long way from the days when most people could only read about presidents in the newspaper). Perhaps predictably, though, Obama mostly answered easy questions or stuck to vague talking points about things like the Internet and NASA, ignoring harder questions about things like the TSA or lobbyists or his betrayal on medical marijuana or the American citizen killed in a drone strike.

2. How the Federal Reserve Accelerates the Robopocalypse. The Federal Reserve has been keeping interest rates ridiculously low for an unprecedented length of time. It’s supposed to help the economy, but I sometimes wonder what unintended consequences this might have down the line. Victor Wong argues that this is actually hurting employment by encouraging businesses to invest in robot labor. I’m not completely convinced, but it sounds plausible. I’m generally optimistic that labor freed by technology will always find something better to do, but I read an argument recently (h/t @interfluidity) that “this time it’s different” because we’re finally starting to run out of options for people on the lower half of the IQ spectrum (read the skeptical comments as well).

Continue reading Thursday Links

Fuel Efficiency Standards and a Hyperactive Government

Yesterday Obama announced new fuel efficiency standards that “mandate an average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon” by 2025. This is the sort of arbitrary government intervention that hits all the libertarian buttons – distorting the market, deceiving consumers, enhancing the corrupt link between big businesses and big government – although I have to admit it’s likely that it won’t make things worse and may even make them better. However, the mandate does illustrate how the government is so hyperactively involved in so many things these days that an attempt to fix something with one hand may break something it’s already fixing with another hand.

Continue reading Fuel Efficiency Standards and a Hyperactive Government

August Outlook For Divided Government

Earlier I explained why I’m not afraid of the fiscal cliff, which means I’m also not afraid of a gridlocked, partisan government making it happen. It actually looks like we have a good chance of getting the trifecta of divided government this November. There’s no guarantees that Obama will be re-elected and that Republicans will keep the House and reclaim the Senate, but it’s increasingly looking like the default and most likely option.

Continue reading August Outlook For Divided Government

Obama At The Movies

I heard there’s a new documentary about Obama that interviews a plethora of people from the President’s past and purports to present his putrid philosophy and the precarious possibilities for our posterity if his previous policies are permitted to persist for four more years.

The film, titled 2016: Obama’s America, is off to a successful start, expanding to a bunch of theaters and projected to come in at #8 for the weekend. In fact, it’s already the 17th-highest grossing documentary of all time, and with a healthy per-theater average and two solid pre-election months to go, it seems guaranteed to climb higher. Maybe it’ll even dethrone Fahrenheit 9/11 from the top of the All-Time Documentary list (though I always thought it was a stretch to call that thing a documentary).

It looks like there’s a lot of money to be made in criticizing Obama. Some news articles are saying the movie is a “surprise” hit. If anything, I’m surprised it took the anti-Obama capitalists this long to turn conservative opposition into such easy profits.

But is the movie any good?

Continue reading Obama At The Movies