Rep. Jim Cooper impresses

Studying models

Temple Gandin, who is on the autistic spectrum and has been a consultant for animal handling systems, has some interesting things to say in her book, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals, including this:

Animal research is getting more and more what I call "abstractified." Instead of people studying the real animals in their natural habitats, researchers use fancy statistical software to construct statistical models, and then they study the models.

Economist Tyler Cowen suggests that financial economists might be able to take away something positive from considering such an observation.

Who is this?

Having run unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1994, he returned to the House in 2002. A mordant Cassandra ("If members of Congress were paid on commission to cut spending, we'd see fabulous results"), he is no longer astonished by Congress's bipartisan avoidance of the predictable crisis coming to the big three entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Why it is Dem. U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper featured in the latest George Will column. The column makes for some discouraging reading but Cooper is impressed with Obama's leadership. It struck me as well that Obama has mentioned the importance entitlement (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) reform. Now mentioning is not addressing and the president is otherwise engaged but mentioning is a first step.

This really impressed me from Cooper who was one of a handful of Democrats to vote against the stimulus package. He favors cutting the Social Security tax from 12.4% to 8%. Payroll taxes, as Cooper points out, suppress job creation. That is stimulus that has a direct impact on employment.

How markets work

Katie Porterfield has a very good piece in today's City Paper on how those in the real estate business are responding to the housing downturn. The private sector responds relatively quickly to changes in economic conditions. The median price of a home sold in the middle Tennessee area fell, from about $188,000 to $164,000, in 2008. Realtors are adjusting strategy, positioning themselves for a recovery, and some are leaving the business.

War is not good

Washington Post (via the Tennessean): In the United States, a move to greatly expand Buy American provisions as part of the $819 billion fiscal stimulus package has generated shock waves overseas, with Canadian and European officials in particular rising up in protest.

For all the points of disagreement, economists agree that at the onset of the Great Depression there were three policies that made things worse - cutting the money supply which raised interest rates, tax increases, and the Smoot-Hawley bill that increased tariffs and launched a global trade war. We've learned. The Fed has lowered interest rates and has signaled that they will stay low. We're not talking about raising taxes. Can Obama resist the protectionist tendencies that emerged in the House?