Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just this past week announced the details of the Obama Administration’s Department of Defense budget. For once, it isn’t the size of the budget that has made a lot of waves, but instead the details of the budget. Gates and Obama want to radically restructure the military. And while I disagree with a few of the details, in general they are right-on. Here’s a breakdown of the winners and losers of the proposed budget.
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Apr 092009
This is the bread of affliction, which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt.
For those of you who aren’t Jewish, the above phrase will be said at millions of Passover Seder’s tonight, as it has on the first night of Passover for thousands of years. It refers to Matzah – an unleavened cracker that is the only bread that Jews are allowed to eat for the next 8 days. Passover celebrates the Jewish People’s escape from slavery in Egypt. And to appreciate the joys of freedom, during Passover Jews forgo some of it. By restricting what we eat, we come to realize how lucky we are to not have such restrictions during the rest of the year.
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Apr 082009
I remember watching the news, it must have been around the year 2000, and seeing several economist-pundits discussing the “new economy”. The general agreement on the round-table that day, with only one dissenter, was that the United States had entered into a post-cycle economy due to the technological boom of the 1990s and that the normal rules regarding the cyclical nature of inflation, unemployment, and interest rates no longer applied. The high-tech bubble burst less than a year later. Ten years earlier, conventional wisdom among many pundits was that due to Japan’s trade practices and business culture, the United States would not be able to compete with the Japanese for global economic dominance. That was right before the Japanese economy collapsed. In the summer of 2007, as more and more economists and news organizations were expressing concern over the housing bubble and what looked like an impending credit crisis, I remember Neil Cavuto on his “business” show on Fox chastising the media for their nay-saying and pointing to the steady growth of the stock market as indication of the fundamental soundness of the American economy. Within six months the economy had lost 40% of it’s value.
Economic predictions are notoriously bad. The truth is that economies swing back and forth due to an intricate combination of factors which we are only beginning to understand–and one of those factors is public perception and confidence which we may never fully be able to understand. That being said, it is possible to identify the really bad predictions.
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Rest easy, America. We know that the auto industry is in turmoil, the economy is leaking both jobs and money, the health care system is broken, our educational system is in need of overhaul, and our fiscal future is in doubt. But at least Congress is acting in a bipartisan way to fix our most important problems.
Problems like this one, which are so shocking, so outrageous, so unpredictable as to boggle the mind. In this case, Senators Grassley (R-IA) and Mikulsky (D-MD) have uncovered, I’m sure through the tireless work on their part, that a couple dozen federal employees working at the National Science Foundation have, over the last decade or so, been viewing pornography on their work computers. And to think: some of the money used by the grants that those computers assisted in distributing might some day be used to study children! Continue reading »
In an internet Q&A with President Obama last week, he was asked about the beneficial effects on the economy and/or fiscal health of the nation if marijuana were legalized and taxed. I’ve seen this argument before, so I thought I might run through some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see if there is any merit to this argument.
Let’s focus on the fiscal aspects of things, as I’m not sure how to even begin to tackle the broader issue of how legalization would effect the economy at large. So the question is this: could legalizing marijuana be a fiscal boon for the federal government?
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