Taxes kill: Medical Device edition.
Paul Krugman: Keep kicking that “austerity” can. He’s pulling two slights of hand here. First, it’s that he’s using semantics to suggest massive declines in GDP, particularly given what we now know about the multipliers. Second, it’s been “not the right time” since I’ve been a minted economist, going on close to a decade. Keep tabs on this to see when he agrees that it’s a fine time to get our fiscal house in order.
Remember when you could get a “free” Boba-Fet action figure by mailing in some receipts? Neither do I. But here are a bunch more mail-in classics.
Los Angeles government schools “misuse” $170 million in funds intended for childrens’ meals. What a bunch of thugs. Quote of the day on this one:
The most maddening part, and the part that is important to recall the next time any school officials argue that they need more money to provide better meals, is how they managed to conserve the money:
The state Senate report concluded that the eight California school districts examined dramatically understaffed school cafeterias and tended to serve processed foods rather than more expensive fresh foods. Consequently, they were able to hoard large sums of federal and state student meal money that they then diverted to illegal uses, the report said.
You can read the whole report here (pdf). Santa Ana Unified and Baldwin Park Unified were notably running huge surpluses in their food programs while this was going on.
I am sure nutties will be coming out of the woodworks to blame the first major winter storm of the year on Climate Change. They should remember that it used to snow 100 years ago if I recall correctly. Oh, they might read this too. But hey, who needs “peer reviewed science” to form a “scientific consensus?” (there are of course other papers with different results, don’t hold your breath waiting for the nutties to cite them).
The longest 4 to 6 weeks of my life was spent awaiting the arrival of Boba Fett. During this time, some poor kid choked on the rocket fired from his backpack and ruined it for everyone (I’m pretty sure global warming caused this, we just didn’t know it at the time). Even without the working launcher, that action figure was still the baddest toy ever made.
I am sick of this “worst economy since the Great Depression” line. Anybody who says that does not remember Jimmy Carter, who handed Ronald Reagan a big recession. Nor do they recall that Clinton handed over a recession to GWB in 2001. Nor do they mention that the GHWB recession ended in 2000, when Clinton was campaigning on the bad economy and suggesting tax cuts, and reminding everybody that GHWB had caved in to George Mitchell.
Moreover, Krugman fails to mention that cuts are measured from the federal baseline, similar to the same system boards of companies that are managed for the sake of the managers. One big madhouse run by the inmates.
If 2+ feet of snow were to fall on Florida it might be a big deal, not the case with New England. In fact, there’s only a couple of states where an event like that would be considered impossible. Parts of Arizona and California get a lot of snow, as do the higher elevations in places like North Carolina and Tennessee. And it’s yet to begin snowing on Harvard Yard.