Welcome to tonight's theme-less hump day ONT.

Which Airports Are Ripping You Off?

It's no secret that it costs much more to fly out of some airports than others. Well Nate Silver of the NYT has run the numbers - accounting for miles flown, flight volume and other variables - to find out which airports are unreasonably expensive (or cheap).

Prices are higher the more the legacy airlines dominate an airport, but they also tend to be a bit higher where Southwest has a large share as opposed to other low-cost carriers like AirTran and JetBlue. (Southwest is cheap, but it isnÂ’t quite as cheap as some of these up-and-coming airlines and now represents something of a middle ground.) Also, prices tend to be higher when any one airline dominates an airport, regardless of whether it is a legacy carrier or a low-cost one.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:13 PM | Comments (575)
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Yeah.

I love this argument people trot out -- our tiny cuts actually get bigger over time.

You know what else that's true for?

The $1.5 trillion deficit.

If $352 million will become $300 billion over time, whatever shall $1.5 trillion become?

Or does the bad stuff not compound?

By the way, if you were hoping the CBO was making this up, and that Boehner would contradict it -- based on the emails between Red State and his office, it seems confirmed and accepted.

They want credit for the $38 billion in future spending authority they did cut, for example.

Posted by: Ace at 03:39 PM | Comments (589)
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As I noted: The Democrats offered Boehner a crooked "deal" wherein they'd offer some smoke and mirrors only-in-accounting-world "cuts" and all Boehner had to do was say yes and the Democrats would play along and pretend they'd been beaten.

First Boehner announced he would not go along with such a deceit.

And then he did, with the Democrats and their allies in the media playing "the Republicans won" narrative, per the agreement, until the Democrats could contain their quiet victory no longer and began announcing it.

So there you go. We started this process, we thought, with $101 billion in cuts, which we only found out after the election was a promise to cut $61 billion.

Then Hal Rodgers -- who must resign -- had an opening bid of around $30 billion, which the Tea Party got angry about and forced him to push a supposed $61 billion cut, but the hand was tipped, it was clear we were not only not holding out for $61 billion, but if we had our druthers, we wouldn't even start there, nevermind end there.

Then some Tea Party people and the Republican Study Group pushed to get it back up to $100 billion, but leadership, including Eric Cantor, voted that down, and some in our very own party used Democratic language in defending their precious spending, saying the cutters wanted to take a "meat axe" to the budget and hurt people who depend on government.

Then we started cutting every week, which turns out now to have been a scam, because we weren't cutting spending, we were cutting future spending authority which wasn't likely to be spent anyway. In essence, when I thought we were making progress, we were actually just giving the Democrats their way by funding government at the same level as usual.

Then we finally agreed on $38.5 billion. Later inspection checked more closely, and determined that most of that wasn't really cuts at all, but accounting gimmicks, fake cuts, and that the real amount of cuts was around $14 billion.

Then someone noticed -- actually, it's closer to $8 billion.

And now the CBO looks at it.

$352 million, with an m, in cuts. What the government spends in... oh, it's like $6 billion a day, so $352 million is what the government spends in about an hour and twenty minutes.

That's what we fought for in November--so that we could cut the 365 days of spending of 2010 into 354 days, twenty two hours, and forty minutes worth of spending.

Hal Rodgers has to go. Has to go. The party has to demand he resign from his post. There have to be consequences.

Someone has to pay.

The rest have to know they're next. We can't hang them all, but we can hang one of them. To encourage the others.

Biggest spending cut in history, huh?

GOP Leadership Lobbying for Votes: At Hot Air.

F*** it all. Shut it down. Burn it down. The hell with it all.

2012? Who cares?

Posted by: Ace at 02:46 PM | Comments (364)
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Check out this poll.

Americans are divided on whether the new plan by House Republicans to cut spending goes too far, but the public definitely thinks the GOP budget unfairly favors some groups more than others, according to a new national poll.
...

Fifty-one percent of people questioned in the poll say the Republican proposal for the 2012 budget goes too far in cutting spending, with 47 percent saying the cuts are not too deep.

Oh, that part's fine -- actually, unexpectedly good news: If 47% think it's good, then we can do it. Close enough to a majority.

Then again, I really think the public is too stupid to understand the question. I think they're talking about the 2011 budget deal, even though they're being asked about the 2012 play offered by Ryan.

I have reasons for believing that:

But by a 68 to 29 percent margin, Americans say the proposed GOP cuts unfairly favor some groups more than others. And seven in ten also believe the Republican budget will affect their families.

Ah sure, of course, of course. These people know not a goddamn thing about the budget but of course they will offer their opinion that it favors the rich or some goddamned thing.

It gets worse.

...

"The president's ace in the hole may be what the elder George Bush once called 'the vision thing'. Two-thirds say that President Obama has a vision for the country's future - so expect to hear more about 'winning the future' in the coming months," adds Holland.

The guy who just alerted the media to let them know he was going to appoint another commission to make proposals three years from now is the guy with the "vision"?

Well, if you take the question literally, I guess I can't argue with it. Undeniably, Obama does have a vision for America. It's just that that vision is Mexico.

But I don't think that's what these people meant.

I think they meant something far more retarded.

"The Vision Thing:" Do nothing and pretend you're doing something. Some vision.

“Last year, in the absence of a serious budget, the President created a Fiscal Commission. He then ignored its recommendations and omitted any of its major proposals from his budget, and now he wants to delegate leadership to yet another commission to solve a problem he refuses to confront," he said. “We need leadership, not a doubling down on the politics of the past. By failing to seriously confront the most predictable economic crisis in our history, this President’s policies are committing our children to a diminished future."

I can't believe he announced a speech so that he could announce a fresh commission.

Jesus.

I tried to predict what he'd say, and in broad strokes, I was close enough.

But I'll tell you one thing I never could have predicted:

Automatic tax increases without congressional voting.

And I'll tell you another thing I never could have predicted:

That the guy who bought himself a year's worth of no-comment by deferring important questions to a commission, and then promptly ignored that commission's recommendations, would then make a major announcement that he fully intends to appoint a new commission.

The critics are wrong. Obama does have balls.

Posted by: Ace at 02:05 PM | Comments (137)
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Ah, I didn't catch this. His idea about the automatic "spending cuts" was coupled with the automatic "spending reductions," which is his new code for tax hikes.

He says that if his plan, which doesn't exist, fails to cut spending, which it isn't actually designed to do, some sort of mechanism of automatic "spending reductions" will go into effect.

Which means tax increases. Like reducing the wasteful "spending deduction" of your personal exemption, thereby taxing more of your income.

He views it as unnecessary spending when the government lets you keep your money, and his plan is to have an automated system to keep this money from going out the government door (by which he means remaining in your pocket).

And, even better, at its heart is something the Democrats have always wanted: The ability to raise taxes without even having to risk the public outcry from voting for it.

Per Obama's plan, whenever the government didn't balance its books, "spending reductions" go into effect, like clockwork machinery without further human aid, and just take as much of your money as needed.

Well, he sure is transformative. That much I'll give him.

Via Instapundit.

Posted by: Ace at 01:46 PM | Comments (89)
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Post-partisan.

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (326)
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First of all, he's proposing less deficit reduction than Ryan. $4.4 trillion versus $4 trillion in the Obama plan. And here's the cute thing: Obama is suddenly talking about 12 year windows, instead of the standard 10, as Ryan did.

So he chose 12 years, probably because he wanted to get the number up to the $4 trillion range.

Further, Obama's plan as far as Medicare consists, as far as I can tell, merely ordering the agency to keep spending at no greater than a .5 or 1% rate of growth.

Um, look, this is his same idea with "bending the curve" with Medicare; there he stole a half trillion from the program to pay for the health care of other people, and then simply asserted that stealing the money from the program would force costs down such that nothing would be lost.

1, this is silly, because the government is what you call a soft touch on these matters. Cost discipline gets imposed by the end-user. It will not be imposed by a government which desperately needs the votes of the end user.

Without actually suggesting any concrete ways to reduce Medicare's costs, he just basically says "I will magically make it cost less."

2, if stealing $500 billion from Medicare would magically force costs down so that no user experiences a net reduction in actual services, why should Ryan's proposal not have a similar property? Furthermore, Ryan's plan at least has a plausible mechanism by which it is possible to imagine prices being forced down (a private insurer, probably requiring higher co-pays and deductibles, which in turn makes the end-user more cost-sensitive and drives down price where it has to be driven down-- at the actual point of sale, not weeks afterwards when Medicare sends out a check for services already rendered.

3, I seem to notice him saying that if his proposed order to reduce Medicare costs does not reduce costs (which it won't, same as it didn't with ObamaCare -- premiums are going up, not down) by the year 2023, then, get this, he will authorize "the Commission" (I think the Medicare trustees or something) to propose further means of reducing costs.

Get that? If, in 12 years, his plan hasn't worked yet, he'll actually call for a third-party blue-ribbon commission to propose some more changes.

Oh, and guess what? His big idea for closing the deficit is 1 cutting defense spending and 2 increasing taxes.

Bonus: He also says that if, in 2014, two years after the next election, the CBO's projection doesn't show "the share of the deficit as a fraction of GDP" falling (note that is a lenient way to view it), he is willing to go so far as authorizing the President and Congress to consider further "spending cuts" and "spending reductions."

What?

Get that? If what he's doing (which is nothing) doesn't work, he will reconvene two years post-election to kick it around some more.

I should note that the New Democratic Style Guide is to refer to any typical tax deductions as "tax expenditures" and hence, eliminating those (and thereby increasing taxes) is no longer a "tax increase," but a "spending reduction."

That's the new speak, man. Better get used to it.

"A Balanced Approach:" 12 year window, huh?

Obama's 12-yr plan: tax hikes now, more spending now, and then spending cuts in the last 5 years.

Yup, tax increases for 7 years and promise we'll start cutting spending like a mofo those last five years!!!!11! Swearsies!!!

Thanks to soothsayer for that.

Oh, he says that we can't cut spending right now because of this precarious recovery we supposedly have; we don't want to disrupt that.

But the tax increases? Oh, they won't fuss no one.

Another bonus: At the end of the speech, the bullshitty "uplift" part, he used the word "quagmire," but he pronounced it, en francais, I guess, as "quogmire."

Like, we're in a quogmire in Pokistohn.

Posted by: Ace at 11:15 AM | Comments (253)
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Great. So now even my only cardio activity of "drinking to forget" is out.

What the hell, man?

Now, they're actually not talking about learning or memory as you think of them. They're talking about making the brain malleable and shapable, and they link this to drug dependency -- when you tweak your brain in this way, you're teaching it, I guess, to like being in that state?

Or something?

Morikawa's study, which found that repeated ethanol exposure enhances synaptic plasticity in a key area in the brain, is further evidence toward an emerging consensus in the neuroscience community that drug and alcohol addiction is fundamentally a learning and memory disorder.

When we drink alcohol (or shoot up heroin, or snort cocaine, or take methamphetamines), our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn't stop there. We become more receptive to forming subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations.

In an important sense, says Morikawa, alcoholics aren't addicted to the experience of pleasure or relief they get from drinking alcohol. They're addicted to the constellation of environmental, behavioral and physiological cues that are reinforced when alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.

Via Instapundit.

Posted by: Ace at 10:51 AM | Comments (96)
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It's at 1:35 Eastern time, or as those of us in the east know it, "1:35." Update: The president is late. I really want him to start walking around with a golf club on his shoulder all the time. Like Bob Hope. At least have some fun with it. Own it.

If he says anything, which I doubt he will, I'll note it here.

On CNN's In the Arena without Kathleen Parker, you know, Client Nine's show, Alan Simpson wishcasts that Obama's going to be serious today:

CLIENT 9 (wearing a mesh nipple-less wifebeater): Is this the magic moment? Has the president called you and said, Senator, you did the hard work, I'm going to finally embrace you -- this sort of structural concept of your report and make this the centerpiece of my thinking?

SIMPSON: Well, I think you might be aware that we'll be there. So I don't think he would invite us there before or after his remarks if he were going to just put us up there as cardboard figures and say, thanks for your work and I didn't take any of it on.

CLIENT 9 (discretely touches groin_: Well, you've never been a cardboard figure. There's no question about that.

SIMPSON: You're going to see -- you're going to see movement. He wasn't going to do anything. If he had back then he'd been savaged by the Republicans. Republicans weren't anything to do anything. They would have been savaged by the White House.

Solely this is a great cone of reality coming together, squeezed like a Venturian nozzle where they're going to have to get in the room in the dark and somebody is going to say, we won't tell anybody that you made the suggestion which can get us on the path to sustainable, just sustainable or stabilizing the debt. You don't have to go crazy. Just stabilize it.

Yeah, I don't think Simpson's right. I already know what Obama's going to do. He's going to do exactly what he did before: He's going to say that we can't "slash" entitlements but that we need to have a "conversation" about Simpson-Bowles.

What I just said (pithily for once) in one sentence Obama will spend 30 minutes on.

Obama's game is to appear mature and serious, in as much as he talking about these things, while reassuring older votes (and liberal Democrats who just want everyone on as much welfare as possible) that it's entirely talk.

It costs you nothing to just talk around a thing, particularly when you keep insisting that you just mean to talk. And that's the way Obama will play it, as he always has.

Oh, I forgot, he'll call for raising taxes on the rich which will cut our ten year deficit all the way down from $20 trillion to $19 trillion.

Republicans say this is a "reactionary" move and Obama's just doing as I suggested, talking and talking to sound as if he's doing something. Which he is -- he's running for re-election.

. An adviser of a senior Senate Republican has this take: “They didn’t think this one through. They’re winging it.” He sees a three-pronged dilemma for the president: “His base won’t let him touch Social Security, Medicare was gutted in ObamaCare, and they couldn’t pass a tax hike with a supermajority Democratic Congress.”

A Republican communications guru also takes a dim view of the effort, telling me, “This speech, to me, is incredibly reactionary, as is everything they seem to do at the White House. Paul Ryan made a big splash with his plan, and now the White House is playing catch-up. Notice that the speech is in middle of the day and not at the White House but instead at George Washington University. So, it’s a ‘major-minor’ speech?” The guru sees a White House obsessed with spin: “All the White House believes the president has to do with this speech is reclaim the headlines. So, he just has to sound good. In their mind, he could be reading out of the phone book.”

What seniors don't want: Cuts to entitlement

What they don't mind so much: Just talking about cuts to the entitlements

Without a plan, that's all Obama's doing. Until he says the words "I am submitting a draft bill to the House...," then this all just a political theater.

Action. Not words.

I need some help here: I am trying to put out a top ten but I am stuck at like three of them. The general topic is broad: "Top Ten Likely Quotes From Obama's Address." If you could help me with suggestions, I'd appreciate it.

I'll collect the best ones (but be aware, I usually edit or sharpen a basic joke idea) and put up a list. I'll give ya's credit and all.

Posted by: Ace at 09:38 AM | Comments (925)
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A smart guy wrote a piece that explained this. Wish I remembered who to credit. But I'm crediting "whatever smart guy wrote this."

A suit of armor used to be prohibitively expensive -- 40 gold pieces, 60 gold pieces. I don't know. I don't have my Dungeon Masters Guide handy. Point is, it cost so much that only the landed gentry -- the rich and super-rich -- could afford it.

Nowadays, you can buy body armor for about a week's salary, even if you're lower-middle class. (I have no idea what it costs, just go with it.)

The difference is between craft and industrial production. Craft is very expensive, because it's just one highly-skilled guy doing the work. His skill is valuable and therefore his time is valuable, and while he can pawn off some of the labor to apprentices and other lower-paid workers, by and large most of the man-hours used in creating the fruits of his craft are his hours, and his time is valuable, so lots of time * high cost per hour = very high cost of labor.

Good produced through industrial production, on the other hand, are made largely by machines, which have a high initial cost but actually are cheaper than three or four people's yearly salaries (go with me-- I'm speaking in generalities), and most of the people needed for this work are low-skilled, so their cost per hour is relatively low. Sure, you have some very skilled people building the machine and engineering the final product, and they command very high rates of pay indeed, but their costs are of the one-time variety, and are spread over each unit sold, so that those costs end up being fairly small in the scheme of things.

Point is, fewer man-hours are needed to produce industrial goods, and most of those man-hours are paid rather cheaply. Few man-hours * low cost per man-hour = small costs of labor.

Note that we are all wealthier than ever due to this industrial effect. It's not that we have so much now -- we're not all princes and merchant captains. It's that the cost of most goods has dropped so low -- due to machines and industry greatly multiplying the output of a few human workers -- that the basket of goods we can purchase with our money is now relatively large.

But this wealth effect, caused by the exploding plenty of industrialized goods, does not apply to goods and services that are still crafts. That is, are still basically one skilled guy, using his skilled (and therefore expensive) man-hours to provide a service or make a good.

Health care -- at least until we have auto-surgeons and aritifcially-intelligent dianosticians -- will continue being a craft. And that means not only will it remain expensive, but it will actually get more expensive every year.

Because expense is determined by looking at the relative buying power of your dollar.

At one point, a car was more expensive than a doctor's and hospital's services, even for a fairly difficult procedure. But the cost of that car has plummeted, whereas the relative cost of the medical services has stayed at the high cost of craft.

What's interesting is that we all have more wealth now, because things like foodstuffs, clothing, electronics and transportation have all gotten cheaper so we can buy those things (and more than we used to) and still have more money left on the side.

The trouble is that health care costs aren't similarly falling, so that every year, we can buy more goods, but health care costs increase in relative terms. In total, we have more wealth, but we get annoyed when we see a greater and greater portion of our wealth-pie going to health care. We don't notice that on the other side, a smaller and smaller piece of that wealth-pie is going towards goods that used to be quite pricey.

Overall, we're coming out ahead, but we're just focusing on the part of the cost-pie that's growing.

(And, by the way, it must grow: If goods fall in value, that means they're cheaper, and that means you'd have to pay a guy with a fixed cost-per-hour more of those goods every year just to keep paying him the same real amount of value.)

Not sure what this has to do with politics, except that we seem to have wisely (ahem) put ourselves on the hook, more and more, for one of the few costs in life that is required, by economic law, to always go up.

At least until they industrialize the process. Which won't be for 60 years or so. I don't know, I forget. I don't have my Traveller books handy.

Posted by: Ace at 09:21 AM | Comments (89)
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