Greg Mankiw links to a WSJ piece about our negative bequest to our children. It's a point I've made many times myself (and am sometimes accused of bashing the elderly because of this). A good quote from the WSJ piece:

[R]egardless of how much they have contributed, the hard reality is that the federal government has already spent it. No matter how deserving they are, it is younger generations of workers who have to come up with the money.

It is morally wrong to force young people to make good on false promises made before they were even born. It is an outrage, a scandal, a shame on our society. A society that invests in the old at the expense of (actually, to the large detriment of) the young cannot survive. A caring and kind society cares for the weak and elderly and helpless; a dynamic and just society allows the young to grow and prosper on their own merits. If America is to prosper as a nation, the young must be given room to build families and careers. To build lives, without the onerous, crushing burden of debt run up by their forebears.

Never mind questions of ethics or "fairness": it's just math. The numbers do not, cannot, and will not ever even up, no matter what accounting tricks the government uses. Until we fundamentally change how the Big Three entitlement programs (SS, Medicare, Medicaid) work, we will continue to load up our young people with a crippling load of debt they had no hand in accruing.

How boned is California? In California, a lifeguard -- a lifeguard -- can make $200K annually and retire at 50 with a full pension worth 90% of his full-time pay.

Speaking of California, senior member of the Loyal Order of the Terminally Boned (LOTB): The average age for public-sector retirement is...60. While still younger than the national average, this "average" is misleading; an outsized number of CA public-sector employees retire at 55 or even 50 with full benefits.

More on the (possible) bursting of the "education bubble": Is College A Rotten Investment? (Yeah, it's a Slate link, but work with me here.) I don't think that college is always a waste of time and money of course; but I think that probably 50% or maybe 60% of the enrolled student body right now shouldn't be there. College is not only not doing them much good; it's actually doing them harm, both in terms of debt and in terms of opportunity cost.

Beware of Greeks blaming speculators. (I have this mental image of some politician doing a Shatner-esque primal scream: SPEEEEECUUUUUULAAAAAATORS!)

What is an ounce of gold really worth? The short answer is: it's worth whatever you can buy with it. Historically, gold is high but not hysterically so; it's the dollar that has tanked. It takes a lot of dollars to buy gold.

Democrats are in love with a girl named Rosy Scenario. Most of their fiscal projections are predicated on robust GDP growth over the next decade and a substantially-higher tax-regime. How likely is this scenario to come to pass? Not very. Over-regulation and excessive taxation will kill the private-sector economic growth that America needs to grow GDP substantially.

You know who's DOOMed? Mitt Romney, that's who. RomneyCare was bad enough, but Mitt's unwillingness or inability to recognize it for the disaster it is will kill him in the 2012 election if the GOP is stupid enough to trot him out there.

Retired GM executives sue for lost pension benefits. Obama only cares if you're in a union, guys. Don't look for any help there. Also: there's no money. You remember that old saying, "You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip?" GM is a turnip.

[UPDATE 1]: Bob Saget reminds me in the comments that today's Treasury bond auction will officially put the US over its debt-limit. Feel the burn!

[UPDATE 2]: Slublog reminds me that Uncle Sugar's bailout of GM really hasn't provided the kind of corporate stability and growth the government was hoping for.
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Posted by: Monty at 05:17 AM | Comments (188)
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Sure, it may have something to do with the way all the Stormfronters rush over here to ensure Paul comes out on top of the AoSHQ GOP candidate polling I do periodically. But it definitely has more to do with the fact that he's a barely functional retard who couldn't express a coherent foreign (or economic) policy even if all our lives were at stake . . . which they are, y'know.

Ron Paul says he would not have authorized the mission that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, and that President Barack Obama should have worked with the Pakistani government instead of authorizing a raid.

“I think things could have been done somewhat differently,” Paul said this week. “I would suggest the way they got Khalid [Sheikh] Mohammed. We went and cooperated with Pakistan. They arrested him, actually, and turned him over to us, and he’s been in prison. Why can’t we work with the government?”

Asked by WHO Radio’s Simon Conway whether he would have given the go-ahead to kill bin Laden if it meant entering another country, Paul shot back that it “absolutely was not necessary.”

“I don’t think it was necessary, no. It absolutely was not necessary,” Paul said during his Tuesday comments. “I think respect for the rule of law and world law and international law. What if he’d been in a hotel in London? We wanted to keep it secret, so would we have sent the airplane, you know the helicopters into London, because they were afraid the information would get out?”

I'm just going to throw this out there and maybe the Ronulans can explain: isn't a hotel room in London just slightly different than a safe house in Abbottabad? It's scratching the tip of my brain, but I'm almost certain there's something quite distinguishable between the two examples...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:13 AM | Comments (176)
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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:18 AM | Comments (193)
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The Top 10 Movies That People Lie About Having Seen

Well people lie about a lot of things so it's no surprise that they'd lie about movies too. And a recent poll by the British movie rental company, LoveFilm, confirms this finding that nearly 80% of people claim to have seen movies they haven't just to impress people.

The Godfather tops the list of the most pretended about movies which means that nearly a third of people who insist that it insists upon itself insist on lying.

The most lied about movies are:

1. The Godfather (30 per cent)
2. Casablanca (13 per cent)
3. Taxi Driver (11 per cent)
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (9 per cent)
5. Reservoir Dogs (8 per cent)
6. This Is Spinal Tap (7 per cent)
7. Apocalypse Now (6 per cent)
8. Goodfellas (5 per cent)
9. Blade Runner (5 per cent)
10. The Great Escape (4 per cent)

Me - I've seen all of these movies.</smug>

Okay that's a lie - I've only seen nine of them (guess the missing one - oh the shame, the shame).

And of course lying can work both ways: I always claim never to have seen the Tranformers movies whenever Gabe brings them up, and I'll keep denying Atlas Shrugged as long as it gets me off the hook for the Epic Movie Review.

So what movies have you lied about? more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:32 PM | Comments (1157)
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6 days old. But new to me.

Public service announcement or gutsy decision?

We may never know the truth.

via Robert on Faceboog more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:09 PM | Comments (116)
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You know why I think that?

I think that because he's doing his own cover art design:

No seriously, look at that. That is not a professional job. Those... antlers in the title? What?

Mothers and fathers, could your five and six year olds do this? I submit they could. And would.

Meanwhile this jagoff is posing like some kind of Fugitive of Love in the world's worst version of Hard Day's Night.

And what the hell is that at the bottom? It's his attempt at icy mountains, right? What is that?

Is there some new free download that has monkeys randomly draw things for you?

Does he actually have a publisher? If so, why are the letting this moron do the book cover on Photoshop for Imbeciles?

I hope that baby gets its intelligence-genes through its mother.

By the way, even though this is on Amazon, it's so stupidly amateurish I do suspect we're being punked.

Thanks to rdbrewer.

Posted by: Ace at 03:37 PM | Comments (142)
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Byron York takes note of the huge elephant in the room -- the lack of a huge elephant in the room.

Talk to enough people around [South Carolina] and you'll learn two lessons, over and over again. One is that there is absolutely, positively no unity among Republicans about any presidential candidate or potential candidate; there's no such thing as a frontrunner. The other is that in the back of their minds, many Republicans are hoping that somewhere, somehow, a superhero candidate will swoop down out of the sky and rescue them from their current lackluster presidential field. They know it's a fantasy, but they still hope.

It's not just dissatisfaction with the field.... Seeing each candidate as flawed, they focus on the unattainables -- Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio -- who they believe might bring a fresh face and new hope to the GOP.

[O]f course, if any of the unattainables actually ran, the dissatisfied might quickly develop doubts about him, too. But at least they'd be new doubts, rather than the old, lingering ones about some of the current candidates.

All this has led to intense frustration among Republicans in South Carolina -- and around the country, too. They believe Barack Obama is eminently beatable, even after the recent triumph of killing Osama bin Laden. When his bin Laden bounce settles down, it's likely that Obama will return to the mid-40s job approval range. And yet Republicans are fighting the idea, heard not just in the press but among some of their own colleagues, that a president in the mid-40s can't be defeated. It doesn't make sense to them. So they hope for some new way out of the problem.

True, true. Some emailers still express hope that Christie or Rubio might run; comes up in the comments, too.

I know the feeling. But one of the reasons I have been annoyed about Palin's hold on the Republican imagination is that I just don't think she's running (or could win, if she did), and therefore thinking of Palin as nominee represents not thinking about one of the people actually running.

Similarly, dreaming of Christie, or Rubio, or -- I'll cop to it -- Ryan keeps us from thinking about the actual candidates.

Christie says, 100%, he's not running, and doesn't seem to be. Rubio says he's not running (although he has been weak on the question of whether he'd serve as Vice President; but that's not top of ticket). Ryan, despite the attempts by Weekly Standard to will him into running, seems satisfied with his old answer of "My kids are too small and my ego's not big enough."

I think Donald Trump was a beneficiary of this a month ago. A lot of people are looking for some candidate to capture their imagination. Even cynics are disguised, disappointed romantics, and everyone wants to fall in love. Trump, I think, was a flash infatuation. Rich, talks tough, has the cache of celebrity -- okay, this guy then!

But there's not going to be any surprise Prince Charming.

Jay Cost addresses this, and notes that Republicans, with the singular example of Barry Goldwater, have since 1948 always run either last year's runner up (comfort level, familiarity, "his turn"), or some dominant figure (Eisenhower), or, of course, actually an incumbent already running for president, and suggests we might be getting a little wigged out since we're not used to having wide-open primaries.

He says we shouldn't sweat it:

[T]he party does not need to fall in love with its nominee. Sitting in the background here is my (admittedly heterodox) opinion that "enthusiasm" doesn't matter all that much for presidential elections. The most loyal partisans usually are the ones who make a regular habit of voting in presidential elections, regardless of their enthusiasm. Additionally, to the extent that enthusiasm does matter, it's important to remember that a close election will drive up interest, and therefore turnout, while a Republican blowout will make all this irrelevant. Enthusiasm could indeed be a problem in an Obama blowout, as that might open up scores of new House and Senate pickup opportunities for the Democrats. Finally, the Obama administration has thoroughly alienated the conservative base, meaning that we can expect it to turn out, at the least, to vote against the president if not for the GOP nominee (recall how the Democratic base turned out in droves for the thoroughly lackluster John Kerry).

And plus: We don't know a lot of these guys yet. The guys we know aren't running for president (mostly); the guys who are running we don't know.

But being unknown is only a problem in the beginning of a campaign. Whoever the nominee turns out to be, they're going to have near 100% name recognition by the end of the process, one way or the other.

And who knows. Some candidates grow in office. Some also grow over the course of a campaign.

And you know, I wanted to link Rescue Me by Aretha Franklin, but it's not on the internet (no, seriously, you find it). So I'll risk ridicule and link this other song featuring Aretha Franklin that lyrically echoes the post.

Posted by: Ace at 02:57 PM | Comments (352)
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It's a well-done parody. As Jason F. says (who sends it), the connection they make is a little dicey.

But here's the Galactic Empire Times, with Darth Vader announcing that "We got him." Him, meaning bearded rebel in hiding Obi Wan Kenobi.

When the end came for Kenobi, he was found not in the remote uncharted areas of Wild Space and the Unknown Regions, where he has long been presumed to be sheltered, but in a massive compound about an hourÂ’s drive west from the Tatooine capital of Bestine. He had been living under the alias "Ben" Kenobi for some time.

The compound, only about 50 miles from the base of operations for the Imperial Storm Squadron, is at the end of a narrow dirt road and is roughly eight times larger than other homes in the area, which were largely occupied by Tusken Raiders. When Imperial operatives converged on the planet on Saturday, following up on recent intelligence, two local moisture farmers “resisted the assault force” and were killed in the middle of an intense gun battle, a senior Stormtrooper said, but details were still sketchy early Monday morning.

A representative of the Imperial Starfleet said that military and intelligence officials first learned last summer that a “high-value target” was hiding somewhere on the desert world and began working on a plan for going in to get him. Beginning in March, Lord Vader worked closely with a series of several different Admirals serving onboard the Death Star to go over plans for the operation, and on Friday morning gave the final order for members of the 501st Legion (known commonly as "Vader's Fist") to strike.

Now Here's Something: Eddiebear sends this fake Craigslist ad, now deleted, probably because Keith Olbermann cried about it.

Here's the text of what it had said.

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Posted by: Ace at 01:39 PM | Comments (131)
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The poll purports to be of all people, but, this is weird, they seem to think the country is very heavily Democratic.

Obama's numbers here are huge on everything -- why, people even approve of the handling of the economy!

And then, when you check the cross-tabs, you find out the people polled were the the American Bar Association, NAMBLA, and the members of the Grateful Dead. Including the dead one.

But then you get to the party ID: 46 percent identify as Democrat or leaning Democrat, 29 percent identify as Republican or leaning Republican, 4 percent identify as purely independent leaning towards neither party, and 20 percent answered, “I don’t know.”

For contrast, the APÂ’s immediate preceding poll was 45 percent Democrat, 33 percent Republican; the likely-voter pool in October 2010 was 43 percent Democrat, 48 percent Republican. The pollÂ’s total sample in October 2010 split 43 percent Democrat, 40 percent Republican.

There's always a question on this partisan-affiliation question, because pollsters typically ask people about what they believe their affiliation is. And this changes. When the GOP is doing poorly, conservative-leaners will tend to report they're "independent;" when we do well, some of these conservative-leaning independents now identify as Republicans. Same thing with the Democrats, their less-party-attached leaners sometimes saying "Democrat" and sometimes saying "independent."

So there may be some disaffected Democrats, who were previously saying they were "independents," now proudly claiming the Democrat label, and thus the Democratic share of the public would grow.

But.

There is no way in hell that there are now more Democrats than there were when Hope and Change fever hit its climax in November 2008.

But that's what AP wishes you to believe.

Because they think you're stupid, and also, because they are.

Posted by: Ace at 01:15 PM | Comments (109)
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"Case in point," he says when an audience member suggests that bin Ladin's death is a pretty good reason to re-elect Obama.

We must finish what we started, if it kills every last one of us.

Posted by: Ace at 12:36 PM | Comments (126)
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