The GOP just discovered something…

Who care’s about the first 100 days? I’m wondering where a later 365 of them is going to go.

I finally figured it out. 2011 is the year we get raptured. As a Christian, all I have to say is “See ya, bitches! Enjoy in the final five years of the Anti-Christ’s administration.” Ahh, schadenfreude never tasted so sweet!

Reality? Bahh, it has a well-known liberal bias.

A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck. For decades, the typical college graduate’s wage rose well above inflation. But no longer. In the economic expansion that began in 2001 and now appears to be ending, the inflation-adjusted wages of the majority of U.S. workers didn’t grow, even among those who went to college. The government’s statistical snapshots show the typical weekly salary of a worker with a bachelor’s degree, adjusted for inflation, didn’t rise last year from 2006 and was 1.7% below the 2001 level. College-educated workers are more plentiful, more commoditized and more subject to the downsizings that used to be the purview of blue-collar workers only.”
—The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2008

I was listening to a this American Life program with a segment titled “Hey Mister DJ.” In it NPR financial reporter, Adam Davidson, attempts to convince his cousin, DJ, to go back to college.

The spoiler is the Georgetown economist that he enlists to convince DJ ends up taking DJ’s side of being a dropout.

I don’t object to the advice per se. But I do have three issues to pick with this idiot economist.

1. The economist claims that because DJ’s job is non-tradeable it is more secure than a job after a college educator? Where is the economic data for that? The answer is, there is none.
2. The economist says that the reason people want you to stay in college is “because [college educated people] have snotty biases” Where is the proof of that? The answer is, there is none because it’s a statement of belief. Dj admits that the members of the family who have been college educated are “very successful.” I guess very successful == snotty. I’d like to see that economic study.

I shouldn’t be surprised of such a fact-free advice from a a free-trade nut.

Why does that get me angry? Because here are the facts.

1. A college graduate earns, on average $25,000/year more than a high school diploma. Adjusted for inflation and the cost of that education, that’s $300,000 ROI—pretty much the best deal around.
2. You need a college education to get a higher degree which opens even larger pay and higher lifetime economics ROI. A college education doesn’t preclude you from any of the jobs that DJ has had.
3. Here is a typical statistic against a college education, it comes from the Wall Street Journal and I quoted it at the top of this article. Read it very closely, what it is saying is that the wage gap between college and high-school is no longer increasing and that you have to get an even higher degree if you want guaranteed employment. The clever use of words omits the fact that from 2001-2006, all wages have been depressed—hence the economics term “jobless recovery.” It never disputes the basic premise that college-educated workers make more money, have more job security, and have more stable and healthier households. And how will you get that higher degree anyways without a college degree?

Let’s apply my overpriced, college-educated brain to this economics professors arguments, shall we? (All of which gives me my third issue with her if you’re counting at home):
Continue reading about The application of my college education after the jump

There was been a lot of hoopla a couple years ago that New York Magazine was eclipsing my beloved The New Yorker.

It bothers me that people often confuse the two.

So for your edification, The New Yorker is the magazine where we first found out that America was torturing people and it published a photo essay moved a prominent politician to switch parties. And New York Magazine publishes stuff like this:

Jake DeSantis, a 40-year-old commodities trader at AIG, was an unlikely face of Wall Street greed. Stocky and clean cut, with an abiding moral streak, he’d worked summers for a bricklayer in the shadow of shuttered steel mills outside Pittsburgh; he was valedictorian of his high-school class and attended college at MIT.…

When DeSantis arrived at the office the morning his letter appeared in the paper, the AIG traders gave him a standing ovation. In some quarters of the press, he was vilified.

It might help to remember who Jake DeSantis is. (The whole article is similarly unintentionally revealing more of the magazine’s values and the author’s preferences than of anything else.) And lest you think that this is some weird outlier for the Magazine, it’s not.

While I applaud Jake for donating his bonus, Really?, I mean, Really?!?

Continue reading about Some comparisons after the jump

A continuation of my article one year ago on the bailout:

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more “business-friendly.” Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties.
—Mark Taibbi for Rolling Stone

Paul Krugman and Obama never will see eye to eye on economics. Liberals are not the same, and Obama’s people comes from the Chicago school—the part that was the mess Clinton made, not other half of the Chicago school that made the mess than Bush and Reagan created. No matter which administration it was under, this school of thought has held the econo-political power for the last thirty years in this country.

Given that, I find that the fact that Krugman says “this budget looks very, very good” very positive. The other shoe finally dropped, and Paul Krugman continued articles against the bailout plan is now engendering attacks on the blogs from the right and left.

But I find some of the reactions truly atrocious. Here is one example:

Does Krugman, or any of these media monkeys jabbering their opinions on the administration’s plan to resolve the biggest crises facing our nation since the Great Depression, have access to the inner circles and behind doors meetings regarding what’s really happening in the financial industry?
—passerby on Balloon Juice

Careful there. You’re starting to sound exactly like some administration official that assured us that if we didn’t invade Iraq, “the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud.” and we didn’t have the information they had to argue that the all those brains in the Pentagon wasn’t preparing for the aftermath of that war.

Obama was supposed to (and I believe is honestly trying) to usher a new era of transparency. But the amount of transparency he’s given us here so far has told nearly every economist worth their salt that the bailout plan has a good chance of being a very costly ineffectiveness.

Why not address those valid criticism without resorting to “trust us”?

Continue reading about Arguing from the left after the jump.