Miscellaneous 148

1) Another thing that Krugman does a lot is the construction of straw-men. Take, for instance, this assertion of his from a recent New York Times editorial; "There's a very widespread belief on the right that banking crises only happen because either the Fed or Barney Frank cause them; go back to a gold standard, and there would be no need for financial regulation or anything like that." It's an utterly absurd statement and as Robert Murphy has pointed out on his blog, conservative and Austrian economists such as Murray Rothbard, Burton Fulsom, and Walter Bagehot have all written extensively on numerous crises and panics that happened well before the FED. I mean, yes, they've also asserted that the panics have gotten a hell of a lot worse since the FED (and, yes, even the charts that Krugman himself has supplied verify this) but to say that they haven't ever acknowledged them is either a lie or utter stupidity by Krugman.............2) I consider myself a pretty strong admirer of former Pennsylvania governor, Ed Rendell (and, yes, I would absolutely consider voting for him). But when the fellow went on MSNBC the other day and claimed that the numbers "didn't add up" in terms of raising revenue strictly by closing loopholes, yeah, I was kind of disappointed in that. The fact of the matter is that there are hundreds of billions of dollars to be had just from closing loopholes (simply lowering the cap on mortgage interest from a million to 500,000 could potentially raise tens of billions and it wouldn't even touch the middle-class) and to have these Democrats be so stubborn and recalcitrant on rates hasn't been helpful (just like it hasn't been helpful that those on the hard right haven't been budging, either).............3) Screen legend and Oscar-winning sisters, Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland, are 95 and 96, respectively. You think that there might be a spate of decent genes there (age, and the fact that they were both smolderingly hot in their prime)? I certainly do.