[Hillary Clinton on ABC's "This Week"] peddled her sham gas-tax holiday and repeated her attempt to blame Indiana’s job losses on outsourcing and Nafta. [Interviewer George] Stephanopoulos asked her to name a single economist who thinks a tax-holiday plan would work, and the daughter of Wellesley and Yale took the chance to shove the geeks into their lockers: “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”

When Stephanopoulos pointed out that Paul Krugman, a Times columnist, has raised doubts about the plan, Clinton lumped Krugman in with the Bush administration and said she wasn’t going to listen to the people responsible for the last seven years.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Nearly every editorial board and economist in the country has come out against it. Even a supporter of yours, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, calls it pointless and disappointing. Can you name one economist, a credible economist, who supports this suspension?

CLINTON: Well, you know George, I think we've been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven't worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But can you name an economist who thinks this makes sense?

CLINTON: You know what, I'm not going to put my lot in with economists, because I know if we did it right, if we actually did it right, if we had a president who used all the tools of the presidency, we would design it in such a way that it would be implemented effectively.

As much as Obama talks, he doesn’t seem to talk much about his ideas for dividing us.

Dividing all U.S. employers, that is, into two categories – those which are “Patriot Corporations” and those which are not; it’s a nightmare version of the “Do Bee” and “Don’t Bee” books from kindergarten, except this one is a process to be administered by the Secretary of the Treasury.

Want to be a “Patriot Corporation”? Be headquartered in the U.S., pay 60% of each employee’s health care premiums, be “neutral” to union organizers and don’t reduce employment levels or compensation below levels set by the bill.

The bill to accomplish this was introduced on August 2, 2007 by Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin with original cosponsors Barack Obama and Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio. Roughly six months later, in February of 2008, Hillary Clinton cosponsored. Brown explains,

I've talked to Barack a lot about his Patriot Corporation Act, which is not trade per se, but it's certainly part of the economic package around globalization. The Patriot Corporation Act has not gotten the attention that I would hope it would. But, basically it says that if you play by the rules, if you pay decent wages, health benefits, pension; do your production here; don't resist unionization on neutral card check, then you will be designated a "Patriot Corporation" and you will get tax advantages and some [preference] on government contracts.

As with most of Obama's ideas, the economic effect would be far different than the political rhetoric. Can you feel the Change?

Washington, DC -- Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. will tour a Treasury Department printing facility in Kansas City next Thursday to observe the first mass production printing and packaging of the 2008 stimulus checks.

The time has come for the nation's wealthiest colleges and universities to rescue its leading newspapers — resources almost as vital to higher education's purpose as libraries, laboratories, classrooms, and concert halls. The plan I have in mind would call upon the richest institutions to set aside 3 percent of their endowments to buy The New York Times. That's for a start. Additional purchases of other newspapers by other endowments should follow.

...Why should colleges assume responsibility, or even care about the plight of newspapers? A higher-education institution's primary obligation is to its particular constituencies, of course, especially to its students. Consider student needs. How would students be able to think about the world beyond the institution's walls without the constant flow of timely information collected by journalists?

Moreover, faculty members are the experts that the news media often cite. The comments and observations of professors in newspapers like the Times, based on their research and expertise, promote the intellectual resources of their institutions and expand every reader's knowledge and understanding of the issue at hand...

Would the institutional owners hear a howl of protest from some alumni about buying "that liberal rag?" Probably, but on the seven campuses, the Times is broadly accepted as an essential, although fallible, source of information. Would the purchase divert money from other worthy purposes, like tuition support for poor and middle-class students? The money used to buy the Times would not be a gift but an investment with a monetary return, although a much smaller return than natural-gas fields or hedge funds would provide.

Cross your fingers, knock on wood: it’s possible, though by no means certain, that the worst of the financial crisis is over.

...here we go again. This is starting to look like a much more comprehensive financial crisis.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment...

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery."

I’m startled at Brad DeLong’s ignorance...

...in a recent column attacking Barack Obama, Paul Krugman has lost his bearings.

Krugman objects to Obama's suggestion, on Fox News, that he accepts the Republican claim that regulation should take the form of tradable emissions permits rather "top-down command and control." Krugman says that Obama is "giving Republicans credit for good ideas they never had."

...Actually Obama had it right. As Harvard's Robert Stavins, a long-time participant in the relevant debates and perhaps the world's leading expert on what actually happened, wrote me, "I think I know the history and provenance of U.S. of cap-and-trade and emission-reduction-credit systems relatively well, and Krugman's column is exceptionally misleading."

The major emissions trading program in federal law, enacted in 1990 and focused on acid deposition, was developed under Bush 41, in the White House no less (under the leadership of C. Boyden Gray, an influential Republican and a pioneering figure, in political circles, with respect to emissions trading). The law was pushed through an initially skeptical Democratic-controlled Congress. The pivotal role of the Bush White House has been carefully documented in books and articles. (See, for example, A. Denny Ellerman et al., Markets for Clean Air.)

The several early emissions trading systems, adopted in the 1970s, were established in Republican administrations (Nixon/Ford), with significant opposition from Democrats (and environmental organizations). The trading program for lead in gasoline was also adopted under a Republican president (Reagan).

Krugman is quite right to say that the Reagan administration resisted a regulatory response to acid deposition (a point that is irrelevant to Obama's claims). He is also right to say that economists of all stripes supported tradable permit systems by 1990. But in the political domain (which was clearly the topic), Obama was correct to say that such systems have come from Republicans. As Robert Stavins writes, "the history is what it is, and unfortuately Krugman has misled his readers in order to score some political points."

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:26 PM | link