Yeglesias picked up one the wrong lie

He says:

According to the Obama administration the nation’s fiscal problem is in the long term. According to the Obama administration the nation’s fiscal problem is mostly due to entitlements. And according to the Obama administration in the short-term there’s a large output gap. So why a short-term discretionary spending freeze?

The truth is that the long term deficit problem is right now. The Yglesias delusion is that a stimulus reduces output gap.

Just becaue Yglesias says so?

Brad wants Yglesias to get a fair shake, over and over and over, until we are shaken. The fair shake is usually the government health insurance programs, and Yglesias raises the usual:

Yglesias » Is Repealing the Affordable Care Act Secretly About Replacing It With a Different Secret Law?: In a word: No. But don’t tell wonk-turned-hack Douglas Holtz-Eakin who explains:

Replacing PPACA with real health-care reform that delivers quality care at lower costs. That is what the repeal vote is really about.

I always forget if I’m allowed to use the word “bullshit” on an official CAPAF website (that was a mention—thanks Professor Goldfarb!), but I think this is best analogized to the solid waste of a male bovine. This just isn’t how public policy works. We change (or “replace”) laws all the time, and it doesn’t happen by first repealing predecessor laws tout court and then gesturing vaguely at a replacement. My guess is that Holtz-Eakin has a bunch of ideas about ways to improve health care policy in the United States relative to the post-ACA status quo. My guess is that I even agree with some of those ideas. The way to get those ideas enacted is to start explaining them to the press and the public and start talking to members of congress about turning them into bills.
At this point I’m not actually sure what the repeal vote is “really” about, but it’s definitely not about starting concrete conversations about further changes to the American health care system.

First, there is no rule that says repeal, reversion or replacement is not part of any reorganization of government law. Congress does not write in stone and repeal is part of the Congressional tool kit, available to the current Congress.

Second, talking about the health business may actually involve talking about patients and doctors and leaving government out of the discussion.

Third, Talking about the health business may include admitting to Congressional ignorance of individual transactions, and our own inability to measure medical affairs on a fine grain.

There is huge amounts of evidence that further involvement of Congress in health insurance will incur very high adjustment costs over the next few years, likely to trigger multiple debt crisis.  The safest thing to do is delay until we figured out the economy.  Let's not forget, it is the household that pays for debt crisis. Yglesias, Pelosi and Obama have stepped into a government mess that will delay recovery for some time.

Some hubris from Yglesias

Talking about Chinese investors having access to hedge funds:

To give this an alternative interpretation, rapid economic growth in China is creating the largest pool of suckers the world has ever seen. Real world individuals exhibit bounded rationality, and lots of Chinese people who may have been extremely smart at getting rich in China’s industrial revolution may be quite foolish about their decision making regarding complicated western financial products.

So I call upon all Chinese hedge fund investors to short anything Yglesias says.

Yglesias!

What’s telling here is the dissonance.

Yglesias claiming tax payers don't get it.  Tax payers do get it, that is why they got their tax cut extended.

Yglesias, Pelosis and Obama are the ones dissonant, snookered, cheated, stupid, ignorant, bad traders etc.  Remember,  the poor and middle class end up paying all those Obamacare taxes, Yglesias organized it that way, taxpayers agreed and fools who listened to Pelosi will be running from the Obamacare Tax Police for a long time. But not the rich, as soon a politicians got that fool Yglesias to believe it, bribing Obama and Pelosis was easy.

Obamacare will be extended and waivered away for a while. Remember Bubba Clinton?  Remember anyone???  Clinton was smart enough to raise taxes then lose HilloryCare.  Not that idiot Yglesias, he gets a fake Obamacare, then lets the tax cuts ride in exchange.  What a fool!

Yglesias?

One of the absolutely strangest elements of modern American conservatism is the extraordinary level of hypersensitivity it exhibits about the idea that any white people might be racists.

Honest people admit their racism, we just do not like it when only one race is singled out for this condition, as Yglesias does in his relentless attacks on conservative whites. At least I try to spread my anti-religious bigotry around a bit.

Yglesias tutors his crowd

Private land ownership is neither a new concept nor a radical one.

Says he. After how many years of blogging does Yglesias finally get this this lesson?

Yglesias to provide universal Bond insurance

A European-Style Fiscal Crisis Is Impossible in the United States of America

He declares, and to prove it he is going to take his puny liberal blogger fee and guarantee all $15 trillion of our federal debt.

I am from California we use the term Greek style crisis, we name our politics after Greece precisely because of the debt crisis. We need negotiations between investors and Treasury, before we issue debt, just like the Greeks. In California, we are fucked, just like Greece, we need other states to fund us, just like Greece. Yglesias hero Brad DeLong is likely going to give up defined benefits to make the California budget work, just like Greece.

If we taxed pollution there would never be high speed trains

Yglesias simply adopts deception as a standard debating tactic:

But how many [HSR travelers] would obviously depend heavily on how the price compared to the price of those flights. And that in turn would have a great deal to do with how we price pollution.

The problem he has is that he cited a Ray LaHood puff piece that says HSR is energy efficient without reference to the calculation. The University Of Calif Berkeley has trashed the life cycle energy costs for the HSR in California, and Yeglesias has no compuction about re-releasing Ray LaHood' ignorant puff piece.  When we actually start taxing pollution, Yglesias  train is the first to go.