One laugh came after [leftist hack and Soros lackey Eric] Alterman criticized New York Times columnist John Tierney for a piece he wrote during last summer’s Republican National Convention in which he made fun of Upper West Side shoppers and questioned whether they had examined their consciences. "I took this seriously," Alterman said. "It is an attack on people like us. It is OK all of a sudden to malign West Side elitist liberals like me."

[Disgraced former Times managing editor Gerald] Boyd, quick to support Tierney, said: "Eric, you’ve really got to cut down on the caffeine. I don’t think it is the end of civilization."

Since it opened, "Fahrenheit 9/11" has been a hit in both blue and red America, even at theaters close to military bases.

"[Fahrenheit 9/11] overperformed only in blue states, and even then only in the most urban parts of those blue states... It did very well in Canada. Fahrenheit 9/11 consistently overperformed in Canadian cities; without that boffo business, the film's gross would have been significantly smaller than it was. That's the upside of the story. The downside revealed by the Nielsen [movie sales] numbers is that Fahrenheit 9/11, far from being the runaway nationwide hit that [Michael] Moore claimed, underperformed in dozens of markets throughout red states and, most important -- as far as the presidential election was concerned -- swing states"...

We look at the impression given of PAM by five hundred media articles, and how that impression varied with eleven indicators of article information quality: mentioning an insider with firsthand knowledge, time since the firestorm began, article length, a news versus an opinion style, author gender and identification, and the awards, circulation, frequency, and topic specialties of the periodical. All eleven indicators individually predict more favorable impressions of PAM. Eight of them are significant and substantial in a multiple regression model, which predicts that a nine hundred word news article in an award-winning widely-read science and business publication a month later that mentioned an insider would give a solidly favorable impression of PAM, as would a similar thirty-five hundred word article today in a general publication.

The top ten Pulitzer historical finalists are New York Times (140), Washington Post (92), Los Angeles Times (86), Philadelphia Inquirer (63), Wall Street Journal (53), Boston Globe (48), Chicago Tribune (47), St. Louis Post-Dispatch (26), Seattle Times (20), and Chicago Sun-Times (14).

The top ten National Magazine finalists are: New Yorker (150), Esquire (71), Newsweek (44), Time (39), Business Week (35), Fortune (17), US News & World Report (15), New Republic (15), Forbes (11), and tied for tenth, Wired and IEEE Spectrum (10).

The top three British Press finalists are the Times (49), Telegraph (37), and Guardian (37).

Update... Reader James Neel wonders,

So is the gnome attempting to hide (badly) from the issue?

Or is the gnome signaling its willingness for the government to screw the gnome in an uncomfortable location?

I figure either applies to the Krugman position on Social Security.

Enter Paul Krugman, who every time you see him looks more and more like the Unabomber’s little brother...

Q: Do you believe that Social Security should be privatized, or no?

A: Yes, I believe that Social Security should be privatized. However there are also other things they can do with it.

Q: How do you believe the system should be fixed, and not just Social Security, but perhaps also Medicare, which seems to be a greater and more prevalent problem?

A: Well first of all, I don't believe there should be a Social Security system of our present kind. Our current Social Security system is a Ponzi game...in which the young pay in to pay the current expenses of the old. It's also being misrepresented, as if it were a form of insurance, that when you pay Social Security taxes, you are paying money which is being put away for your own benefit. That is not the case. The money that you pay goes out immediately, either to pay pensions to current retirees or to pay other expenses of government. There are no real assets corresponding to it...

One of the interesting things is, everybody talks about the problems of Social Security as the fact that the number of workers are going up less rapidly than the number of retirees. Well if that's the problem, you would think it would also effect life insurance companies, and yet haven't heard any problems with the life insurance companies, have you?

The ideal situation would be that we abolish Social Security and let people save for their own retirement.

I think its disgraceful that, well, take the case that always seems to be the most extreme. You have a young man who has AIDS. He is seriously ill and dying at age 50 at the latest, and when he's 40, the government comes along and says we gotta take a sixth of your income and put it aside for your old age. How absurd can you be?

Social Security has become a kind of an icon, an untouchable, and yet it's basic premise is flawed.

Q: Knowing that it won't be abolished, how would you propose to save Social Security?

A: What I would do is link the benefits to the price index, not a wage index. I would do that the whole way down and not just with the upper incomes. That would solve a good part of the problem. I would raise the date of retirement, and I would go in for private accounts, but on a larger scale. I would allow workers to keep 6 percent of their taxes.

Q: If the federal government does move to private accounts, does the $3 trillion that President Bush says he would have to borrow to get that moving cause a greater stress on the American economy?

A: No, because we already have that obligation. What we are talking about is replacing an unfunded debt with funded debt. We already have an obligation to all the people like myself who are currently on Social Security. The difference is it is not written out as funded debt. So when you talk about borrowing, they are not really changing the total government debt, they are only changing how much they recognize, and what is open and above board and how much of it is hidden in other funding.

This particular line from Paul Krugman's column today struck me:

"In health care, competition and personal choice can and do lead to higher costs and lower quality."

The evidence is just the opposite. Take the pharmaceuticals market: competition between therapeutically equivalent products not only gives patients and docs choice among products (not all patients react the same to each drug, even if they are in the same class), but enables insurers to extract rebates from manufacturers-- which in theory are passed along to the insured as savings. This intense competition in a lucrative market also provides incentives to firms to invest in the R&D necessary for the next generation of drugs.

Personal choice is playing a more important role than ever with the rise of formularies and different tiers and co-pays-- when patients feel the burn, they make different choices. For example, substituting a less expensive generic statin for a brand name product. The penetration of generic pharmaceuticals in the US (over half of all prescriptions are for generic versions of brand name drugs) shows that a mixture of regulation (Hatch-Waxman Act, patent protection) and market forces can result in BOTH high quality AND lower costs.

There are many examples in health care of how competition and personal choice can lower costs and improve quality.

• "The presence of U.S. troops boosts economic growth in host countries. There is a positive unconditional relationship between troop deployments and growth, based on data from 94 countries, and there is also a positive condi­tional relationship that factors in other explana­tory variables like war, political stability, and initial gross domestic product (GDP) levels. For example, a deployment of 500,000 U.S. troops to a host country spread over five decades (10,000 per year) is associated with an increase of 1 percent annual GDP growth per capita.
• "The evidence rejects the hypothesis that the U.S. military is economically exploiting or harming nations where it is deployed...
• "We theorize that the mechanisms driving the troops-growth relationship involve a 'security umbrella' effect and an 'innovation diffusion' effect. Therefore, we believe that troops provide stability and make investors more willing to invest in a given country. Furthermore, U.S. troops bring with them the relatively successful political and economic ideas of the United States—ideas that host countries often choose to adopt.
• "Our models indicate that duration of U.S. troop deployments matters more for long-run economic growth than overall force strength. That is, in terms of economic growth, there are diminishing returns for every additional soldier deployed to a foreign country. In addition, the growth benefit of U.S. troop deployments grows stronger over time."

May I state the obvious: Most of America’s great universities began as religiously affiliated schools. Centuries later, as most of them dropped their official religious ties, our great colleges remained heavily populated by conservative faculty and students until the final days of Nixon and the SDS. Is Krugman saying that Duke was poor academically until some uncertain date in the late 1970’s or 1980’s? Harvard? Princeton? Columbia? Exactly when did they become excellent, in his view? We can guess it’s roughly the same time period when conservatives (including much of each school’s most supportive alumni) would say the decline began.

Is Yeshiva bad? Notre Dame? Baylor?

The big change leftward on college faculties was the after-blast of the wave of protests on campuses accusing the college administrators of those days of “supporting” the Vietnam War. It’s accelerated in recent decades as college leaders have forfeited control. So, sad to say, many great, once diverse universities are lost to the thought police.

With this attack on religion, Krugman has left classic liberalism. He is a bigot. Like all bigots, he doesn’t battle the ideas of others; instead he attacks them personally and, for what, believing in God?

"Over the next few weeks I'll back up these assertions, and talk about what a workable health care reform might look like, if we can get ideology out of the way."

Of course, when he talks about "ideology" that has to be gotten "out of the way," he means any ideas or philosophies that disagree with his ideology. But no matter. Nothing from Krugman will be forthcoming on health care reform, just as nothing has ever come from Krugman's promise in his January 4 Times column to "suggest steps to strengthen the program."

Krugman is bereft of solutions. Only problems. He, like the Democratic Party he serves, is nothing but a sterile cuckoo.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:14 AM | link  

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 5:04 PM | link  

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 5:02 PM | link