California budget talks collapse

It is on the issue of redevelopment where Republicans look the worst. Brown wanted to terminate redevelopment agencies and funnel their $1.7 billion revenue into more useful purposes. Chris Norby of Fullerton was the only Assembly Republican to vote against what he calls "the most wasteful," fraudulent and abusive arm of government.

All sides fumbled. Republicans failed to compromise and they failed to let voters bring clarity on state spending. Democrats kept arguing for letting the voters decide - but only on taxes, not pension reform or spending.

With polls indicating that the Brown ballot measure would tank, state pols in both parties had little incentive to push for a deal that couldn't win. SF gate

Anti-democracy from the left

A half-century later, the District of Columbia’s population, estimated in the new census at 601,723, is larger than Wyoming’s and only slightly smaller than Vermont’s. Yet Washingtonians still have no meaningful voice in Congress and lack full authority over their own affairs. A Brainless Kate Masur at the NY Times

Kate sweetheart, California has 30 million people and gets only two Senators. Kevin Drum picked up on this. It is amazing that the left has no respect for a fair democracy.

DC can have all the statehood they want, and so can California, Texas, Florida and New York.  Use my proposal, get another 20 Senators to pass around and lets break up the big states. California should get six new Senators, at a minimum. Let's make the Senate a fairly representative body, or alternatively, lets default on the federal debt and force the issue.

The NY Times needs to go out of business. 

Kate wrote this book:
“An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C.”

Yet when I look at my federal taxes in/spending out; I see that DC Residents get about $5.50 back for every dollar they put in. In other words, DC residents are on the congressional gravy train.

I think the correct answer is residents of DC have figured out how to make Senators from big states stand out in a crowd, they give money to DC residents. Babs Boxer, my own Senator, is very generous with our federal tax dollars, giving nearly 25% of it away to wealthier citizens, just to show off I guess.

The answer to Babs is to crowd here back into her own state of San Francisco, and let the rest of California have their own Senators. Is having to live with Babs in DC worth the pride of a whole Sunny California? What is the worship for a state that deliberately bankrupted itself? Break up California into four separate states, really folks.  We suffer a brainwashing from early childhood about these dopey states.

You know what drives information technology?  Nuttiness.  There is a huge payoff when someone can grab the latest information tech and report on obvious nuttiness.  We are nutty in our love for states.  What makes California? Some idiot named John Fremont and his role in the Civil War.   Kate is nutty. Keynesians are nutty.

Like oil shortages.  Consider.  There are at most four or five major inputs to the economy. What input would money measure with the most accuracy?  The input that is short.  There is only so much correlation coefficient between money and the four or five important inputs.  Well over 90% of the available correlation coefficient ties the  deflated dollar to oil import prices.

Whoops

The webosphere is talking about badly reported statistics from the BEA,via a blog post by Michael Mandel.

He points out something we have noticed, the necessity of deep downward revisions after the first estimate of nominal GDP output. If we look at the crash, a lot of intermediate businesses exited the field, and the ratio of consumer prices to producer prices went way up; business inputs dropped in price faster than we expected. So during the post crash era, the BEA underestimated the price drop for intermediate goods and and assumed the gains after the crash came from productivity gains.

Calculated risk twice noticed the downward revisions to GDP. The economy changed state, and the BEA uses the older state model for the new economy. Keynesians pull the same stunt.

What happened was not a collapse of the retail consumer, but a collapse of intermediate producers, leaving the field with much fewer suppliers. With the contracted supply chain, gains along the chain appear impressive. But the rank order in the channel, being reduced, means that the sum(n*log(n)) is smaller because n has dropped, fewer steps in the production chain.

We do not have intermediate solutions when we drop rank, the BEA assumes we do.  The result, to make matters simple, is that the BEA assumes a smaller amount of volatility, and ascribes a temporary inventory recovery to real growth. Inevitably, the BEA has to issue a downward revision.

The economy has and is continuing to contract.  I keep pointing out that M1 Velocity continues to drop, and the gain from specialization (PPI/CPI) have gone back to previous, and terrible, values.   We are going to drop rank one more time, have a bit of a Double Dip.     

My senator actually listens to Schumer

Schumer instructed the group, made up of Sens. Barbara Boxer of California, Tom Carper of Delaware, Ben Cardin of Maryland and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, to tell reporters that the GOP is refusing to negotiate.

Mine would be Babs. We only get two Senators for our 53 districts, and we have to pick a bozo that takes orders from New York! California is doomed.

How's my doftware coming, you ask?

Well, the thing can save and restore DOM trees at will.  It re-attached the recovered DOM tress to part of the current document,. That kind of retrieval from screen components from database is something new. As long as the web page has properly marked cut and paste connection points, then the user can alter the web page almost instantaneously.  I am mainly testing the thing, and looking at various dom trees, how they are laid out.

John McCain, King of the world

“To say regime change is not going to take place by force I certainly can’t agree with it. [Gadhafi’s] a danger to the world, and the longer he stays in power the more dangerous he becomes.” Mr. McCain said.

So how did Arizona become colonial master of Africa? Nearly 4 million people in Arizona determine the political arrangement of Africa. Where did they get all this power?   It might be the whiteness, look at the man.  Anybody that white would seem ghostly to an African.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) chickens out

Te man is too timid to handle the three weeks budget cycle. The Senators like big autopilot deficits, it gives them time to pontificate.

I hereby file another New Patent

The road priority alarm system.
It notifies the driver of any vehicle if it violates a high speed lane. High speed lanes allow speeds up to 100 MPH, with lane guided vehicles. Human guided vehicles disallowed.

I patent the idea that people should be warned not to go some places, while in their cars.

New Englanders

Let them have their own nation. Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, Massachussets, Maine, Upper New York. Their own regional bank. Make a deal. They can have ten Senators, and 4% of the federal debt.

Look at the data

Seriously, its all over the web, in fascinating detail. Hence, I think,we are a bit more accurate. So, I'm thinking, we can be a bit more dub-divided in our distribution networks. We get that classical Marxist skew, an unbalance between the new knowns and institutions.

The driver? Seasonal change in Northern climes. When seasons change on regular patterns in extremes, there is a much higher yield on lightweight transport,hence information networks.

Google Chrome and allow access to local files

Their solution works well for me, I set my Google Chrome command line variable in the Windows icon thingy. But Chrome always wants human verification,a very good solution.

Every browser has is advantages, I like the Chrome debugger toolset.

Snappy menus

<select id='commands' style ="width: 90px" >
      <option  onmouseup = "execLevel(this.value)">dir</option>
      <option  onmouseup = "execLevel(this.value)">init</option>
      <option  onmousedown = "execLevel(this.value)">sql</option>
      <option  onmousedown = "execLevel(this.value)">list</option>
      <option  onmouseup = "execLevel(this.value)">clear</option>
      <option  onmouseup = "execLevel(this.value)">drop</option>
      <option  >table</option>
      <option  >macro</option>
      <option  onmouseup = "execLevel(this.value)">test</option>
      <option  onmouseup = "execLevel(this.value)">hello</option>
</select>

But it only works cleanly in opera,near as I can tell. But it is quick to the user, drop down and click.

Descending a Dom tree and making table records.

function descend(xml) {
 function descendnew(xml,body) {
 
var r=[];

if(recNode(xml,r)) {
  element = newRow('TD',r);
  body.appendChild(element);
  if(xml.attributes) {
    var len = xml.attributes.length;
    for(var i=0; i < len;i++)
       descendnew(xml.attributes[i],body);
    }

  if(xml.childNodes) {
    count++;
    var len = xml.childNodes.length;
    for(var i=0; i < len;i++) {
      descendnew(xml.childNodes[i],body);
 
 }
    count--;
    }
}
else {
  alert('rejected node');
   return 0;
 }
return 1;
}

In the the end, the routine ends up with a second Dom tree, an html row version of the standard Dom node, with appropriate header names. It was sort of fascinating,and still is, to reverse engineer all the rules of Dom attributes.

So I go from Dom tree to and from record format using a standard record definition for a node:   'Type','Self','Span','Parent','Name','Value', my best guess of a Dom node. The Self and Span pointers are reletavie nesting containers as in this article, by Hillyer.

At the end of the chain, the web publishers has access to simple sql syntax inside his document, for general queries on XML databases.

Harless gets this right

 inflation has nothing to do with how much groceries and gasoline you can afford. Inflation is a pattern of increase in the general price level. What matters for affording stuff is a relative price, not the general price level.His Blog

But by the same reasoning. complaints about inflation are harmless, hence I rarely complain about the Fear of Inflation.

I talk about the Money Illusion. What it is really, is the Channel Bandwidth of the economy. The economy generally operates with a six month inventory cycle on the shortest end, our bandwidth is 2 Hz. Money to me is the banker's yield curve, the economy's best estimate of required reserves to avoid inventory shortfalls. The economy is always right, that is the best Macro strategy. The banker's yield curve is very lightweight, but still 2 Hz.

When the economy is always right, I mean, the economy computes on a positive definite finite graph. That is a simplification, but a good one. The economy does not plan losses, and it seeks minimum redundancy distribution.. Some economists are searching for gravity, hence the Great Exogeneous. They get stuck. I like the economists who are just curious.

Norquist lis a communist

I was disappointed this morning to read an article … in which you were implicated as parties to a bipartisan budget deal containing a net tax increase Bruce Bartlett

Like Reagan, Norquist likes Big Government, he just likes a different Big Government. To get smaller government one has to raise its price. Remember the old refrain, you tax something and you get less of it? That is the idea, get less government, Unfortunately, Norquist, like the Koch brothers, like Billy Kristol never wanted small government.

I put Norquist in the same camp as Koch, Reid and Yglesias. All of these groups are fighting for more of their kind of government. My own view: As long as mal democracy prevails in DC, we need less DC and more Periphery, I don\'t care whose government we cut, as long as DC gets cut.

PS: Bruce Bartlett is beginning to take the lead in common sense.  I wish he would start going after Senate Mal-distribution.

Vermont declares war on Connecticut

According to Fox News, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) commented today on the situation in Libya and what he hopes to hear from the President tonight regarding military action in the country.

All together, these two states with their grand total of five Congressional districts will determine who gets into a war with the other 400 Congressional districts. I suggest we have these two states simple go warring on each other.

Senator Jerry Moran and his four Congresional districts

Intend to keep the Senate feet in the fire:

“Americans are looking for leadership in Washington to confront the problems of today, not push them off on future generations,” Moran, a freshman senator who previously served in the House for seven terms,wrote in the March 22 letter. “To date, you have provided little or no leadership on what I believe to be the most important issue facing our nation – our national debt. With no indication that your willingness to lead will change, I want to inform you I will vote ‘no’ on your request to raise the debt ceiling.”

This Senator represents the same number of people as Reid. I have no reason to listen to either, they can fight it out in the Senate. The House is passing budgets, the Senate isn't.

HTY Senatus

Reid doesn't like three weeks budget schedules

Reid reiterated his argument on the Senate floor this afternoon. “On our side of the negotiating table, we’ve made a proposal. That proposal makes significant cuts, but will not hurt our fragile recovery.”

Here Reid lies. The Senate has not passed a three week budget, none, zero zip. What Reid wants is for the Senate to go back on autopilot, but that is not going to happen. Reid is caught with a mal-proportioned Senate which gives him extraordinary power, he refuses to give that up and thus he is stuck with a three week budget cycle.

Stiglitz gets it wrong

Overwhelmingly, the deficit increase has been caused by the enormous shortfall between the economy’s potential and actual output. Even as growth has resumed, the “output gap”—reflecting in high unemployment—has persisted.

Unemployment is accurate, the emratio is now stable, exactly where the economy wants it. It is Stiglitz who is inaccurate:

With monetary policy demonstrably ineffective in pulling us out of our malaise, fiscal policy is only recourse to putting America back to work.

We are back at work. What we suffer from is Stiglitz and his crew wanting central government to force a different economy upon us, an economy we do not choose.

Selling Congressional guarantees

Not too long ago, during the depths of the global crisis, the finance industry was on the brink of collapse. How times have changed.

Friday’s revisions to U.S. gross domestic product contained news on fourth-quarter profits. Top-line, or pretax, operating profits economywide hit a record high at the end of 2010. All of the gain was in the financial sector. WSJ Reporting

What value added is the financial industry providing? Government guarantees that Congress will always cover the Treasury debt. Foreign lenders know America is inflating part of the trade deficit, and they include that loss in their calculations. They are once again fooled by the illusion that this partial default will be smooth, but we know that economists always get the math wrong. The partial default on our foreign borrowings will be sudden, and taxpayers assigned to cover the costs. But taxpayers and voters are learning, from the example of Ireland and Iceland, that we can give sudden haircuts. When the haircuts come, the financial industry will once and crash badly. The economists will assert heteroskedacity, and claim innocence.

If you like large error bounds

And lousy correlation coefficients, then the Modern Money Theorists are right.  We can regulate money with printing and taxes.  Unfortunately, 90% of the economy has much better estimates of taxes and printing then the MMT folks.  The economy figures this stuff out before taxes go haywire.  The economy is much more accurate about itself than Martin Wolf, Paul Krugman or the MMTs.  If you want to be a good economist, I suggest you would have at least the same accuracy as the economy.

How can we have an economic theory that depends on economic agents reading our columns? I get that entanglement is part of economics, the same as in physics. But it is too far fetched to go from a NYT op ed to the demand for eggs. We suffer the same problem we had in the Great Depression, economic pundits running around thinking the newspaper rules the roost while the economy had moved on to broadcast radio.  The economy lives on information, suggest the economists keep up.

Krugman and bad math

But when you cut the price of everything — which is more or less what happens when wages fall across the board — there’s nothing else to substitute away from.

Yes, economics textbooks typically show a downward-sloping “aggregate demand curve”. But the reasons for that curve’s downward slope aren’t the same as for your ordinary demand curve. It’s a process that works like this: lower prices -> lower demand for money -> lower interest rates -> higher spending. And that process doesn’t operate when, as is currently the case, short-term interest rates (which are the ones that matter for money demand) are zero. At the NYT again.

Krugman executing bad math again and relying on the so called Money Illusion.

The yield curve is the economy's best estimate of reserves required to prevent short falls. If we cannot substitute away from anything, then our required reserves of real goods remains the same, the yield curve does not adjust, it is a ratio. I don't care what the price of eggs are at the retail level, if no substitution take place, then the price of retail eggs retains the same factor as the wholesale price of a case of eggs.

Krugman relies on money illusion, the Keynesian thingy. Unfortunately, we have had an information revolution, and when the Fed thinks we are  in the age of television, but that age left about ten years ago. Hence, it is most likely that Krugman and the Fed suffer from the illusion, not the economy.

He gets Yglesias to believe the horse pucky, but we can expect no better from a Harvard graduate.  It is usually the economists who suffer the Money Illusion, the economy gets it by definition.

Martin Wolf is losing credibility

Our arguments about the US federal budget are now all about deficits and debt: the effect of the budget on the budget. We are cutting government spending with little thought to the value of the public services forgone, and no thought at all to the effect on production, jobs and incomes. He says.

He is wrong and simply engages in wishful thinking on behalf of who knows. If we didn't have a budget crisis then we wouldn't have the Senate on a 3 week budget cycle. If we didn't have a crisis, then John Lockyer in California wouldn't be warming up the laser Printer. If we didn't have a crisis then my own county of Fresno would not be preparing for a near term bankruptcy.

Let's try an experiment. Let's not make a budget, let's have the Senate go back to its traditional role of declaring pompous postulates and making war. Let us see what happens on Apr 9.

What is Martin Wolf's point here? That he is not a member of Congress and he likes to write delusional articles for the FT Times. I would rather listen to the elected officials who actually make the budget, they , not Martin, determine if there is a budget crisis.

Jeff Sesions, Big Government Republican

Sessions was ranked by National Journal as the fifth-most conservative U.S. Senator in their March 2007 Conservative/Liberal Rankings.[15] He backs conservative Republican stances on foreign policy, taxes, and social issues. Wiki

This guy was part of the deficit ridden, Big Government Bush administration. His is a Reagan supporter and can take personal responsibility for over $8 trillion, or half of the Congressional debt. He has no business talking about small government.

Oil prices looking stable

Antiplanner is wrong, I think

The truth is that gas taxes don’t work any more and really haven’t worked very well for several decades. The only reason we use gas taxes to pay for roads is because collection costs were low compared with tolls. Now that we have the technologies to collect tolls or vehicle-mile fees at a reasonably low cost (and without necessarily invading people’s privacy), we should make the switch.Talking about road use fees.

No, gas taxes most closely represent use of the actual road. Gas is energy and represents the cost of moving mass over roads, and correctly represents the wear and tear. Gas is also proportional to volume moved, hence gas taxes fairly represent the space used.

Finally, let me point out that the technology that measures miles can also measure gasoline, they are both digitized within the car.

Technology can be used to measure anything,  if it has a measurement, technology is there.  Cars have the  technology, hell, my television and toaster have the stuff.

When do we want to measure mileage?  When we are dealing with drive by mile insurance, or very congested conditions.  However, given that the technology can also measure mass moved, directly, we can easily compute wear and tear on road use by converting from miles driven to asphalt worn.

The Telegraph hammers Choo Choo

The case against the high-speed line is, by contrast, widely appreciated. It will run through areas of outstanding natural beauty, spoiling them forever. At a time of painful cuts elsewhere, spending such a large sum on a single project that will only benefit a portion of the country is a criminal waste of scarce resources. We don’t say that the case against the high-speed link is right – only that the case for it has not yet been effectively made. If the project is not to be perceived as another state-sponsored white elephant, that case has to be spelt out very clearly to the people who will end up paying for it: ordinary taxpayers across Britain.Telegraph

f anything represents the peculiar delusions of Obama, it has to be Choo Choo.

We have a new Ben quote

an important part of the effect of oil price shocks on the economy results not from the change in oil prices, per se, but from the resulting tightening of monetary policy

Clearly evidence of the delusional effects of entanglement. a moral hazard of the worst kind. But Ben, in his environment, is only surrounded by the idea that money makes the world. If he thought otherwise, he would cause hysteria around Wall Street.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=an+important+part+of+the+effect+of+oil+price+shocks+on+the+economy+results+not+from+the+change+in+oil+prices%2C+per+se%2C+but+from+the+resulting+tightening+of+monetary+policy&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=

So far google has a half million hits on this combination of words.

Tuesday is a long time offf

All I’m saying is that dollar or no dollar, fiscal solvency is still an issue — not now, not for some time to come, but not something we can always ignore.Says Krugman

As I understand, absent serious start of the next budget negotiations by Tuesday, day after tomorrow, the likelihood of a government shut down on Apr 9 goes way up.

Master budget buster Hennessey speaks

The budget debate will soon expand beyond the current short-term fight. Negotiations on appropriations funding for the remainder of FY11 continue, and a government shutdown on April 9th is quite possible. I will write about that battle as events dictate, but hope to focus most of my attention on the more important big fiscal picture.

Yes, his ex boss, lil Bush thought the same thing, remember lil Bush and Deficits Don't Matter?

One day a week is sufficient

Senator Tom Carper’s (D-DE) “long-standing opposition to the U.S. Postal Service going to five-day delivery appears to be softening with the fiscal realities facing the Post Offices,” the News Journal reports.

Why is some guy from Delaware's 1 Congressional district determining the rules for mail delivery across the other 434 districts? A better idea, let's just abolish the state of Delaware and have the mail delivered one day a week.

The Dollar straight jacket

Specifically, the reason Greece (and Ireland, and Portugal, and to some extent Spain) are in so much trouble is that by adopting the euro they’ve left themselves with no good way out of the aftereffects of the pre-2008 bubble. Krugman advocating decentralized monetary powers.

The reason NY, California, Florida and Illinois are in so much trouble is that they have adopted the Dollar without the fair representation in the legislature of DC. I agree with Paul here, we should decentralize the Fed, adopt regional monetary areas and let each have money creation powers. To accomplish an economic recovery we are going to need another 20 senators  get us closer to democracy.

Yglesias,  Krugman, and Baker, are all coming to the same conclusion, they have all erred badly in urging more centralized fiscal power. 

Khan doesn't go far enough

Salman Khan, creator of Khan Academy teaching videos, calls for “flipping” education: Let students watch video lectures at home and do “homework” in class with help from the teacher.

We can easily eliminate the classroom. The new Web widget technology allows interaction between the teachers computer mouse and the students computer mouse. Intelligent tracking of the student's mouse lets the widget know what problems he is dealing with. That information transmitted to the teachers computer, allows the teacher to immediately redirect the students attention to the proper actions.

Combine that technology with private student blogs, on line interactive learning tools, on line information sources; and the class room becomes obsolete.  The only thing we need to retain are weekly seminars, about two hours each with ten or less students per seminar.

Carl Levin declares himself the electorate of Libya

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) “defended U.S. involvement in Libya as a mission with a ‘clear purpose,’ but said it is up to the Libyan people to remove their leader Moammar Gadhafi,” CNN reports.

He will be in conflict with Sarkozy of France who has declared himself ruler of the Arabs.

Between Mankiw and Yglesias, Harvard has a problem

Mankiw is arguing that he is an idiot communist. while Yglesias can't figure out inflation.

For Mankiw, the issue is that he is so concerned about the deficit that he and Paul Ryan created.  If Mankiw doesn't like deficits then why did he create a massive shortfall? For Yglesias the problem is that he figures the US economy is too big for stability.  Yet he wants more centralized power in DC.

As we see, our educational institutions appear  dysfunctional.  Want another example?  Why would anyone buy the Mankiw economics text book in the age of the Internet?

Then, to top off the nonsense, we have Michelle running for president on the Big Government Nanny ticket, and she calls herself a leader of the  small government Tea Party!   I have lost count of the number of e mails that women has sent me about how Washington DC should enforce her view of morality.  She reminds me of Yglesas and Mankiw.

Robert Kaplan is an idiot

The United States may be a democracy,..

He says. If we are a democracy then why is a Senator with 5 Congressional districts declaring wars which are paid for by California with 53 Congressional districts?

Connecticut is starting another war

Lieberman: Ya know, going into Syria may not be such a bad idea

I have a better idea, lets start a civil war against Connecticut.

Stability

Add caption

Nothing wrong with this picture

The employment ratio used to be stable at 63 now it is stable a 58.5.  The real question is why the government of California hires economic professors who don't like economic stability.

Sarkozy delares himself ruler of the Arabs

Referring to deadly violence in Syria, he explained: "Every ruler should understand, and especially every Arab ruler should understand that the reaction of the international community and of Europe will from this moment on each time be the same: we will be on the side of peaceful protesters who must not be repressed with violence."

Sarkozy indicated that he is ready to tolerate a certain level of violence, but that any country which orders its army to open fire on crowds will cross a red line. Good luck.

It never was housing

As Karl Smith points out in his post:

A point I want to keep emphasizing is that while the rapid increase in housing construction during the 2000s was not unprecedented, the collapse in home construction is.

A the end of the post he gets a problem:

ome people die each year and some homes are torn down or condemned each year. Unless those ratios are changing rapidly then a current levels the number of persons per home will converge towards more than double its long run average.

In channel terms, M1 Velocity is crashing, hence the rank order of the economy is reducing and we get larger households with less frequent but larger purchases of goods. Indications of a reduced rank production channel.

Why is this happening? You pick the bogeyman, but it was not caused by the housing boom.

Software Success

My XML/HTML nested database works! I can take any DOM tree from the browser, and place the entire tree in a relational database with nested pointers such that the DOM can be completely recovered and re-assembled from the database. The DOM tree is displayed in table format.

Once in the database, the DOM trees can be partially extracted with SQL, in tree order, any segment, any leaf, extracted with SQL syntax. And otherwise, the DOM can be searched for keywords, names, or partial text using the built in Sqlite database in the browser.
I will get it cleaned up and post the source. But this should have great utility over the web publishing and even software development environment. Anything one can abstract with a few XML tags, one can easily organize in a relational database.

I am going to name my software company: Person in the Basement with a New Computer Software company.

Browsers!

Opera is the best browser.  I am discovering much that is not implemented on other browsers.  Everything I do with my software works in Opera, only!

Regional banking to the rescue

We have more charts from Europe comparing real interest rates and the central bank rule. Multiplier Effect is reporting on a study by Wessel:

Readers may have seen two charts that are part of a column by David Wessel published last week. For five European countries, they compare actual interest rates with those prescribed by a standard policy rule. Wessel’s charts provide some interesting evidence that European Central Bank monetary policy has been either too loose or too tight most of the time for several currently ailing European economies, given these countries’ inflation rates and gaps between actual and potential output.

In other words, with a large economy and varying inflation over the regions, central bankers suck, they needlessly keep the peripheral regions in a skew, never really having interest rates that match real growth rates. This is bubble stuff.

The problem here is the lenders, the banks. The European Central Banks can only get to the average for the Eurozone. We have the same problem in the USA. California, and the West, which pay 40% of the debt service costs for Congress are a separate economy, yet the Federal Reserve looks mostly at business in DC, mainly Congressional spending.

Competitive regional banks are the solution;  using the same currency but restricting their yield curve to the regional economy they serve. We need regional banks with money creation powers over the region they serve, as does Europe.  Decentralized banking helps a lot.

There is no profit motive in the Constitution

Except as related to the Income Tax Amendment.
So how do we get from income taxes to copyright law? Let's read about the new copyright ruing and see if we can disentangle the judges opinion. From the article:

The decision hinges on the portion of Fair Use law that declares that it's all right to re-distribute a piece of content as long as it doesn't hurt the market for the original content. In this case, there was virtually no possible overlap between the readership of the original piece (a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article) and the readers who would see the piece on the non-profit's website. 

OK, I see one overlap, the readers are reading the same article, exactly, from the same author!

This ruling will fail on appeal, the judge is simply an idiot.

January Angeles seems confused

Here January celebrates the fact that the Federal government collects the taxes from States for Medicaid expansion. That is called a good thing according CBPP.

Whether its a good deal to send federal agents out to California to pay everyone's bill remains uncertain, but I do know that we Californians get 1/6 the number of Senators and we are going to pay a 25% premium to cover Medicaid for other states.

You judge for yourself, but secession is a right when representation is mal-distributed. The better alternative is for bankrupt states without representation to default.

XML Commander

How about that, a near commercial javascript widget in a few weeks. It is the XML/WebSQL utility of all time.

Basics: 
Using WebSql and xmlHttpRequest, XML Commander provides a cannonical flat form that maintains the nesting order, of the xml Dom tree obtained from a get. It stores by tag, and maintains the links and values.

A simple widget, built around datalists, includes a tiny library to manage the options. Drop down command window. Is in pre-alpha, but looking quite solid.

The target are ad hoc users who jump on xml formats of the moment. This is a simple tool that helps connect document publisher and xml via the SQL syntax. And includes an SQL input window.

Yaldex Software

I have their Javascript editor, looks great.

Here is my own little routine that moves a table from the DB to a Table. This is a call back, the stack preset by a dispatcher. The handy tdStr and thStr make the html formats.

function output(me) {
  
  if(me.numrows == 0) return;
  var strOut =  "<table class='sql' ><tr>";
  for(key in me.results.rows[0]) 
    strOut += thStr(key);
  strOut += "</tr>";
  for(var i = 0; i < me.numrows;i++) {
    strOut += "<tr>"; 
      for(key in me.results.rows[i]) 
        strOut += tdStr(me.results.rows[i][key]);
      strOut += "</tr>";
      }
    strOut += "</table>"
    dbStatus.innerHTML +=  strOut;
  }

SQL, the syntax wins in the split

Break SQL from its engine, then it becomes a real web script and a very popular tool for document publishers.  When we work with simple prior agreements about meaning, then publishing become more powerful, faster.  Complex data, bracketed with the XML tags, becomes searchable with simple syntax straight from the browser.

Restructuring government

Get it out of its liquidity trap?

Cram the debt downhill in exchange for loss of future revenue. Split the debt, and with each chunk of debt a smaller central future government results. You don't need to be an expert in Spontaneous Order to get the problem, between the states and central, there is not much to hold debt.

Regionalize. Break up the big states, go with the NY, Texas, Southeast, California, Cascadia, Midwest. Just equalize the senators, inflate the count and redistrict under existing constitutional provision. In exchange for the Senators, the mini-states reach a tax deal in groups, and create a debt holding entity with a tax stream by prior agreement.

So for California, we get the California system, and six more senators, by boundary and agreement. Then split the tax streams to let the regional debt holder get the middle income bracket. Come to a prior agreement on regional health management.

You end up with a central government at 1/3 debt total, bondholders taking their third, but a central government with the predicted 14.5% share.

Do this, boom times, that is some Fiscal Stimulus, none of this Pansy Wansy Keynesian stuff.

Better idea for Europe

Lease them two aircraft carriers for a ten year period. Great deal all around, they can go bomb Africans all they want.

Liquidity trap, what is it?

When Congress runs out of debt capacity and it is time to restructure government. I do not think our Congress will ever see 19% of the economy flow toward government programs. Congress is in a pickle. The next leg down for federal revenue is about 14% of the economy, if my Fibonacci theory is correct. (I take a Fib series up to 21, then scale the 21 down to 19 and see the value of the second to last number, which becomes 14.5%) This is the new federal allocation.

So what happened?
Washington DC no longer has some special privilege in the world, our European centric government does not have a strong partner in Europe anymore and the large US states are being drained of liquidity to sustain the unsustainable. Normally the skew in Washington DC is managed by the bailout process, paying off the groups that lose out to political skew. But the bailout debt has been used up, and we now have shortages of energy.

Our federal government is not static, a constant as in the Keynesian equation. Power in Washington DC ebbs and flows over our history, and we are undergoing one of our fundamental changes. So, no panic is required, the outcome will be better than what we have.

Vic Hanson on the new war

When the mission in Libya and its methods are not clearly stated and the leadership role of the U.S. is not defined, then the ambiguities and paradoxes simply mount. Victor is writing in the National Review

Let's read the article and see if he mentions that the Weekly Standard idiot, Billy Kristol, started this mess. Victor decides:

Instead, we ignore congressional approval, broadcast to our enemies all sorts of self-imposed limitations on our use of force, have not defined the mission as the removal of Qaddafi, on day three are promising less rather than more military force, have no clue what is to replace him, and seem uncomfortable with a leadership role that would define victory and take the necessary measures to achieve it.

Answer? Lieberman, Hillary, Billy Kristol and a mediocre law teacher from Tennessee are a bunch of idiots, and Obama may just now be figuring that out; our presidents are a little slow here in America.

The point is, we went galavanting off to war because Hillary fears looking weak with respect to Kristol. Believe me, after this fiasco, my Dead Dog looks smarter than Billy.

What does Hillary say?

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday beat President Obama to the punch on Libya -- again.

Hours before Obama called a press conference on the US response to the crisis, Clinton publicly drew a line in the sand for Libyan madman Moammar Khadafy.

"The final result of any negotiation would have to be the decision by Col. Khadafy to leave," demanded Clinton, who threatened military action as US warships moved within striking distance of Tripoli.

Hillary is the electorate for Africa. Sound Keynesian?  Read Arthur Herman at the NY Post:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says our goal is to topple the Libyan dictator. Others at the United Nations and in the Arab League don't seem so sure. Until they make up their minds, expect Khadafy to play an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with our jets even after his air force and air-defense systems are destroyed.

No regime since World War II has been toppled by air power alone, without the use of troops. Even then, it took both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to get Japan to consider surrender. As for targeting Khadafy himself, hopes during Iraqi Freedom that slamming Saddam with a bunker-busting strike might decapitate the regime proved false. Count on Khadafy's shelters being at least as deep.

Fourth, an American ground presence in Libya is inevitable, despite Obama's assurances otherwise. It's going to prove impossible to maintain any cease-fire or protect rebel-held areas from the air alone. Just keeping track of who's friend and who's foe will require Tactical Air Control personnel on the ground as well as Special Forces. And no humanitarian-aid mission will be safe unless it's accompanied by US, British or French troops.

When the time comes to remove Khadafy from power, expect at least a brigade-size force of American boots on the ground to help out. When they will come home will be anyone's guess.

Hillary got us into a mess because her DC Delusion means looking strong for Europe.

Corrupt Chicago mayors

For more than a quarter century, under two mayors, Chicago has generated hundreds of millions of dollars from "Tax Increment Financing" (TIF) programs that were supposed to benefit blighted communities — but most of the dollars went to some of the city's most powerful corporations, leaving the inner city communities further behind as the national and local economy weakened.Substance News

This is another of those redevelopment programs; the one Republicans love because they are licenses to steal.
HT Anti-planner

Whoops

The San Francisco Employees Retirement System (SFERS), which covers most of the city's municipal workers,faces an unfunded liability of $4.4 billion on a market value basis. That's nearly $35,000 per every San Francisco household.Business Insider

This is partly Diane Feinstein's work, remember her, Senator from California? She was mayor, and also failing to add things up. So, with politicians pulling this nonsense, why would anyone believe that Feinstein can create safe assets in the Senate?

HT Newmark.

DeLong says we are looking for safe assets

He always goes back to the idea that there are safe assets in the world to hold our savings. This is portfolio advice, where to safe harbor your extra cash. OK, fools, one and all, I look for safe harbors:

1) Gold
2) German bonds
3) Australian commodities

I would put US Treasuries on the list, but I am not sure we are getting back to 19% revenue share for Congress, hence there is the fear of the unknown as the federal government restructures.

So, DeLong has to help us out here. We have a Fed that is floundering a bit, a Senate on a three week scheduling cycle, and the major funding states for Congress are nearly bankrupt with high unemployment. Maybe Brad knows something about federal government that I do not, after all he studies it a little more. But he is ultimately asking us to invest in the US federal government based on his knowledge of history.

How do we know Brad is right? What if my proposal takes off; the idea of breaking up the US and partialing out a fairer democracy. Do you trust secessionists to safeguard Congressional debt during the breakup?

Sen Lugar says we can't afford this latest war

Lugar warned that the U.S. is investing huge sums of money in a foreign endeavor at a time when the domestic economy is still struggling.”It’s a strange time,” he said. “Almost all of our congressional days are spent on budget deficits, outrageous problems. Yet, at the same time, all of this passes, which is a very expensive operation.”Senatus reporting

Is he a member of the Tea Party? I don't think so, the Tea party loves expensive wars, they get giddy feelings when they can bomb foreigners on borrowed money.

On the other hand:

“I’m glad we’re finally doing something,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I don’t know how many people have died as we wait to do something, and I thank God for strong women in the Obama administration. I don’t know what finally got the president to act. But I’ve very worried that we’re taking a back seat rather than a leadership role.”

Lindsey Graham sounds like a deficit loving, budget busting Tea Party member. His state is on welfare, like Sarah in Alaska, they cannot survive down there in S Carolina without central government welfare. Yep, sure sounds like a Tea Party member to me.  Except, this is what he says about the Tea party:

In a piece profiling him in the Times magazine, Graham complains about the so-called tea party movement, arguing that the movement that’s emerged over the last year or so doesn’t have long to live. “The problem with the Tea Party, I think it’s just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out,” Graham is quoted as saying. 

Translation: Since most of the Tea party members come from states living off federal welfare, what is it exactly that a Tea Party member wants?  More welfare, likely.

The Amazon Tax fiasco heating up

Who pays sales taxes when retailers deliver?

The local retailer still pays, whether the customer or a service trucks the object to the customer's home. If customers develop the habit of shopping at the retailer on-line, then legislatures should consider how the required government services have changed and change the retail tax accordingly. What Amazon is rightfully attacking is the inability of our legislatures to think clearly.

Legislatures work for a company that delivers services for a fee. Try to figure out the services needed then allocate the fee. When that clear thinking is done, they can collect from Amazon what is due.

Legislatures generally think in terms of what they can steal by mis-direction, they are the problem in this case.

Whoops

First, for most households, low interest rates and high inflation have had a much greater impact on their real incomes than either unemployment or tax and benefit changes. If you break down that £365 loss in post-tax income for the median household, only £79 is directly attributable to loss of employment. About £203 has been lost as a result of earning less interest on savings, and another £203 has been lost as a result of their wages not keeping up with inflation.Stephanie Flander, BBC

Translation: The average British citizen is not participating in the future.

I suspect that most of Britain's future is tied up in the government economy, and the amount of private sector future to pass around is small.

Max Boot explains

Why four or five delusional DC Elites can perform electoral duties for an African Nation and send a good chunk of the $300 billion  bill to California voters. These are not libertarians, folks, libertarians believe in the voter process.

Hillary and Civil Wars

Littered across the landscape, some 30 miles south of Benghazi, the detritus of the allied airstrikes on Saturday and Sunday morning offered a panorama of destruction: tanks, charred and battered, their turrets blasted clean off, one with a body still caught in its remnants; a small Toyota truck with its roof torn away; a tank transporter still on fire. But it did not end there.NYT Reports this is not just a No Fly

Hillary, Instapundit, Lieberman, McCain, his  Welfare Queen from Alaska,  and Kristol have gotten the US involved ib a long ground out civil war in Libya. This has become one of our infamous nation building processes, we are in Africa to stay. Look at new military costs in the $300 billion range over then next two years. These four bozos, with absolutely no input from the voter. I blame Paul Ryan for allowing funding to continue.

Kling on liquidity traps

Read his explanation.

My generic meaning of a liquidity trap: The Fed's every day trading activity activities cannot create inflation.    

The Fed can scare us for a while, making us have temporary hysterical fears of higher oil prices, for example.  But as soon as the Fed scare appears, it disappears as we readjust oil allocations and exchange rates  Congress can create inflation, but only until the next election.  Fortunately we have just enough democracy to stop Congress.

Like everything else, the Fed has to deal with a production chain to deliver inflation, but a bank production chain designed to deliver inflation, by definition, can never exist, right?  I mean, if we had a banking system designed to make money useless, then it wouldn't be a banking system. 

So what does "low for an extended period" mean? It means that Ben has a Congress that wants a spending binge and the Fed has to accommodate until voters can throw the bums out.

Babs Boxer is nutty

The insurance bill, S. 637, would allow nonprofit insurance programs like the California Earthquake Authority to use federal loan guarantees to lower the cost of earthquake insurance. Senatus

What does this mean?

This is the anti-earthquake preparedness. What Babs doesn't realize, or she hopes we don't see it, is that Californians will pay a 25% premium for quake damage insurance because we got Congress involved in collecting California taxes to pay for Californian damages. Not only that, California builders now know that Babs will send in Federal agents to take our money and cover the costs for shoddy building work.

Babs Boxer is a nutcase, and shouldn't be allowed near a legislature.

Hillary didn't like Khadafi

In a Paris hotel room on Monday night, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton found herself juggling the inconsistencies of American foreign policy in a turbulent Middle East. She criticized the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates for sending troops to quash protests in Bahrain even as she pressed him to send planes to intervene in Libya.

Only the day before, Mrs. Clinton — along with her boss, President Obama — was a skeptic on whether the United States should take military action in Libya. But that night, with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces turning back the rebellion that threatened his rule, Mrs. Clinton changed course, forming an unlikely alliance with a handful of top administration aides who had been arguing for intervention.

Within hours, Mrs. Clinton and the aides had convinced Mr. Obama that the United States had to act, and the president ordered up military plans, which Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hand-delivered to the White House the next day. On Thursday, during an hour-and-a -half meeting, Mr. Obama signed off on allowing American pilots to join Europeans and Arabs in military strikes against the Libyan government. DC Delusions

We go to war because Hillary, Lieberman and Kristol don't like someone? California is not paying for this, didn't ask for it, and the Islamic Sunni Arab Belt Bombers can bomb someone else for this.

Here is Glenn's snark:
HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Nobel Peace Prize Winner Enters Third War.  But Instapundit started this with his Tennessee Volunteer Taxpayers. Let's pay for this with a tax on mediocre law teachers.

My data manager

The idea for the master widget.  It simply reads in an arbitrary dom tree into WebSql or indexDB, in nested order.  It maintains adjacency pointers, following a suggestion in this article, by Mike Hillyer, on nested trees.

Mainly this widget reads arbitrary xml files and synchronized local data base, within the browser. So, really simple work group stuff, participants agree on some simple xml definition, and they automatically get work flow compatibility and active documents. What could be simpler? Add in a SQL syntax interpreter and publishers have a convenient syntax to grab xml data for charts and tables.

I have the Senate Widget

That patent is mine, claimed upon this post.

Here is how the Senate Widget works:
It pops up on the Senators screen, and it has a slider and text. In the slider the Senator adjusts between more secrecy and faster convergence.  In the input field he puts the XML tag definition for the government program he is bidding for.  See where this is going? We could have these little bots roam the Linux boxes amongst each other, digital Senators trading!.  They always look for the minimal trade among the programs.

But it is still political, the Senators can secretly go off to, say the men's room, and take out their manipulators and adjust the slider.

Eventually the bots will come to a conclusion!

Gingrich goes warmongering

Newt Gingrich told reporters today that the Libyan rebels have France's lack of bracket fever to thank for the no-fly zone that will soon protect them from aerial attacks by embattled dictator Muammar Qaddafi.

I gave the guy three breaks, three goddamned breaks to prove he isn't another war making, deficit loving, big government flea bag.

The man is challenged. Here is some big news, folks, a lot of people want Libyan oil, or its equivalent. If something goes a bit harry, our trading partners are coming over to say,"Go get the oil flowing". Which of the last (four? eight?) anti-Muslim Crusades went smoothly?

Some very large quantity of the middle class will soon be giving up oil, and paying extra in the loss.

It is like a balance, for each bozo in one camp, we need a counter bozo in the other.

Let's make this a completely robot war, belt bombers vs robo-flyers.

California Republicans: Corrupt Socialists

As the California GOP begins its convention in Sacramento today, party members ought to at least understand where its Assembly members stand – on the side of big government, higher taxes and uncontrolled debt and against property rights, individualism and freedom. As the party blathers about luring minority and working-class voters, let it be clear that the GOP sided with the developers and government planners who want to drive minorities and working-class people off of their property. The Democrats are right: The GOP is the party of big business and privilege.

As part of the governor’s budget package, the Assembly voted on SB77, which would have ended the state’s redevelopment agencies. But only longtime redevelopment foe, Chris Norby of Fullerton, sided with taxpayers and property owners. The rest of the Assembly Republicans voted “no” or didn’t vote at all. Had even one of the Republicans joined Norby, the bill would have passed with a two-thirds majority. There may still be time, but the GOP is too busy celebrating that it stopped Brown on this one issue. They put partisanship above their own ideology. They stopped Brown in one of the few areas where Brown was right. CalWatch is pissed.

The point is that the redevelopment scam has been a corrupt rip off of taxpayers since the idea first came up. It is the larger central government giving local politicians tax money to bribe and steal. It is roundabout taxing, the larger government taxes, the local thieves spend.  

These kind of Republican antics are why they are not to be trusted. Where is the California Tea Party? The very thieves stealing this development money are the ones funding the Tea Party!  This stinks like the Walker secret deals in Wisconsin regarding power generators.

Bob Dutton and Daniel Logue, the two Republican leaders and both coming from real estate interest backgrounds. This is the best California can do?

The Brad and Nick Show

Oil is Money

Brad and Nick still believe we suffer hysterical demand for liquid assets. Wrong liquid, however. Oil and money are the equivalent assets as the chart shows they track quite nicely. The correlation jumped just prior to the crash and has remained tight ever since. We're not conserving cash, we are conserving oil.

Small town Senators seek return to delusions

Concerning a letter 60 Senators write to Obama to make a one year budget deal:

The call by 32 Republicans and 32 members of the Democratic caucus for Obama to widen the budget talks gives a boost to a bipartisan group of six senators trying to craft a sweeping deficit-reduction plan that can pass Congress. The number of signatures suggests the group’s effort to reach a grand bargain on spending and taxes has picked up support that may help propel an eventual agreement through the Senate.

“I expected a lot, but this is an awful lot,” said Senator Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat who circulated the letter this week with Republican Senator Mike Johanns of Nebraska. “I hope it will keep the conversation moving forward and the Gang of Six working.”

No, I say put them back to a two week budget cycle.

Whoops

My favorite indicator

Looking like we have already entered Second Dip.

CBO low balls the upcoming debt expansion

Under the President’s proposals, the federal budget deficit would total $1.2 trillion in 2012 and smaller amounts in later years, averaging 4.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) over the 2012–2021 period.

Just make that $1.6 trillion to cover the legally hidden agenda of the CBO and the war in Libya. In QEs that comes to an additional two, I believe.

A Dick Lugar spokesperson:

"Before any American military assets are used, Senator Lugar wants Congress to have a full briefing on the planned use of American military personnel and equipment, and how it will be paid for," Lugar’s spokesman Mark Helmke said Thursday. "This is an issue that requires full public debate under the Constitution."

I can help the Senator out here. We are going to pay for the war by having, as Krugman puts it, the Fed credit the account of Senator Lierbman in the Senate. The credit eventually arrives as a liability on the doorsteps of California citizens who pay a 25% federal tax premium and have 1/20 the Senate representation as citizens of Connecticut have.

Where is the Tea Party?

I don't quite get the shenanigans. Lieberman, a two horse Senator declares war, Hillary goes along, the war will ultimately cost another $100 billion in debt, and Ms Bachmann, head of the no more debt party in the only democratic federal assembly we have, is not heard from?

This whole mess smells of the Republican Big Government Oligarchy in action, and the Tea Party revealing itself as just another Communist front.  California should secede.

SQL Tester

Text frame

drop table test; create table test (f1,f2,f3); insert into test values('1','2','3'); select * from test;

Result

A Kling and Krugman conversation

Kling says the ten year rate dropped, plunged, right as Reagan deficits rose. Krugman says we have negative real rates, today, right after the deficit thing. The two episodes seem similar but Krugmam calls the later a liquidity trap but not the former. Krugman wants the absolute level to go to zero. Kling says it is a relative drop.

Krugman is right, we are hitting pavement. Kling is right it is a relative drop. But they are both right, we are taking the last 40 feet of a 200 foot drop done in relative amounts ever since Reagan.

We don't have any more capacity for Congress to bail any of us out, we spent the debt allocation.  That is why Congress works on a three week scheduling basis, no more debt capacity.  It is hard to do, but the economist has to put government back inside the model.  Why do we have Tea party, Three Week Budgets, and, for Christ Sake, Congress has given up Earmarks.

Does the economist need any more clues that Congress is not in a borrowing mood? 

The layman's version of XML

Simple XML is about as simple as it gets. These two characters are all you need: <> Beyond that, you, your family, group or experiment can define the meaning of behind the tags:

<Parent>  Text or number about </parent>
<child> Number, a series of numbers, or text or image pointer </child>

Once someone agrees to use a format like this, then our browsers can parse it out and store it, without much further ado. The simplicity of basic XML defeats any purpose behind aggregate standards. Groups can build up ad hoc definition of the tags for the current project. The widgets and data figure each other out.

Try this bloggable tool

JSLab 1.0. I am evaluating it now. That looks like a great widget to have around for, say blogging. More graphtools here at Six Reviews.

I posted my script

on the widget page to the right.
I found that it works with anchors and href
fun stuff

Messing with code

Text frame

<br /> <br /> <h1>My First Heading</h1><br /> <p>My first paragraph.</p><br />

Result

Widgets and javascript is fun stuff.

Lets see if I can dump the same script into a comment window!
Naw, comments don't allow anything. Hey, did you notice where my prose is ending up? In the result window.

I have it!! I will add a little emailer, and the commenter can fix up his html message, no matter how pornographic, and e mail it to another widget which shall promptly post it.

We getting close...the anonymous blog running for office. It shall be ruled by its postings which come from comments. It therefore retains some democracy, yet speaks wisely.

And with my new widget technology, the anonymous blog can execute writs in defense of its candidacy, retaining anonymity. Spring the Citizens United defense.

Of course the winning view would always be the commenter that injects a clever virus, defeating opposing commenters from democracy.

Chait screws this up

Chait is talking about and deficit reduction and Erskin Bowles, who is:

WASHINGTON - Democrat Erskine Bowles, who co-chaired the White House's deficit-reduction panel last year, predicted Wednesday evening that 35 to 40 additional U.S. senators would back a deficit reduction plan being drafted by a group of lawmakers known as the "Gang of Six."

"I think the Gang of Six is our best hope," he said during a conference call hosted by a group called "No Labels," which says it represents Democrats, Republicans and Independents who want lawmakers to work together to promote change in Washington. WSJ
. 

The whole nonsense part of both Bowles and Chait is their assumption that things go back to the way they are, DC on autopilot. Chait gets his regular flow of entitlement checks and Bowlses gets DC government the way he thinks it will exist forever, including grants to his college.

Things aren't going back to their Religion, things are forever with Congress budgeting on a three week basis. At this point, having gotten these politicians to actually sit down on a weekly basis and manage the budget is nothing short of a miracle, and I think the American voter will soon come to realize all the advantages. The main advantage, is no citizen is fooled into believing in the entitlement fairy. The Internet has hit the Senate, they will never again be allowed to run on autopilot.

UN declares war against badly dressed presidents

He's easy to spot, dressed like an Acid Freak.

So it is Lieberman and the UN vs Charles Bronson. I still think the King of Kings wins, but the odds should go up in my favor.  Send Jerry Brown the bill, he will table it.

The Real Business Cycle needs a theory

It is is the economic theory that says "shit happens" and the best we can do is find what happened and based on the discovery, try to predict when things get fixed.  A much better theory than Keynes who posits that government is static and undemocratic.

As we all know by now, recessions happen because the Levin chain risk increases, and we break and reform the production chain. We even have math that describes the phenomena.

In network theory, undergoing a recession involves local decisions on the real production graph. The economy looks for mergers and innovations,locally between nodes, that allow the production chain to reform with less risk.

Most of the shocks come from information technology. Absent any technology change in information, all parties equilibriate to the agreed allocations. Information technology changes our ability to measure allocation efficiency. it is a paradox. When things are working resonably well, the agents have no other path toward increasing gains except better information. Going back to the telegraph, the game was always find better information sources.

Brad looks at skew

A Poorer World Short of High Quality Assets with Ample Infrastructure Investment Opportunities

He certainly gets his main point in the title. He says that even though the world is poorer because of the Japan mess, there is more skew. Some parts of the global economy have gained in relative value due to the skew that results from a global adjustment. In this case, Brad points out that our Congress is now rated higher, relatively speaking, because of radiation leakage in Northern Japan.

I didn't need radiation leaks in Japan, I simply realized our Congress can work a three week budget cycle! That is a major improvement among the corrupt in DC. Less pontifications and more work, Congressional productivity has a great multiplier, mainly because Congressional idiocy is one of the economic disasters we face.

It is about the Internet, we can see right through the politics.  For example, Paul Ryan cannot hide the fact that he was formerly a budget busting, deficit loving Communist under lil Bush.  Everything he does today is cast against the errors he made in the past.

When my Senator Babs Boxer pulls out her political correctness language, we spot the lunacy right away.  We now know that it is Billy Kristol declaring war, and California paying the tab.  We fully accept the risk that the Tea Party might turn into a debt busting popular spending movement.  We can find, locate and point to the county commissioners who bankrupt local government.  We can drill into the literature and keep the Keynesians honest.

I think, great, we should be able to operate Congress forever on a three week budget cycle, we have the technology. 

Japan is going to need more oil

And they are going to get it.  The prospect of Japan returning to normal efficiency is actually high.  Sending scarce oil to Japan is a good bet.

We are wearing out the politicians

Senators have passed a three-week spending measure (H. J. RES. 48) to keep the government running through April 8 by a vote of 87-13. It’s already been passed by the House.

According to the AP, this continuing resolution “includes $6 billion in cuts to domestic spending in the budget year that ends Sept. 30.”

The measure would “buy time for talks about passing larger legislation to cover the day-to-day operations of the government until the 2012 budget year begins.”

Both sides say “they’re tired of running the government in two- and three-week installments.Senatus Reporting

They may be tired, but it is working. They might think about gains in productivity. Basically the driver here are Senate interests in special budgets they promised their malproportioned constituents. The Senators need budget Widgets.

What is the difference between nominal and real interest rates?

Uncle Milt's passion for socialist banking. Absent central banking control, we really do not have that difference.

Put in other terms, nominal rates are the rates Harry Reid pays when he goes into debt on behalf of the Senate. Real rates are the rates Nevadans pay to cover Harry Reid pontifications.

Not enough Obama for Hillary delusions

“Obviously, she’s not happy with dealing with a president who can’t decide if today is Tuesday or Wednesday, who can’t make his mind up,” a Clinton insider told The Daily. “She’s exhausted, tired.”

He went on, “If you take a look at what’s on her plate as compared with what’s on the plates of previous Secretary of States — there’s more going on now at this particular moment, and it’s like playing sports with a bunch of amateurs. And she doesn’t have any power. She’s trying to do what she can to keep things from imploding.” The Daily Reports

If you think Americans tire of the DC Delusions, think of other world political leaders who have to deal with this woman and her grandiosity. She promenades around like she is in charge of world safety, then cannot understand why a citizenship with $15 trillion in debt and a three week budget cycle won't recognized her new found grandiosity.

DC makes people nuts, they think that American citizen's rely on their "thought leaders" as Yglesias puts it. Think again, the American Senate gives us few choices except tax protests.

Government grants $17 million in commissions for a few hours work

When Keynesian Senators fall in love with central banking then:

Using 5 Year Note futures as a proxy, we have calculated the difference in average price between what the NY Fed would have paid had it not cancelled the first auction versus what it actually ended up paying: $15.7 million ($12.1 million for the 5's and $3.6 million for the 7's). This amount was simply pocketed by the primary dealers and is now a liability of the Federal Reserve, and putatively the US taxpayer. Zero Hedge tracks the Fed trading fees.

This is a racket, foisted on taxpayers who are not even close to covering the debt costs. It is the Great Religion, again, the Keynesians and their love for undemocratic central power that does us in.

Brad's thinks this kind of crap will save his government  job out here in California.  His math is wrong.  

A country boy with 4 Congressional districts

Harry Reid.  With his self importance figures it is his job to determine out future as in:

Harry Reid says no to Social Security reform

How about this, 36 million Californians say no to income taxes until we get our six more senators. We represent more of Harry Reid's debt than Nevada, though they pay a higher premium.

Vernon California, what a town!

Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley is trying to disband a minuscule city that has sucked up state funds and leaked scandal for 80 years, according to LA Times.

All you have to know about Vernon, Calif. is it has a population of 90 and a municipal budget of $300 million. That's a $3.3 million budget per person. Vernon has this much money thanks to the 1,800 businesses incorporated within its borders -- generating money that would otherwise flow to the bare coffers of Los Angeles. Business Insider

Let's go corruption hunting, shall we?

Here the LA Times names the crooks explicitly:

o far, the Los Angeles district attorney's investigation appears to have focused primarily on Donal O'Callaghan, the former city administrator who was indicted by a Los Angeles grand jury on charges regarding two contracts the city established with his wife.

The attorney general is now demanding that Vernon make officials available for testimony regarding the compensation and perks received by former city attorney and city administrator Eric T. Fresch, Finance Director Roirdan S. Burnett, former City Atty. Jeffrey Harrison, former City Administrator Bruce Malkenhorst Sr., and former City Clerk Bruce Malkenhorst Jr., as well as O'Callaghan.

Those six constitute the last decade of leadership in Vernon, a small, well-heeled industrial city just south of downtown Los Angeles. Vernon has been dogged for decades by claims that it is run by a small fiefdom of well-connected people who use the city of 90 residents to generate large incomes.

The Times reported this summer that those six officials all earned more than $500,000 in at least one of the last five years, with Fresch, a former city administrator who now works as a legal consultant, making $1.65 million in 2008. Source.

On reading Wiki about the town, however, we find it is just a 90 person family town that run the city for profit. There real crimes are restriction of voting and assembly rights as new residents were discouraged from moving in. Of the 90 residents, half work for the city and live in city owned housing, The place runs their own power utility. It seems less corrupt and more like a fiefdom. If you steal, the only group to steal from is the founding and managing family. They produce quite a bit of odors since they cater to meat, food and metal processing. Otherwise, just a libertarian town owned and managed by one family.

This town should be a private business, it is not clear why they incorporated in the first place except to confer titles onto the founder family.

Chiang's one of the gang that caused the mess

California taxpayers just took a huge punch in the nose from the same actuaries who provided the cover for state politicians to spike public employee retirement benefits. The latest shocker comes from California State Controller John Chiang, who just unveiled a new actuarial report
that shows California faces another unfunded debt of $59.9 billion to pay for retiree health and dental benefits over the next 30 years.

Controller Chiang highlighted that the unfunded liability grew during the 2010 fiscal year by $8.1 billion; an amount equal to almost 25 percent of this year’s entire California kindergarten through high school education budget. At least he admits to the mess!

California cannot exit the catastrophe without a serious reform of the public sector.

Incoherent McCain and McConnel

“I can say with total confidence that the House and Senate will not be passing another continuing resolution without defense spending for the rest of the year,” McConnell said during a colloquy Wednesday with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on the Senate floor.Senutus point us to this aberration

What do these two Senators mean? I think they mean that when some idiot like Lieberman declares war, just for the hell of it, then California had better prepare to produce an additional $100 billion in taxes. Not the way it works. We have a House with a serious budget issue. No one is bothering to listen to delusionals who think government occurs via elite declarations.

Noahpinion discusses the government channel

He likes to break the distinction between low end and high end government channels, thus allowing  economists to become lazy philosophers instead of hard working scientists.

The real distinction a governments that cover the their economic domain coherently and those that don't. A measurement of economies of scale of scale helps here. Our government has large economies (more stages of production) because our domain is much larger.

If we apply this to the Noahpinion desire for high end government what does he mean?  Less economies of scale and more power entrenched in DC? That is a prescription for lower GDP, back again to variability in product space. Under channel theory, the entitlements are centralized and likely cause less variability in wage space, hence lower GDP and lower standard of living, fewer choices. Earmarks are good, they flow directly from central government down the shortest path to retail variability in product space.

How do we know when the government channel is top heavy? Notice that all branches are having trouble keeping budget, from federal to city. Instability at all levels of government is sufficient proof that the government channel is skewed. The level of Congressional debt points us to evidence that Congress, mostly the Senate, is the culprit.

Three weeks by three weeks, the federal buget cycle

Who wins when Congress is forced to deal with the budget on a triweekly basis?

The voter and taxpayer wins. We have a situation in which the Senate is actually forced to go over the budget line by line, looking for the next compromise. Would the voter prefer that the Senate revert to its traditional elitism, and declare the budget sound by superior intuition?

We have two forces, the House with proportional representation and Senate elitism. The House is currently winning the battle.

Obama and the Choo Choo delusion

Editorial writers cannot get enough of how delusional that man was with regard to HSR. Now the NY Times chimes in.

I think Choo Choo represents all we need to know about DC Delusions.

Yes we suffer a Debt Trap

Though Krugman still clings to the Liquidity Trap concept.

The central government, operating on a two week scheduling cycle with a debt equal to the entire economy, requiring constant attention by its banker with $300 billion in extra interest costs coming due from stimulating activities.  Debt Trap is the better term here.

Africa has a surplus of people

As boats carrying hundreds of Africans set sail for a better life in Europe, they were met on Italy’s Lampedusa island with two words by a 5-foot, 8-inch blonde: go away.

“They cannot be allowed on the shore,” Marine Le Pen, the 42-year-old leader of France’s anti-immigration National Front, said in a March 15 interview in Rome after a three-hour visit the previous day to Lampedusa. “Send boats out to feed them. But they must not set foot on land.”

The island, a speck in the Mediterranean Sea closer to Tunisia than Sicily, is experiencing first-hand an immigration surge poised to spread to the rest of Europe and drive a deeper wedge in a north-south divide already tested by the sovereign- debt crisis.

“It’s evident that Italy has been abandoned by Europe,” Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said in Brussels on March 10 after a meeting with his European Union counterparts. “We can’t be the policeman of Europe.” Bloomberg

Why try to color this? The one distinction between African culture and European culture is a 10,000 year adaption to the North. I think that is an obvious fact, and there is no racism in acknowledging it.

Whoops on multipliers

In How Big (Small?) Are Fiscal Multipliers? (NBER Working Paper No. 16479), co-authors Ethan Ilzetzki, Enrique Mendoza, and Carlos Vegh show that the impact of government fiscal stimulus depends on key country characteristics, including the level of development, the exchange rate regime, openness to trade, and public indebtedness. After analyzing a quarterly dataset on government expenditures for 44 countries (20 high-income and 24 developing) from 1960 to 2007, they conclude that the output effect of an increase in government consumption is larger in industrial than in developing countries. That response -- which is called the fiscal multiplier -- is relatively large in economies operating under a predetermined exchange rate, but it is zero in economies operating under flexible exchange rates. Finally, they conclude that fiscal multipliers are smaller in open economies than in closed economies, and are zero in high-debt countries.

In developing countries, output initially responds negatively to increases in government consumption. Only after a lag of two to four quarters does output rise in response to an increase in government consumption, and the cumulative output response is not statistically different from zero. Furthermore, increases in government consumption are less persistent (dying out after approximately six quarters) in developing countries than in high-income countries. NBER Working Paper

HT Institutional Economics

Matt Nesvisky released the letter, brave soul.

Using Websql for my widgets

For now.  But I watch the indexDB standard firm and I migrate when ready. So I structure my WebSql inerface with index DB in mind.

My new widget

Hello World!

Filename:

Installed properly it will take the XML parsed output from xmlhttpRequest and show it in a table on the page. But the important point is that this widget on my post uses the widget code over there on the right.

SQLite and indexDB

Both big winners.

The SQLite engine will replicate and broadcast into all the new script engines that need the SQLite API. SQLite syntax, and any an all variants of SQL syntax thrive because there is an inherent simplicity in the syntax, it can be typed.  And html5 really bridges the two together much better than could be done in a single SQLite executable. SQL interpreters written in the embedded languages as widgets will be in demand. It's a win all around.
I would be proven wrong if SQLite was declining in the market.  I go look it up.

Rajiv's latest

He looks at trades that didn't happen. He is looking at traders who bet on a future asset trade, and finds the sellers of assets who did not get their bid were tightly distributes, relative to the buyers of assets who failed.

My claim here, is that we have the natural evolution of economies of scale. The tight variance, are producers and there is a hidden flow; from larger at lower rates to smaller at higher. If there is an economy going on, it does so with quantized flow,  the fundamental assumption thing.

So those distribution of un met beliefs resemble the quantization we expect in finite distribution. The traders saying, if you want this flow, then these quantizations levels must be met.  Those quantization levels determined by the inventory risks that represents something like a 15% reserve.

We ae back to the hidden map.

Making opera Widgets

I have my system down pat.  I have the three basic files:  config.xml, index.html, and myscript.js. I keep a command prompt open.  I zip those three files into an archive.  Then I switch back to my opera browser and open that resulting zip file.  The Opera will install and let you run the widget. I use whatever text editor I please. Most of the value added goes into the file myscript.js.

As I make little widgets i will post them.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
  <style>
body {
color : green;
border: solid red;
background-color: blue;
  font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;
  font-size: 16px;
}

</style>
    <title>Hello World!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Hello World!</p>
  </body>

Like this simple Hello World. I make this widget visible with and ugly colored background in the style section.

Banker Widgets

he success of the mobile money programme in Kenya – where money is exchanged via mobile phone – has been phenomenal. In four years, a country with only 850 bank branches has seen the number of outlets providing the service grow from 4,000 to 25,000. People have access to formal finance as never before. This column studies 3,000 households between 2008 and 2010, tracking this social and economic transformation. From Jack and Sun at VoxEU

Great chart, go read this article.

Where have I seen this chart before? In th Great Depression. Home entertainment Radio climbed just like this digital money thingy. So the robots in Kenya, especially the CEO of the largest monopoly provider, have instantaneous access to a nearly pure Money Index. It tells them at that moment haw money is moving, all of the set NilogNi, for most of the retail and wholesale sets of i. But man, what a service.

We need to liberate the great equalizers robots. They cruise the money waves and smooth entropy. A company like Google creating the open source equalizer widget. Anybody using the digital money system can agree with the counter party about distributing the trade over time.

We get a digital market based on an aggregate measure of: The Willingness to reveal vs the desire for liquidity. Each trader making the personal trade, agree on the parameter setting, and the trade is executed by the Bot. Trading bots, they keep secret information about a contracted convergence rate; the Bot will use that as his guide to setting the window of his entropy tuner. Always trying to wedge in trades at the spectral space about the secret targeted i, in the collection of NilogNi.

The Autonomous liquidity Bots, roam, just looking for nickels, returning the profit to the network operator.

My theory says this is a depression causing shock, for money will very quickly establish who is not liquid behind the scenes. Things thought normal yesterday will appear out of sorts today, because retail money is becoming much more accurate much more suddenly.