Miscellaneous 151

1) According to Rachel Maddow, "WE KNOW" that government spending is more stimulative to the American economy than tax-cuts. Yeah, well, guess what, WRONG! At the bare minimum it's debatable. I mean, yes, there are some studies and economists (that dude from Moody's and the celebrity economist, Krugman - two of them) who still subscribe to this multiplier effect thing but it is far, FAR, from a consensus. Harvard's Robert Barro and the University of California's Valerie Ramey, for instance - those folks place the multiplier effect of government spending at .7 and between .6 and 1.1, respectively. Hell, even the administration's own Christine Romer in a study that she did at Cal had the multiplier effect of tax cuts at 3.0 (a far greater amount than even the hardest of the hard-core Keynesians have asserted for any form of government spending)....Look, I'm not saying here that I have the final word on any of this shit. But for activists like Rachel Maddow to continuously say that they DO, sorry, not going to let it pass.............2) Hugh Samuel Johnson, FDR's administrator of the National Recovery Administration - wow, what a piece of work that guy was. Not only was the fellow an admirer of Mussolini, he actually went as far as to disseminate fascistic propaganda within the government by one of Mussolini's favorite economists AND he was an alcoholic who administered the NRA so incompetently that it was even too much for Roosevelt who ended up firing him in 1934. Of course, the most hilarious aspect of the story is that Time Magazine actually named him, "Man of the Year" OVER FDR! Is this a great country or is it not?............3) Just for the record, he was in fact a true-believer while he was there. He once referred to the NRA as "the greatest social advance since the days of Jesus Christ."