The idiocy of New York's new gun law

I'll keep this one quick, because it's essentially an update to a couple of recent posts. As could have been expected, some states are already moving toward stricter gun control laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook incident last month. The first state to enact a policy response is nearby New York, as CNBC notes.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and legislative leaders tentatively agreed on Monday on a broad package of changes to gun laws that would expand the state's ban on assault weapons and would include new measures to keep guns away from the mentally ill. 

Approval of the legislation would make New York the first state to act in response to the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., last month. Monday was the first full day of this year's legislative session in Albany; the State Assembly opened its session with a moment of silence for those killed in Newtown, and lawmakers from both parties said they expected to vote on the gun package late Monday or early Tuesday. 

"We don't need another tragedy to point out the problems in the system," Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said at a news conference just before 9 p.m., during which he detailed elements of the proposed legislation. "Enough people have lost their lives," he added. "Let's act."

That's basically okay so far, I don't have any major gripes with those first paragraphs, even if it does reek a bit of the "DO SOMETHING" dynamic that I loathe so much. Let's keep going.

In an acknowledgment that many people have suggested that part of the solution to gun violence is a better government response to mental illness, the legislation includes not only new restrictions on gun ownership, but also efforts to limit access to guns by the mentally ill.

The most significant new proposal would require mental health professionals to report to local mental health officials when they believe that a patient is likely to harm themselves or others. Law enforcement would then be authorized to confiscate any firearm owned by the patient. 

"People who have mental health issues should not have guns," Mr. Cuomo said. "They could hurt themselves, they could hurt other people." 

But such a requirement "represents a major change in the presumption of confidentiality that has been inherent in mental health treatment," said Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, the director of the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, who said the Legislature should hold hearings on possible consequences of the proposal. 

"The prospect of being reported to the local authorities, even if they do not have weapons, may be enough to discourage patients with suicidal or homicidal thoughts from seeking treatment or from being honest about their impulses," he said.

Okay, now we've got problems. "Addressing mental health issues" in our society does not mean "treating those with mental health issues like convicted felons and second-class citizens". The proposal, as stated, would strongly discourage those who are struggling with mental illness from ever disclosing their problems, lest they be forced to give up their rights as Americans as a result. That would make the societal issues we now face much worse, not better.

The goal of these policies should be to minimize the number of mentally ill people in the country, and to pro-actively treat the symptoms of those who become viciously disillusioned or inclined toward violence, not to further isolate those people and make them even more bitter and pissed off at society. This is not a step in the right direction; on the contrary, it's a huge step backward for New York and the country as a whole.

Unfortunately, this type of response is exactly what I warned about in my previous missives on gun control, only worse. Instead of ignoring mental health issues (as I had feared), New York politicians are seemingly trying to actively antagonize the very people they should be seeking to help. That's a dereliction of duty of the highest order, and a complete failure by those politicians to protect the rights and well-being of all citizens equally.

I see no reason to be diplomatic or civil when policy proposals that are so boldly idiotic are put forth. Citizens and politicians of New York, what in the fuck are you thinking?

[CNBC]

The credentialization of America

Last week, I wrote a post about government policies gone bad in Chicago, and how those policies are getting in the way of innovation and economic growth. I wrote:

The fact of the matter is that most politicians don't have a clue about what it actually takes to promote economic growth, even while they recognize that it's the absolute only way out of our current budgetary morass, given those same politicians' utter unwillingness to do anything meaningful to address it. 

As I've written here before, if we really want sustainable economic growth, then we need to be incentivizing innovation and entrepreneurship, not stifling it with overly onerous regulations that turn a simple task like starting a food truck business into a Sisyphean struggle. But, of course, we seem to be consistently doing the opposite, just about everywhere we look. 

We pass regulations on top of regulations from coast to coast, and we issue overly broad patents that protect the large companies at the expense of the small and innovative start-ups. We pass bizarre "taxpayer relief" bills without reading them, rubber-stamping a plethora of corporate kickbacks and subsidies in the process when nobody's looking. And we require that ever more trivial jobs require credentials and continuing education, increasing the cost of pursuing just about any career path we may choose (I'll have more on that topic next week).

Well, here it is, next week, and I am a man of my word. I happen to follow the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Twitter, largely because it's amusing to do so. Last week, they posted a status talking all about certificates, and how they were the "fast track" to careers. They linked to this strange little marketing pamphlet, which talks all about how awesome these certificates are. In it, they wrote:

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has identified 33 occupations as typically requiring a certificate or other postsecondary nondegree award for people entering those occupations. In 2010–11, according to NCES, the most popular disciplines for certificate programs were healthcare, personal and culinary services, and mechanic and repair technologies and technicians. But people also earned certificates in a wide range of other occupational areas, such as computer and information sciences and protective services.

This includes jobs like hairdressers, nannies, fitness trainers, all the way down to computer programmers and web administrators. Strangely enough, most accountants, preschool teachers, and paralegals reported that they didn't need any special sort of certificate, which is honestly a little bit bizarre.

Now, in many of these cases, the tendency toward requiring certificates provides a very valuable protection for consumers—they can be assured that they're getting at least a minimum level of competence from the people they hire, and that's usually a good thing. But as these credentials and certificates creep their way down into even the most "unskilled" of occupations, I have to wonder what the point of it all is.

Is all of this just making it harder for everyone to meet basic job requirements? And is that a good thing for the economy at large? Or are these requirements just destined to get in the way of economic growth, like the licensing requirements for food trucks in Chicago in my earlier post? I'm all for safeguarding certain professions and making sure that the people who are in high-risk or high-impact positions don't blow up the world, but I think we've gotten way beyond that now.

I've been through a few of these types of training courses on my own over the years (TIPS training was a personal favorite), and I can tell you first-hand: they're not all exactly academically rigorous. Generally speaking, I'm not any more or less likely to do the right thing as a bartender or a financial advisor or a manicurist or whatever else just because I forked over a few hundred bucks and took a couple of classes with some common-sense tests attached to the back of them. Ultimately, there's a big difference between knowing the right thing to do, and then actually doing the right thing. Shocking, I know.

As consumers, we can't be so willing to outsource our due diligence to these certificate-granting institutions, whichever they may be. Many times, we in fact allow ourselves to become more vulnerable as a result, because it's incredibly easy for a scam artist to get himself a license or certificate and then hide behind his "credentials". And in the process, we may actually have made it more difficult for an honest and hard-working man to get that same job. That's bad.

Maybe none of this matters, and I'm just howling at the moon a bit, but I don't think this world needs any more licenses and certificates and credentials than it already has. What it does need is more common sense, more personal accountability, and more innovation and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, again, we seem to be headed in the wrong direction.

[Bureau of Labor Statistics]

Quote of the Week

We had two very serious contenders for Quote of the Week this week, and both of them are going to get a little bit of love here. The first one comes from Brazil, where a cat was caught trying to wriggle through prison gates while carrying a cell phone, drills, an earphone, batteries, and a phone charger. When discussing the case, prison guards shared that it was tough to get the cat to sell out his accomplices, because he wasn't talking. Shocking. Note to self: teach cat how to commit petty crimes.

But this week's winner comes from the great state of California, where a man is seemingly determined to prove that corporations are not, in fact, people (contrary to the beliefs of a certain electoral runner-up). From NBC News, it's your Quote of the Week.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"When Jonathan Frieman of San Rafael, Calif., was pulled over for driving alone in the carpool lane, he argued to the officer that, actually, he did have a passenger. He waved his corporation papers at the officer, saying that corporations are people under California law... Frieman doesn't actually support this notion. For more than 10 years, Frieman says he had been trying to get pulled over to get ticketed and to take his argument to court—to challenge a judge to determine that corporations and people are not the same." 
                                                    - NBC News

At the heart of the issue is the Supreme Court's controversial 2010 decision in the "Citizens United" case, which essentially brought the issue of corporate personhood into the public eye and made it a hot-button political issue. It's still unclear exactly where the concept of corporation-as-person begins and ends, and this latest incident is clearly part of the process of drawing out those lines in the sand.

Unfortunately (and somewhat unsurprisingly), it doesn't look like Mr. Frieman's case is going anywhere. A judge has already ruled against him, and although an appeal is planned, it's unlikely to gain any traction. Nevertheless, kudos to the man for coming up with a creative way to draw attention to an issue that likely won't be going away any time soon. As far as Quotes of the Week go, this one is among my favorites.

[NBC News]

On government policies gone bad

In a post earlier today, I talked about unintended consequences and provided a link to this post from last year, in which I discussed the ramifications of "when regulatory bodies go wild". Unfortunately, John Cochrane (the self-dubbed "Grumpy Economist") shared a few similar examples from his own backyard of Chicago, showing that this regulatory madness is spreading, not abating. He writes,

If you travel from California or New York to Chicago, especially the beautiful but food-deserted campus of the University of Chicago, you will notice a striking absence: food trucks, which serve a bewlidering variety of tasty treats in other cities. 

Finally, last summer, our City council passed an ordinance allowing food trucks to cook food, along with a bewildering variety of restaurant-protecting restrictions, such as that they may not operate within 200 feet of a restaurant, they can't park for more than two hours, they must carry an on board GPS to verify position, and so on.   

Today, the Chicago Tribune reports on the success of this program:   

Of the 109 entrepreneurs who have applied for the Mobile Food Preparer licenses that allow onboard cooking, none has met the city's requirements... 

The process of getting a license is just too daunting, according to Rodriguez and Fuentes, who cite bad experiences with city bureaucracy, steep additional costs and the need to retrofit equipment among the reasons. 

"I think many food truck owners are hesitant to even pursue cooking onboard because of their haunting experience with working with the city," Rodriguez wrote in an email.  

(Kudos to Rodriguez for having the courage to write on the record, and good luck with her next application.)

....Chicago's code includes rules on ventilation and gas line equipment that "are meetable but extremely cumbersome and can raise the price of outfitting a truck by $10,000 to $20,000."...

...the additional ventilation equipment (with intake and exhaust fans similar to those in brick-and-mortar kitchens) also raises the height of trucks to 13 feet, making certain Chicago underpasses impassable. 

Aaron Crumbaugh, who operates the Wagyu Wagon ... said he is outfitting several trucks for franchisees in other cities whose processes for licensing are clear-cut.  "But here they don't know exactly what they want," he said. "Every time a truck comes in (health officials) say 'You need this' but then when you come back they say 'No you need that' and then the next time they find something else."

The Tribune did a much more balanced job of including quotes from city employees defending themselves. I'm a blog so I don't have to be balanced. The numbers speak for themselves. Zero. 

Yeah. Cochrane also shares a story from the Hyde Park Herald that discusses the ridiculous red tape that is currently preventing a South Side movie theater from opening on time. As Cochrane concludes, "Chicago, like the US, is broke. It says it wants more businesses. Until actual businesses try to open. Really, if we can't get food trucks and movie theater regulations to work, how do Dodd Frank and the EPA have a hope?"

Well said, John. The fact of the matter is that most politicians don't have a clue about what it actually takes to promote economic growth, even while they recognize that it's the absolute only way out of our current budgetary morass, given those same politicians' utter unwillingness to do anything meaningful to address it.

As I've written here before, if we really want sustainable economic growth, then we need to be incentivizing innovation and entrepreneurship, not stifling it with overly onerous regulations that turn a simple task like starting a food truck business into a Sisyphean struggle. But, of course, we seem to be consistently doing the opposite, just about everywhere we look.

We pass regulations on top of regulations from coast to coast, and we issue overly broad patents that protect the large companies at the expense of the small and innovative start-ups. We pass bizarre "taxpayer relief" bills without reading them, rubber-stamping a plethora of corporate kickbacks and subsidies in the process when nobody's looking. And we require that ever more trivial jobs require credentials and continuing education, increasing the cost of pursuing just about any career path we may choose (I'll have more on that topic next week).

Absolutely none of these government policies does anything but slow economic growth and the pace of innovation, and they must all therefore be considered counter-productive with respect to American prosperity. As Mr. Cochrane so eloquently wrote, if we can't get a food truck to start up in Chicago without violating some arcane city code, how can anybody ever do anything of any value in this country without breaking the law? I wonder.

[Grumpy Economist]

Quote of the Week (Fiscal Cliff edition)

I don't have a lot to say about the recent "resolution" to the fiscal cliff, largely because it resolved nothing and is, once again, merely a prelude to the next "fiscal crisis" that is mere weeks away. However, I thought that Tyler Cowen of the Marginal Revolution blog shared the most succinct (and sobering) summary of the entire fiscal cliff experience. From New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, it's your Quote of the Week.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"If a newly re-elected Democratic president can’t muster the political will and capital required to do something as straightforward and relatively popular as raising taxes on the tiny fraction Americans making over $250,000 when those same taxes are scheduled to go up already, then how can Democrats ever expect to push taxes upward to levels that would make our existing public progams sustainable for the long run?"
                                                     - Ross Douthat, New York Times

Indeed. Which of course just shows us that there is, ultimately, zero political will to address the problems about which I've spilled so much ink (okay, pixels) on this blog. If we can't raise revenue, then we can't fund programs, period, end of story. It's just a matter of when we choose to recognize this fact (or when the markets decide to recognize it for us, as is usually the reality when it happens elsewhere, and is almost assured given that politicians are already setting up to capitulate on the next crisis).

All of this means that charts like this one aren't likely to change any time soon, regardless of what some people might want to tell you:

Source: Bianco Research via Barry Ritholtz

But hey, at least the markets liked the deal, that must be good news, right? Uh, maybe. Or maybe this thing was just like every other piece of legislation out of Washington lately—hastily thrown together, not well-understood even by those who voted on it because they didn't bother to read it, and loaded up with all sorts of kickbacks and favors to the corporate elite that don't belong in there to begin with.

Business as usual in Washington, right? Good grief.

[New York Times]
(h/t Marginal Revolution)

Quote of the Week (Sexual Harassment Edition)

This week's Quote of the Week is presented here without comment, lest I say something that offends women, seeing as I live in a house with two of them (one big, one small). I'll just let this one speak for itself.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"The Iowa Supreme Court says a dentist did not commit sex discrimination when he fired an attractive female assistant he viewed as a threat to his marriage. The court ruled Friday that a boss can fire an employee he considers an 'irresistible attraction,' even if the employee has done nothing wrong. The decision is the first in Iowa, but in line with rulings elsewhere. Justices rejected a discrimination lawsuit filed by Melissa Nelson, who was fired by Fort Dodge dentist James Knight in 2010."
                                                 - Quad-City Times, via Associated Press

Okay, fine, I'll comment, but just for a second. For what it's worth, as a general rule, I think that people should be able to be fired for just about any reason, just because I think it's silly that nobody really has to provide reasons why they didn't hire anybody in the first place, but then they are expected to provide well-documented reasons why they did fire somebody, just because they made the initial decision to hire them.

It's basically your typical act of omission versus act of commission scenario, and I typically think that such distinctions have a tendency to become arbitrary and stupid. If we place restrictions on firing, then all we're really doing is making it less likely that anybody would ever want to hire anybody in the first place. And that's a lesson that France seems intent on learning the hard way. Let's not be like France, mkay?

Anyway, the dentist in question in this case is definitely a moron, and he is almost certainly guilty of sexual harassment and deserving of some type of punishment—via karma if not via the court system. However, in my semi-libertarian opinion, there is no reason that we need to place restrictions on discretionary hiring and firing decisions simply because of this guy's moron-itude. Being a moron (or a scumbag) is not, in general, an act that must be punishable under the law—I'll leave that punishment to the dentist's wife, who I'm quite certain is up to the task.

As for Ms. Nelson, why exactly would somebody want to work in an environment with a creepy-ass dentist who makes off-color sexual remarks in the first place? Her dismissal is probably for the best for just about everyone involved here, in my humble opinion. But hey, maybe I should've just not commented on this one, after all...

[Quad-City Times]

Top posts of 2012

Since it's that time of the year where everybody takes stock of things and mocks the Mayans and makes predictions for the next year and does whatever else it is that people like to do while nursing their egg nog hangovers, I thought I'd take a look back at The Year That Was here at the Crimson Cavalier, starting with a rundown of my most popular posts of the past 12 months.

So here are my Top 10 most-read pieces from 2012, which are, naturally, all over the map. None of these posts was anywhere close to becoming my most-read post of all time (that honor belongs to this post on globalization, followed closely by this George Carlin-inspired post and this post on discrimination), but a few of them definitely registered a bit of a rumble on the ol' Crimson Cavalier pageview seismometer.

Enjoy re-reading some of your favorites, and I'll do my best in the future to reproduce more of the good stuff you all like... whatever that is.

#1: Remembering the Dream Team (June 14)

It probably shouldn't be surprising that my most-read post of the year had to do with the (tape-delayed) Olympics, which dominated the news cycle for a few weeks back in the summer. On the 20th anniversary of the Dream Team, I shared some of my own memories while excerpting a GQ oral history of the squad.

#2: The changing business of education (May 9)

The runner-up post (with about half the pageviews of the champion, which means it's a distant second, but so be it) involved one of my favorite topics, education. Inspired by a very cool new program at Virginia Tech called the "Math Emporium", I shared some of my thoughts on the future of higher education in America.

#3: Eat More Chikin (at Wendy's?) (July 30)

I'm sure you all remember the flap surrounding Chik-Fil-A this summer, way back when Mitt Romney's Presidential campaign was just shifting from "suck" to "blow". I thought the controversy was incredibly overdone, and I thought that many people were far too self-congratulatory with respect to their boycotts of the fast food also-ran. I said so, in a pretty standard Crimson Cavalier rant.

#4: I'm too busy to write a blog post (July 16)

I'm too busy to write a blurb about this blog post. Just read it, alright? Or don't, if you're too busy. Either way, kudos to the Harvard Business Review for a well-written article, one that I briefly reviewed in this post.

#5: The carbon footprint of flowers (WTF??) (May 4)

With Mother's Day approaching, I decided to take a minute to make everybody think twice about sending flowers to their mothers. Why? Because I'm a jerk, obviously. Also, because it turns out that almost all of the flowers we buy in this country are shipped here from Latin America, and that therefore the flower industry has an incredibly large carbon footprint. How's THAT for irony? "Green" economics, indeed.

#6: Is it the weekend yet? (June 6)

I wrote this post on a Wednesday, so no, it most definitely was not the weekend. I might have had a drink that night anyway. Possibly.

#7: Bernanke's Terror Alert Scale (September 14)

I wrote this post in the immediate aftermath of the Fed's announcement of infinite "quantitative easing", a program that has had incredibly underwhelming results so far. That's about what I predicted on that day, and so I'm going to take a second here to pat myself on the back. While we're at it, keep your eye on this dynamic in 2013—I have a feeling it's going to have some serious economic relevance in the not-too-distant future.

#8: When hypocrisy is good business: "The Lorax" (March 2)

"The Lorax" could have been a cute little Dr. Seuss movie with a nice message about conservation, but instead it became a symbol of all that I hate about corporate hypocrisy. I borrowed from a delightfully vicious review of the movie by NY Times critic A.O. Scott, and I shared my own thoughts about the odd intersection (or clash) between morals and business.

#9: Clip of the Week (April 6)

I'd like to thank John O'Hurley (J. Peterman) for providing me with my most popular Clip of the Week ever—a promotional video for "Rangé" golf balls. Good stuff.

#10: The tail is still wagging the dog at UF (April 24)

Yes, another post on education, which makes two in my top 10. This one also involved collegiate athletics, another common topic here on the blog. The University of Florida made the incredibly bizarre decision to drop its ENTIRE computer science department, an area of education that should be expanding if anything. At the same time, they increased their athletics budget by more than $2 million, an increase that was greater than the entire C.S. department budget. Well played, UF. Well played. But next time, beat Georgia.

On prohibition (of guns)

Whenever I come across a politically charged issue like the one on gun control that has sprung up in the wake of the events in Newtown, I tend to take some time to properly synthesize my thoughts, so as to avoid speaking off the cuff and saying something un-careful that adds to the chorus of stupidity that typically surrounds these types of events and issues. Having now taken an appropriate amount of time to have done so, I'll now share my thoughts, hopefully in a manner that is both sensible and organized (rather than a rambling brain-dump).

Obviously (and mostly correctly), the tragedy in Newtown has sparked a significant wave of support for new gun control laws, or at least for a re-introduction of past gun laws that have since lapsed. When I try to assess the likely impact of such proposed laws, I think that it's always best to rely on the predictive power of analogies. In the case of guns, I think it's impossible to talk about any sorts of limitation or prohibition without first considering our nation's experience with the prohibition of alcohol, marijuana, and abortion—all things for which there is/was an intense societal desire, but also a significant social or moral concern. Suffice it to say, the experience of such prohibitions has been mixed at best. Unintended consequences have a tendency to crop up in strange and undesirable ways, much like in the case of bans on texting while driving.

The last thing we need is to institute a counterproductive law that ironically makes our problem worse, not better. History has shown that when people have an intense desire to possess or to do something, they typically will find a way. People and corporations are incredibly resourceful when they need to be, which of course is why we now have corn in our Coca-Cola.

But what concerns me more about the response to the Newtown incident isn't my suspicion that gun control laws would fail, but more that we are focusing on largely the wrong issues. While we can't know entirely what was going through Adam Lanza's head on the day that he decided to become a national pariah, we owe it to ourselves (and to the slain children) to try our best to understand, rather than to simply blame his tools and be done with it.

Ultimately, the laser focus on guns and gun control in the past few weeks has all the traditional markers of scapegoating. We have in front of us a very complex and uncomfortable issue, with many factors potentially playing a hand in ways that we may not fully appreciate. But instead of trying to unpack a large and messy issue, we instead focus on the easiest (or most convenient) explanation, and in doing so we rely on what is an overly simplistic narrative of What Happened That Day In Connecticut.

In the discussion on gun control, there is a serious issue of what is said versus what is left unsaid. What is largely left unsaid is our implicit assumption that a certain subset of Americans will always want to do great harm to other Americans, and that we must therefore act to minimize the damage that they can do. We ask very few questions as far as why those Americans must exist, or why they continue to do things like this at a rate that seems to be increasing by the day.

Is there something ill in our society that causes people to become so hopeless or disillusioned that they think these acts are the only way by which they can obtain any attention or fame? Are we doing a disservice to the mentally ill people in our society, ignoring them to the point that they begin doing desperate and irrational things? Could it even be that the drugs we use to try to treat these people's "symptoms" are doing more harm than good (unintended consequences, revisited)? All of these are relevant and important questions and discussions, and yet they have so far largely been drowned out by a chorus of "MORE GUN CONTROL NOW" demands from all corners of the country.

One of the most compelling ironies that I've come across in the past couple weeks came courtesy of the following tweet:

If u run onto a baseball field, TV won't show it, to dissuade copycats. If u kill kids? Anti-hero profiles for DAYS. #newtown @pattonoswalt
— Brian Farnham (@brifar) December 14, 2012

Indeed, this central irony of media coverage is both poignant and dangerous. If you mention the names "Dylan and Eric", most people in my generation will still know who you're talking about, even a decade and a half after the original incident. That's somewhat sick, and it's definitely part of the problem. For good or for bad, the individuals who shoot up schools become national celebrities, and everyone instantly knows who they are—it took mere minutes for the name "Adam Lanza" (well, Ryan Lanza at first, but I digress) to be known from coast to coast. For kids who feel small or hopeless or depressed, it doesn't take much for that kind of anti-hero worship to become incredibly alluring.

I think it's incredibly dangerous for us to singularly focus on gun control as the remedy to our current problem while ignoring the dynamics that I've (ever so briefly) mentioned in this post. Even if our country had no guns at all, it would still be possible for Timothy McVeigh to blow up a building with fertilizer and diesel fuel, and it would still be possible for the next Adam Lanza to emulate these Chinese men, who terrorized schools not with guns but with knives.

Ultimately, the longer this country goes on ignoring the more difficult and important questions in our society, the harder those issues will become to address in the future. It's basic kick-the-can behavior, which doesn't work any better in cases of mass murder and psychological distress than it does in the case of debt crises.

We often take it for granted that America is the greatest country in the world, but quite frankly, in many ways, it is far from it. In the greatest country in the world, Newtown shouldn't happen. In the greatest country in the world, we take care of all our citizens, BEFORE they get desperate and do crazy things, rather than waiting for a great tragedy to show our support (or condemnation). In the greatest country in the world, we try to rehabilitate the mentally ill, we don't just ostracize them and put them in a padded room. And in the greatest country in the world, we don't sit and stare while our suicide rate stagnates at roughly twice the rate of Spain, Italy, and the U.K.

In the greatest country in the world, we ask the tough questions, and we ask them early. Rather than shying away from uncomfortable discussions, we embrace them and attack them head-on, sensing an opportunity to make a great nation even greater. In the greatest country in the world, we don't ask how we can keep bad people from getting guns, we ask how we can keep from having "bad people" in the first place.

Incidents like the one in Newtown are unacceptable, but simply shrugging our shoulders and pretending that blaming guns is a sufficient response is even more unacceptable. The victims and their families deserve better than that, but we all stand ready to give them short shrift. Unfortunately, that's becoming the American way, and it's an awful, awful trend.

If we all accept on faith that gun control and gun control alone is the proper response to Newtown, then I can give you 100% assurance that there will be another Newtown in our not-too-distant future. And in the greatest country in the world, that's just not okay.

Concentrated benefits and dispersed costs

I know, that's the most exciting headline you've ever seen on this blog. But it's also one of the most important dynamics in American politics and economics, and it's one that dominates just about everything that comes out of Washington these days. Thanks to Alex Tabarrok of the Marginal Revolution blog, we've got a nice video that explains what it's all about, focusing on why there's corn syrup instead of sugar in our Coke bottles.



Simply put, the people (farmers) who want there to be corn syrup instead of sugar in our Coke have more to gain (or lose) than the rest of us, so they make the most noise, donate the most money, and generally spend the most time and effort making sure that the laws of the land are written in a way that benefits them, even if it's at the expense of the greater good. The rest of us tend not to have enough of a dog in the fight, so we generally won't take the time to fight back, even if we're aware of the issue at hand (which we often are not). The problem is, sooner or later these little things start to add up in a way that matters significantly to us, but only in aggregate.

This video also provides a valuable lesson on the typical behavior of large companies in response to changes in input cost structure. When one input in the product they create increases dramatically in price, these companies are typically very resourceful at finding ways to replace that input at a lower cost (but similar enough quality). That's how we end up with corn syrup in absolutely every food in the grocery store, that's how all of our manufacturing jobs get outsourced to China and Vietnam (no, it's not about "currency manipulation"), and it's also one of the primary factors holding our official "inflation rate" in check.

Inflation rates are only useful statistics if we assume that the goods we're measuring are 100% the same over time, which they rarely are. Coke is different now than it was 30 years ago (and frankly, even five years ago), and so too are cars, houses, clothing, electronics, and more. That's usually a good thing, but not always. "Low inflation" is not a win for us as consumers if it means that the quality of our products is degrading over time—unfortunately, that's exactly what's been happening right under our noses, with a huge assist from government policies.

Concentrated benefits and dispersed costs—it's great when you're the focus of the concentration, not so great when you're the one bearing the costs... and when those small dispersed costs start piling up, it starts to become a pretty big cost, doesn't it?

[Marginal Revolution]

Quote of the Week (Fertility Edition)

I definitely had at least half a mind to give this week's Quote of the Week to Chiefs quarterback Brady Quinn, who did an admirable job of distilling a horrific incident down to a useful message (without preaching or being trite or condescending, like some people). It's rare that you see an athlete being so frank and dropping their guard like Quinn did (it happened around five minutes into the press conference, which started out pretty slowly), and I salute him for it.

As he mused, "when you ask someone how they're doing, do you really mean it... and when you answer someone back, are you really telling them the truth?" I think Quinn is right to decry the shallowness of many (or most) interpersonal relationships in our social media-driven era, and his words can definitely give us all some food for thought.

But I came across another excerpt yesterday that was even more academically intriguing, if somewhat less poignant and powerful. Courtesy of Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen, and echoing some of the comments I made in this blog post last week, I give you the New York Times' Ross Douthat, who discusses the reasons for and potential impact of America's plummeting fertility rate:

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"There’s been a broader cultural shift away from a child-centric understanding of romance and marriage. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans told Pew that children were “very important” to a successful marriage; in 2007, just before the current baby bust, only 41 percent agreed... The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place."
                                            - Ross Douthat, New York Times

I think there's a lot of merit to Douthat's take on the matter. The decision to eschew having children is, in a sense, the pinnacle of short-term thinking (a dynamic which has clearly taken on a life of its own in recent generations). If we all made the decision to have no children, our society would (theoretically, anyway) disappear in a matter of decades. None of us would be here but for someone else's decision to procreate, and yet there is often no recognition of that fact when it comes time for us to make a similar decision.

The decision is, in fact, the ultimate indulgence of a rich and stagnant society, one that is made all the more possible and plausible by the emergence and standardization of birth control, the access to which the UN has bizarrely ruled a universal human right.

To be fair, for many people in my generation, the decision not to have children has been a direct by-product of the explosion of debt (student loans and other types) in recent decades, and in that respect it's a perfectly rational—yet still sub-optimal—decision. If you can't afford to have kids (or don't feel like you can), then you clearly shouldn't, lest those children be deprived or resented by their own parents.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting thought experiment to wonder what would happen if only the underprivileged people in the world (those who couldn't afford birth control, and therefore couldn't afford to decide not to have children) were procreating. What would the next generation look like? What would be the prospects for global economic growth? And what kinds of decisions would such a scenario lead governments and voters to make, if the rich and powerful had no direct connection to the next generation of humans?

I don't know the answers to all of these questions (especially since many of them are purely academic in nature), but I do know that those who have the weakest connection to the future are the least likely to make good decisions with respect to said future. And if we continue to make decisions that sacrifice the future to benefit today, then I'm pretty sure we're not going to like the future very much once we do get there.

[New York Times]
(h/t Marginal Revolution)

The "real" fiscal cliff

From Tyler Cowen at the Marginal Revolution blog, what he terms "the truly important news". I'll agree with his assessment.

Forget post-election dissection and the fiscal cliff, here is the stunner: 

The U.S. birthrate plunged last year to a record low, with the decline being led by immigrant women hit hard by the recession, according to a study released Thursday by the Pew Research Center. 

The overall birthrate decreased by 8 percent between 2007 and 2010, with a much bigger drop of 14 percent among foreign-born women. The overall birthrate is at its lowest since 1920, the earliest year with reliable records. The 2011 figures don’t have breakdowns for immigrants yet, but the preliminary findings indicate that they will follow the same trend. 

That’s the real fiscal cliff.  Yet The Washington Post reports that its most popular article today is “Starbucks’ new $7 coffee is its priciest ever."

Yeah, that's not good. As I mentioned on Twitter this morning, over the long run, without population growth there can be no economic growth. Worse yet, a steady decline in the ratio of non-working (retired) citizens to working age citizens means that there's virtually no way to keep Social Security solvent, or to have any hope of paying down our national debt.

Want to know why Japan's economy can't seem to get out of its own way? This is why:

Too few working people (we could also call them "taxpayers"), too many unproductive people to support, and not enough aggregate savings among the latter to support themselves without help from the former. That's a problem, and it's one that's difficult if not impossible to reverse.

When a population ages dramatically, in relative or absolute terms, that always creates issues from an economic standpoint. It's a simple problem, and yet it's one that no amount of modern economic complexity (or monetary policy) can overcome. As Tyler wrote, this is the real fiscal cliff.

[Marginal Revolution]

More stadium financing follies

I've written about the lunacy of publicly-funded sports arenas and stadia here before, and I think the issue deserves to be revisited given recent developments. On the one front, there is the city of Miami, which was taken to the cleaners by the disgrace that is the Miami Marlins franchise. Unfortunately for that city, their woes may just be beginning, as the Dolphins are also reportedly looking for public funding to fix their dilapidated home.

It would be easy to write this all off as Miami's loss, and theirs alone, except that it's not the case. When municipalities like these go into debt to fund stadium boondoggles, the whole country pays, as a recent Bloomberg article points out.

New York Giants fans will cheer on their team against the Dallas Cowboys at tonight’s National Football League opener in New Jersey. At tax time, they’ll help pay for the opponents’ $1.2 billion home field in Texas. 

That’s because the 80,000-seat Cowboys Stadium was built partly using tax-free borrowing by the City of Arlington. The resulting subsidy comes out of the pockets of every American taxpayer, including Giants fans. The money doesn’t go directly to the Cowboys’ billionaire owner Jerry Jones. Rather, it lowers the cost of financing, giving his team the highest revenue in the NFL and making it the league’s most-valuable franchise. 

“It’s part of the corruption of the federal tax system,” said James Runzheimer, 67, an Arlington lawyer who led opponents of public borrowing for the structure known locally as “Jerry’s World.” “It’s use of government funds to subsidize activity that the private sector can finance on its own.”...

Tax exemptions on interest paid by muni bonds that were issued for sports structures cost the U.S. Treasury $146 million a year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg on 2,700 securities. Over the life of the $17 billion of exempt debt issued to build stadiums since 1986, the last of which matures in 2047, taxpayer subsidies to bondholders will total $4 billion, the data show. 

Those estimates are based on what the Treasury could have collected on interest from the same amount of taxable bonds sold at the same time to investors in the 25 percent income-tax bracket, the rate many government agencies assume. In fact, more than half the owners of tax-exempt bonds pay top rates of at least 30 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So they save even more on their income taxes, a system that U.S. lawmakers of both parties and President Barack Obama have described as inefficient and unfair.

Yes, that's right, when tax-exempt municipal bonds are used to pay for these stadiums, that means that the FEDERAL government is effectively subsidizing these projects. So when the Cowboys build a stadium with "public" funds, that "public" isn't limited to the Dallas area—it includes the entire nation. This amounts to taxation without representation for those of us who don't get to enjoy the Cowboys' new monstrosity, and that used to be something that mattered in this country (but of course, doesn't any more).

Sure, we could try to argue that some of this comes out in the wash, because it's just a transfer from taxpayers to bondholders, and there is significant overlap between those two populations—it's just taxpayers stealing from themselves. But unless every taxpayer is also a municipal bondholder (and I'm at least one taxpayer who owns no munis), then this becomes a very serious constitutional issue, and yet one that is perpetually ignored by nearly everyone in the nation. I, for one, have no interest in paying more in taxes so that Jerry Jones can build a playground for the super-rich in Texas, but I was never afforded a say in the matter.

Ultimately, this trend of public financing of private enterprise must end in all its forms. There's no reason for taxpayers to be funding private business, in Miami, Dallas, or anywhere else. This is a long-running scam that has been run on Americans who love their sports (and teams) too much to say no to this extortion. We all must stand up and say that we are unwilling to pay for stadiums that we then must pay to enter—if it's a public facility, then we should have the right to do with it what we please. Otherwise, the Jerry Joneses of the world can figure out their own ways to build the things. I'm getting out of the stadium-building business... who's coming with me?

[Bloomberg]

Pay for Congressional performance?

Sheila Bair baffles me. Every time she starts making a ton of sense, the former FDIC head says or writes something else that comes across like low-grade satire, except I don't think it is. Her most recent piece for Fortune falls into the latter camp.

Will the elections bring about improvements in our increasingly dysfunctional government? I fear not. Successfully running for office these days is more about political fundraising and negative campaigning than about the art of governing. Only one in 10 Americans thinks Congress is doing a good job, and no wonder. Our economy is stuck in low gear, and our fiscal situation is precarious. How do we motivate our national leaders to deal with these problems? As with most organizations, it comes down to economic incentives. If our elected officials can keep their paychecks by being adept at fundraising and negative campaigning, then that is what they'll do. But if at least part of their pay is based on performance, maybe we could get them to focus on doing their jobs. Pay for performance has improved management in the private sector. Why not try it with the folks in D.C.? 

For instance, one-half of compensation for corporate directors is frequently paid in stock, which they must hold for several years. The idea is to align their economic incentives with the long-term profitability of the corporation. There is no stock ownership in the federal government, obviously, but we do issue a lot of debt (boy, do we ever). So here is an idea: Let's start paying members of Congress and the President half of their compensation in 10-year Treasury debt, which they must hold until maturity. Members of Congress make roughly $180,000, so under this proposal, they would get $90,000 in cash and $90,000 in 10-year Treasuries. (We would add a housing allowance, too, given the high cost of living in Washington.) For the President, it would be $200,000 cash and $200,000 in T-bonds. If the economy does well and if they get our fiscal house in order and institute pro-growth tax and spending policies, those 10-year bonds should hold their value. But if we continue our profligate ways, inflation spikes, and interest rates skyrocket, those bonds may end up being worth as much as the stuff Czar Nicholas issued shortly before the Bolshevik revolution (some of which I bought at a flea market and now use as wallpaper in the bathroom).

She keeps going with her proposal, but I refuse to further indulge her ramblings here. Realistically, the very premise of Bair's argument is fundamentally flawed.

"Pay for performance has improved management in the private sector," she writes. No, Sheila, it hasn't. Reams and reams of research have been produced which prove your argument wrong. What pay for performance tends to do, instead, is encourage leaders and executives to make company-betting moves which promise huge potential payoffs but equally large risks. If those risks pan out, the executive in question makes millions and retires happy, but if they don't, the whole company blows up and the manager walks away scot-free, moving on to the next gullible company to rinse and repeat (see: John Thain).

These schemes have led to an epidemic of short-termism on Wall Street in particular, where traders and executives have little interest in the firm's profitability beyond the next quarter or year. Making those stocks or options or bonds vest at a later date does little to change the underlying risk/reward dynamic from the standpoint of the executive. While things may be slightly different for Congressmen than for Fortune 500 CEOs, those differences aren't nearly as great as we would like them to be. The folks in Washington have already shown themselves to be experts at trading long-term security for short-term gain, and the last thing they need is another scheme from us that encourages them to do more of the same.

You see, even if our Congressmen (and women) were to blow up the whole country under Bair's proposal, they'd still be pulling in $90k a year (oh, and a housing allowance, of course), well above the national average. That's not exactly giving them the "skin in the game" that they might need in order to ensure that they don't screw things up terribly for the rest of us.

Worse still, the plan suffers from a serious flaw in design by tying compensation to a bond price rather than some other more tangible measure of actual long-term American prosperity. If our Congressmen suddenly own millions of dollars worth of U.S. government debt, then all that does is give them a huge incentive to encourage the clowns over at the Fed to keep on keeping on with their ridiculous quantitative easing, which sends bond prices skyrocketing (and yields plummeting) even while the fiscal state of the union deteriorates by the day.

The real flaw in Bair's argument, ultimately, lies in its presumption that Congressmen and Senators control bond prices and economic outcomes with their policies—they don't. The Fed controls these things, they have for decades, and that won't be changing any time soon, regardless of any "pay for performance" scheme that you want to put into place. Not until the voters force it to be so, that is.

The truth is, the only kind of "pay for performance" scheme that will ever work in a democracy is to vote the bums out when they screw over their constituents. That requires real, actual responsibility on the part of the voters, more than some lazy "autopilot" compensation scheme that won't work and represents a further abdication of the voters' responsibility to hold their elected officials accountable.

Now as ever, we as voters get the government that we deserve. If we refuse to hold our Congressmen accountable with our votes on Election Day, then we can't expect the mess to sort itself out just because they own a few more government bonds then they used to. Bair should know better than this, and yet somehow she doesn't. Unless, of course, this is satire, in which case the joke is, once again, on me.

D.C. politicians have in large part ascended to their lofty positions by being experts at gaming whatever system has been placed before them. Unless a pay-for-performance scheme is meticulously designed to avoid any unintended consequences, you can bet that they'll find the loopholes and design ways to maximize their compensation, regardless of the externalities that may result from their actions. What a joke of an idea. Our politicians need fewer systems and schemes to try to game, not more. Go back to the drawing board, Sheila.

[Fortune]

Quote of the Week (Election Edition)

I'll make this one quick and just throw out some interesting words to ponder, on this Presidential Election Day. I don't agree with everything written in Douglas French's epic rant, but I do think there is some serious food for thought in there.

No matter how things break tonight, there will be a lot of very happy people, a lot of very angry people, and a lot of people like me, wishing that it didn't have to be like that. When a nation is so bitterly divided that it forgets that we're all in this together, I think that's unequivocally a negative thing. But so be it.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"There are thousands of elections every year. Political positions from constable to governor are elected constantly. So with all of these layers of democracy — this great thing that America spends so many lives and so much money exporting — is America freer? With this constant turnover of political blood, is business allowed to operate unfettered? After all, we are led to believe democracy is synonymous with freedom. No democracy, no freedom.

America was attacked on Sept. 11 because they hate us for our freedoms, we’re told. America is so free it has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 750 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. More than 2.3 million people are locked up, and many more millions are on probation. Is this the upside of this great thing — democracy?"
                                                - Douglas French, The Daily Reckoning

Interesting stuff to think about, either way, and similar to this bit from Stephen Fry, which will be this post's parting shot.


Get out there and vote today, regardless—apathy may feel good, but it does nothing to help any of our issues.

[Daily Reckoning]

Voters are idiots, apparently

While many of us in America take our duties as voters and citizens very seriously (or at least think we do),  educating ourselves on the issues of the day and then trying our best to make the right decisions, many more of us... don't (emphasis mine).

Recent research has revealed that voter irrationality may be more arbitrary than we think. And in a razor-thin election just enough irrationality can make all the difference. Just how irrational are voters? It is statistically possible that the outcome of a handful of college football games in the right battleground states could determine the race for the White House. 

Economists Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Mo make this argument in a fascinating article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They examined whether the outcomes of college football games on the eve of elections for presidents, senators, and governors affected the choices voters made. They found that a win by the local team, in the week before an election, raises the vote going to the incumbent by around 1.5 percentage points. When it comes to the 20 highest attendance teams—big athletic programs like the University of Michigan, Oklahoma, and Southern Cal—a victory on the eve of an election pushes the vote for the incumbent up by 3 percentage points. That’s a lot of votes, certainly more than the margin of victory in a tight race. And these results aren’t based on just a handful of games or political seasons; the data were taken from 62 big-time college teams from 1964 to 2008. 

The good news, we suppose, is that sports really can cheer us up and make the world seem like a brighter place. The sports fan is left happier and more satisfied all around, not just on the gridiron. When you are feeling upbeat and happy, you feel more satisfied with the status quo in general. And feeling satisfied with the status quo makes you more likely to vote for the incumbent politician, even if that’s totally irrational. 

The study’s authors control for economic, demographic, and political factors, so the results are much more sophisticated than just a raw correlation. They also did a deeper analysis that took into account people’s expectations. It turns out that surprise wins are especially potent, raising local support for incumbent politicians by around 2.5 percentage points.

Oh, boy... taking a look at the schedule (and the electoral map), that means we should probably be keeping an eye on Missouri-Florida, UVA-NC State, Virginia Tech-Miami (not sure what to make of that one), and perhaps most importantly Ohio State-Illinois.

I've covered voter irrationality—and self-deception—before (here and here, mostly), but this takes that to a whole new level. It's one thing to vote based on contradictory principles or on platforms and ideologies that don't make a whole lot of sense. It's another thing entirely to walk into a voting booth and vote for the incumbent just because you're happy that day. But hey... that's democracy, right?

Now, for today's final word on voter idiocy, we'll turn to our friends at Freakonomics, who shared a fantastic letter that was sent to economist Bryan Caplan by a former (and, for our purposes, anonymous) Virginia state senator. I think it sums things up pretty nicely.

"I do want to thank you for confirming by your research that my ideas about the stupidity of voters is a valid thought." Pretty sure that's not exactly the sentiment we hope to hear from our elected officials. But given our level of competence with respect to investments, it's hardly surprising.  

[Slate]
[Freakonomics]

Clip of the Week (Election edition)

Alright, time for Clip of the Week. I really wanted to give the Washington Nationals some love here, but their Game 5 choke in the NLDS (and... this) made me back off of that decision. Nevertheless, this and this are some pretty cool sports videos by any measure.

I also want to give some love to Felix Baumgartner, who jumped from the edge of space in the coolest way possible (or maybe this is cooler). There's some other random stuff out there as well this week, including this Pixar short with the Toy Story characters and this awesome SNL parody of the iPhone5.

But I feel like going the political route this week, so here are two fantastic election-related clips from a couple of late night hosts doing what they do best. I give you Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, with your politically charged co-Clips of the Week.

No President has ever been elected...

Here's a fun bit of Presidential election trivia for you, courtesy of the awesome nerds at XKCD. This one comes with the added bonus that it throws in a little bit of a statistics lesson. Right up my alley... (right-click and open in a new tab if the cartoon doesn't blow up big enough for you just by clicking).

Quote of the Week

This week's Quote of the Week is going to be a bit of a cheat, in that it's really a Clip of the Week. I'm not going to do any setup of this quote (short of posting up this blog post, which is particularly apt), except to say that this is actor Craig T. Nelson, it's three years old, and yet I just saw it for the first time and think it's terrific.

I'll be referring back to this Quote in a blog post that I intend to write tomorrow, but for now, enjoy the awesomeness.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"We are a capitalistic society. Okay, I go into business, I don't make it, I go bankrupt. They're not gonna bail me out. I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No." 
                                             - Craig T. Nelson

Simply stunning ignorance. Amazing work.

Quote of the Week (Paul Ryan edition)

Alright, time to jump into things post-Labor Day. I hope you're all enjoying your fall, even though it won't "officially" start for a couple more weeks. It's football season, so it's fall, simple as that.

Of course, it's also an election year, which means that fall is going to be... just mind-numbingly annoying. I'm going to try my best to ignore the majority of the political noise over the next couple of months, because so much of it is specifically designed to inflame and distract and do anything but talk about the actual issues which are plaguing our country—issues which our politicians refuse to address, and for which voters refuse to hold our politicians accountable—but I digress. Wait, where was I?

So at any rate, while I'm going to try to ignore most of the political noise, this week's Quote will indeed be somewhat political in nature. No, I'm not going to quote Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, even though it would've been incredibly easy to do so (a perfect example from Stewart: "Do you know how hard it is to get money down in Tampa that doesn't have body glitter on it?"... you see, it's funny because Tampa is loaded with strip clubs). Instead, I'm going to let Paul Ryan do what apparently comes naturally to him: tell a lie. Without further ado...

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I hurt a disc in my back, so I don't run marathons anymore... I had a two hour and fifty-something [personal best]... I was fast when I was younger."
                                     - Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan

Wow. That is fast. That's a sub-7 minute mile pace, sustained for a whole marathon. I'm impressed. That's not easy.

You see, when Romney chose Ryan to be his running mate, it seemed to be a solid, safe choice. Ryan had built a reputation on being/pretending to be tough on budgetary issues, and that's an issue that's seeming to resonate with voters this year (which I consider a positive, even if I think neither candidate is prepared to honestly do anything about it). Perhaps more importantly, Romney seemed to be avoiding the Sarah Palin landmine that exploded on John McCain four years ago—Ryan wasn't the type to say anything stupid, or get his name in the headlines, or anything like that. Hell, I'd even (sorta) praised the guy here on my blog once, and that's not easy for me to do. And hey, he's young and athletic, too!

But... um... whoops. You see, Paul Ryan never broke 3 hours in a marathon. He never even broke 4 hours. His best time was a 4:01 (not bad, just not overwhelmingly impressive), which just so happens to be about two minutes slower than Sarah Palin's personal best. That hour difference amounts to more than two minutes per mile, which is an obviously significant amount.

Could Ryan have just randomly screwed up here? Sure, it's possible, if not particularly probable for anyone who's spent more than a minute of their lives training for a marathon (believe me, I'd remember if I'd broken 3 hours up in Boston a couple of years ago).

But as I remarked on Twitter over the weekend, when you lie for a living, sometimes it's hard to know where the truth ends and fiction begins. And for Paul Ryan, it seems like lying is just quite simply what this guy does. To wit, after his incredibly misleading convention speech, none other than FOX FREAKING NEWS remarked that Ryan's speech "was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech." Um... yikes.

So, congratulations Mitt Romney. Your "uncontroversial" pick for running mate has already managed to put his foot in his mouth on repeated occasions, lying in a manner that has made even Fox News blush. That's not easy.

Hey, Ron Paul, you doing anything this November?