Coyote Blog

Back in January, I wrote about both ethanol and the stimulus bill, observing:

I have decided there is something that is very predictable about the media:  they usually are very sympathetic to legislation expanding government powers or spending when the legislation is being discussed in Congress.  Then, after the legislation is passed, and there is nothing that can be done to get rid of it, the media gets really insightful all of a sudden, running thoughtful pieces about the hidden problems and unintended consequences of the legislation

My emerging theorem about the media is that they want to be on the record as having predicted problems with legislation, but that for leftish legislation they personally support, they defer their most insightful analysis until after the law has passed.  That way, their favored legislation gets on the books, but they are also on the record as having spotted potential problems and can make the argument later that they were not rubes or useful idiots.

We are seeing this yet again, as the New York Times questions some obvious flaws with the Dartmouth health savings data (ht Insty)

Of course, the article misses the most obvious point -- while the Dartmouth data was certainly used to try to sell Obamacare, nothing in the actual legislation does anything to capture these supposed potential savings.  The $700 billion in waste number is more of a sort of happy thought that lets politicians sign the ridiculously expensive bill while pretending that some mythical savings are somehow available in the future through unidentified mechanisms to pay for the program.

I have written on several occasions about how the data demonstrate pretty conclusively that immigrants are not driving a crime wave in Arizona (here and here).  The one exception to this may be well-armed quasi militaristic gangs raiding near the border.  These guys are certainly running rampant in Norther Mexico and conflicting reports have them making certain US border regions nearly unlivable.

OK, but how is this crime a justification for state laws that harass day laborers and companies that hire immigrants, while requiring law enforcement to check immigration status at traffic stops?  One could technically describe the German army in 1941 as illegal immigrants in France, but I don't think this euphemism would trick anyone into thinking that Arizona-style immigration laws would have saved France from Guderion, Rommel and company.

There is zero in SB1070 that will do one little thing to phase such gangs.  So how can people with a straight face use such crime as justification for the bill?

A large part of Apple's iPad 3G sales pitch was the ability to buy a $30 a month unlimited data plan from AT&T.   In an announcement that clearly has been in the works long before Apple introduced the iPad, and which was only released after the first wave of iPad 3G sales, AT&T said "just kidding" to its unlimited data plan customers.  I understand where AT&T is going with this but if Apple is going to have an exclusive relationship with a cellular provider, it has some responsibility to its customers to keep them in line.

For years I have resisted the urge to switch to AT&T to get an iPhone, sticking with whatever imperfect phones I could find to access the Verizon network.  This just reinforces that choice.

Local telephone providers pretty much failed in their ability to offer reasonable high-speed data services to customers, for years losing out to cable and other suppliers.  It will be interesting to see if any cellular providers will be up to this challenge.  HT Megan McArdle.

Update: The old plans are still up at the Apple site selling iPads.  Note the new AT&T plan even cost increases the low volume plan, increasing it from $15 for 250mb to $15 for 200mb.  Crazy that Apple allowed their partner to do this within a month of the iPad 3G launch.

I have written a lot about the Cash for Clunkers law, and the fact that it was a hit with its beneficiaries because it bought cars that blue-booked for just under $1500 for two or three times that amount.  Other studies have shown that the program did abate some CO2, but at ridiculously high prices per ton.

But I have found a reason to love the Cash for Clunkers program:  it is a fabulous demonstration project for just how utterly pointless government stimulus programs can be.  Stimulus programs tend to be hard to evaluate in our complex economy -- sort of like trying to calculate the effect of a butterfly flapping its wings on world climate.  But since cash for clunkers only lasted a few weeks and hit only one industry, we can learn a lot about the effectiveness of government stimulus.

Here is the US Census data for auto dealer sales (source).  Thanks to my friend Scott who first pointed me to the analysis:

The dotted line simply averages the sales for the month of the clunkers program and the month after.  I think it is pretty clear that we spent a few billion dollars making some used car owners happy (by overpaying for their vehicles) but did absolutely nothing to move the trend line in auto sales, as the program appears to have just pulled forward purchases rather than stimulated new ones.

Update: Welcome Instapundit readers.  This is all in the family blogging day, as my son just started up his own blog with a post ranking baseball players.  Feel free to give him grief for being a Yankees homer.

Via Valley Fever:

In upholding the conviction of Josue Acosta Marquez, (a.k.a. Martin Contreras-Pulido) in an interstate marijuana smuggling case, the Circuit Court judges wrote that federal agents and Iowa cops did nothing wrong when they planted the electronic monitoring device on a pickup truck used by Marquez while it was parked at a Wal-Mart. Police accessed the unit seven times to change the batteries -- always in a public place -- and tracked the pickup as it drove between Des Moines and Denver.

Since anyone can see a vehicle parked or driving in public places, the use of electronics to enhance surveillance doesn't violate Fourth Amendment rights regarding unreasonable search and seizure, wrote Justices Roger Wollman, James Loken and John Gibson.

No warrant neeeded. And there's nothing stopping cops from planting those suckers as often and wherever they like, says the Eighth Court judges.

First, I have always thought that extended surveillance of a home or moving vehicle, beyond say a few hours, should require a warrant, even if it is all performed in public places.  I think most folks would consider such actions by a private party to be intrusive (thus many state stalking laws) and we generally hold the state to an even tighter standard.

Second, cost is important.  A surveillance approach that is difficult and expensive is less likely to be abused than one that is suddenly 10x or even 100x less expensive.  The judges acknowledge this, but then ignore the problem completely in their statement when they write:

It is imaginable that a police unit could undertake "wholesale surveillance" by attaching such devices to thousands of random cars and then analyzing the volumes of data produced for suspicious patterns of activity. Id. Such an effort, if it ever occurred, would raise different concerns than the ones present here.

Just get a freaking warrant -- its not that hard, especially in this case when we are talking about extended surveillance and no particular rush to get started. This kind of lazy law enforcement has become endemic, and we shouldn't tolerate it.

Its pretty clear from this summary of the Obama administration legal brief that the Administration has no idea what its own immigration policy should be.  I don't agree with all of the author's statements (for example, I am not a fan of e-Verify, as it just reinforces to me that the government has gotten itself in the business of licensing labor) but its a pretty interesting summary of just how muddled the Obama administration is on this topic.  While I don't support our newest immigration law here in AZ, its easier to see why states like AZ feel the need to take some independent leadership on the topic.

In this brief, the Obama administration is challenging an earlier AZ state law that requires, as a condition to retain one's business license, that companies use e-Verify to check new employees legal work status  (here and here).  Unfortunately, Obama's head of Homeland Security (and thus all immigration-related activities) actually signed the law into being and the administration wrote a brief in favor of the law just 9 months ago, about the same time Congress reauthorized e-Verify without doing anything to strike down AZ implementation practices).  I am not much of a legal scholar, but states use compliance with Federal programs all the time as minimum requirements for retaining business licenses -- e.g. non-payment of Federal taxes can cause one to lose his state business license, but no one has ever argued that is an illegal intrusion of states on federal powers.  If the Feds want to argue all of these provisions are unconstitutional, fine by me.  Anyway, the article linked above is highly entertaining.

Postscript: Here is the e-Verify post one must post in his business to be legally compliant:

This is fairly Orwellian for those of us who believe that all people have the right to work, irrespective of the country they were born in, and this right does not flow from any national government and therefore does not stop or start at any border.

It is a beautiful day here, so I really don't have the time or desire right now to summarize the absolute mess that is the FTC discussion draft for the "reinvention of journalism," reinvention being a synonym apparently for government takeover.  Almost every proposal is fraught with unintended (or perhaps intended but hidden) consequences, faulty economics, and unprecedented attacks of the first amendment.  If you don't have the time to read it, I will try to summarize it next week, but just open it and scroll the bold headers with the proposals.  Its really outrageous.  Here are just some quick highlights:

• Substantial narrowing of fair use, with particular focus on how search engines and other online sites (e.g. blogs) use and/or have to pay for access to news sites
• Expansion of news copyrights on breaking news - ie certain papers will own the copyrights to certain news events if they are the first mover on it
• Increased government funding of news organizations along multiple vectors, from subsidies to guaranteed loans to income tax checkoffs to lower postal rates to Americorps programs for for journalists.
• Simultaneously reduce private funding of journalism through taxes, including a tax on advertisers
• Shift the organizational model of journalism from profit corporations (which rely on satisfying individuals to get their revenue) to non-profit organizations dependent on the government for funding
• New taxes on and licensing of the Internet.   New taxes on broadcast spectrum to subsidize print media (shifting money from media that are more hostile to the administration to print media and non-profits that are more sympathetic to the administration).

Here is the intro that was missing from the report:  "The New York Times and Newsweek can't figure out a profitable business model in the Internet age.  We propose the government step in with all means at its disposal to limit competition to these print media companies and create new government subsidies for their business.  Once their companies' profitability is absolutely dependent on these government mandates and subsidies, the Federal government will have a powerful source of leverage to protect itself from criticism in these outlets.  Once we have this situation in place, we will have a strong inventive to quash more independent outlets and maximize the market share of media companies beholden to the government.  In a large sense, our recommendations build off the success of the tobacco settlement experiment, where a few large companies agreed to pay the government large percentages of their future profits, and then the government worked diligently to quash new tobacco competitors to maximize the market share of those companies paying it settlement money."

Update: South Bend Seven makes an interesting comparison to campus newspapers.

Via TJIC:

By the way, where does the government get the money to fund all these immensely useful programs? According to a Fox News poll earlier this year, 65 per cent of Americans understand that the government gets its money from taxpayers, but 24 per cent think the government has "plenty of its own money without using taxpayer dollars." You can hardly blame them for getting that impression in an age in which there is almost nothing the state won't pay for.

Conservatives, nominally supporters of smaller government and free markets, are yet again torpedoing these principles in the name of short term political expediency.  In order to score a few fleeting points against Obama, they are calling him out over the BP oil spill, saying that this is his Katrina, a massive failure both in regulation and response.

That's stupid.  One can certainly raise some questions about the government -- why have they been collecting an oil spill cleanup tax but not any oil spill cleanup capability or equipment, why are we driving oil companies out of easy oil in shallow waters to crazy-hard oil in deep waters.  But this is not Obama's fault nor the government's fault.  This is BP's fault.  They screwed up and started the spill, and it was they that had no contingency plan for such a disaster.  And its going to cost them a staggering amount of money, as it should.

After all, what are the feds going to do?  They certainly can't be expected to maintain the expertise to deal with this kind of thing, particularly in cutting-edge deep water.  Which is why Obama has had to resort mostly to joggling BP's elbow demanding that hey hurry.

We have the incredible sight of Conservatives, rightly, saying that more regulation could not have prevented the financial crisis because regulators are any better than industry participants in spotting problems when entering uncharted territory.  But here we have exactly the same situation and Conservatives are hammering on Obama for not being authoritarian enough or regulating enough.

Postscript: One of the few things the Obama administration has done is demand BP stop using a certain oil dispersant chemical because it is toxic.  Duh.  So is all the oil.  Which is probably why BP ignored him.  Government is terrible with this type of decision.  We have something really bad happening that we can't control.  But we can make it less bad by doing X, but X has some downsides as well.   In the heat of battle, when discretion is required, government will choose the sin of omission (letting more oil reach the shore) over the sin of commission (using a toxic dispersant), even if this decision is irrational.  In their incentive system, the sin of commission is impossible to sluff off on someone else.  The sin of omission can always be blamed on BP, or Bush, or whoever.  This is one reason why government bureaucratic rules are often so detailed and prescriptive -- given these incentives, certain decisions will never be made in the heat of battle by bureaucrats unless their actions are guided by detailed rules, which then give them cover.

Postscript #2: I think the media has tended to underestimate the difficulty here.  5000 feet of water is really deep and complicated to work in, orders of magnitude harder than shallow water, which in turn is orders of magnitude harder than on land.  In a way, its actually kind of amazing that BP has sealed this thing, given that the Soviets, in much less difficult leaks, reportedly had to resort to nukes to seal the well.

Conservatives want immigrants to work, but not vote.

Liberals want immigrants to vote, but not work.

Of all the foreign policy analysts in the world, I am probably in the bottom quartile.  Or decile.  So take this for what its worth.

We have heard rumors for months, even years, that the internal situation in North Korea is desperate, or more accurately even more FUBAR'd than usual.  There have even been hints of open popular opposition to the government, definitely an unusual occurrence.  I look at the attack on the South Korean ship in the context of domestic problems.  This was Kim's "wag the dog" response.  The classic totalitarian response to domestic problems is to seek out distracting foreign adventures.  I think what we may be learning is that the domestic situation is even worse than has been supposed.

Discuss.

From the AZ Republic:

Zack de la Rocha has issued a statement on behalf of an organization called the Sound Strike urging music fans and fellow artists to boycott Arizona "to stop SB 1070," which he labels an "odious" law.

Among those artists joining de la Rocha's boycott are Conor Oberst, Kanye West, Rage Against the Machine, Rise Against, Cypress Hill, Serj Tankian, Joe Satriani, Sonic Youth, Tenacious D, Street Sweeper Social Club and Michael Moore.

So it turns out that at the local Best Buy here in Phoenix, Arizona, I find many examples of these folks' work still for sale.  Moore's videos, for example, still seem to be available for purchase.  Possibly their requests to have their merchandise removed from store shelves in Arizona have not reached the sales floor yet, but my guess is that these guys have absolutely no intention of actually pulling their product from Arizona stores.   My guess  (and please tell me if I am being unfair) is that most of these folks, at best, are committing to cancel tour dates that for most of these bands are not even scheduled yet.  This is about as much of a sacrifice as me promising to cancel my next date with Gisele Bündchen.  This kind of statement is the moral equivalent of Hollywood stars who decry global warming from the steps for their private jet.

I think folks know I am a proponent of open immigration, and so, as in the war on drugs, I don't condone adding more government powers to enforce a pointless prohibition.  But there are many folks here who have supported far more authoritarian legislation than the AZ immigration law.  For God sakes in Sicko Michael Moore wrote a long love note to Castro's Cuba.

I like to prominently highlight when I have been wrong.  In the past, I have said that the US follows a double standard on our Mexican and Canadian borders.  Where are the Canadian wall proposals?  Where are the Canadian workers getting handcuffed by Joe Arpaio.

But apparently I was wrong.  The US is working hard to apply an equal level of obnoxiousness to Canadians.

Proponents of tougher immigration enforcement often use crime as their big scare factor in trying to influence people to their point.  Only tougher laws and Joe Arpaio, they caution, stand athwart the coming immigrant rape of Phoenix.

But when the case is built on one or two high-profile crime where the perpetrator has not even been identified, rather than statistics, we can be suspicious of how strong the case is.  I have cited historical figures here, but the WSJ has the new figures for 2009:

Violent crime fell significantly last year in cities across the U.S., according to preliminary federal statistics, challenging the widely held belief that recessions drive up crime rates.

The incidence of violent crimes such as murder, rape and aggravated assault was down 5.5% from 2008, and 6.9% in big cities. It fell 2.4% in long-troubled Detroit and plunged 16.6% in Phoenix, despite a perception of rising crime that has fueled an immigration backlash....

In Phoenix, police spokesman Trent Crump said, "Despite all the hype, in every single reportable crime category, we're significantly down." Mr. Crump said Phoenix's most recent data for 2010 indicated still lower crime. For the first quarter of 2010, violent crime was down 17% overall in the city, while homicides were down 38% and robberies 27%, compared with the same period in 2009.

Arizona's major cities all registered declines. A perceived rise in crime is one reason often cited by proponents of a new law intended to crack down on illegal immigration. The number of kidnappings reported in Phoenix, which hit 368 in 2008, was also down, though police officials didn't have exact figures.

And just to head off the obvious straw man, 2008 was not somehow a peak year, it was actually well below historical levels.

Via the USAToday

Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year, a USA TODAY analysis of government data finds.

At the same time, government-provided benefits "” from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs "” rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.

Those records reflect a long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in the source of personal income from private wages to government programs.

Buried in the ariticle is a quote that I have to cite as perhaps the worst analysis I have ever seen:

The shift in incomeshows that the federal government's stimulus efforts have been effective, says Paul Van de Water, an economist at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

"It's the system working as it should," Van de Water says. Government is stimulating growth and helping people in need, he says. As the economy recovers, private wages will rebound, he says.

How does the income shift prove the stimulus worked?  The problem is, as usual, a difficult one of evaluating what the economy would have done without the stimulus.  The mere shift in income is a necesary outcome of the stimulus -- all it means is that we have succesfully robbed Peter to pay Paul -- it says nothing about whether Peter and Paul are more wealthy in aggregate had we not moved money around by force.  In fact, proponents of the stimulus never, ever address a very simple fact - someone was using the money to run a business or invest or buy things or employ people before the government took it for stimulus programs.  And it is really, really hard to look at the body of stimulus programs and come to the conclusion that the private sector was investing the money worse, which is the only way stimulus would occur.

I have not read the relevant text of the law, so this may be an exaggeration, but it sure would not surprise me:

Remember when Obama and congressional Democrats made a big show of dropping the public option government insurance program that was supposedly going to give private insurers competition and drive rates down? The truth is the public option is alive and well, residing in Section 1334, pages 97-100, of the new health care law. That section gives the U.S. Office of Personnel Management "” which presently manages the federal civil service "” new responsibilities: establishing and running two entirely new government health insurance programs to compete directly with private insurance companies in every state with coverage for people outside of government.Quoting the new law, former OPM director Donald Devine notes that it makes the OPM boss a health care czar, with power to set ""˜profit margin premiums and other such terms and conditions of coverage as are in the interest of enrollees in such plans.' That's open-ended. You can do anything." Dan Blair, another former OPM director, calls the new program "nothing but a placeholder for the public option." Indeed, the OPM head is also given the authority to "appoint as many employees" as needed to run the program, and to spend "such sums as may be necessary" to establish and administer it.

Police officers long for the days when they can make up any facts they wish about an encounter with the public and make them stick.  That is why, even if the public were required to videotape police, my guess is that officers would still find a reason to arrest them for wiretapping.

It is pretty much a law of nature that issuers of securities hate short-selling.  They have tried for years to paint it as somehow unethical or at least unseemly, though it has always befuddled me as to why short-selling is any different than taking a long position on a security.  In both cases one is making a bet on future prices of the underlying asset, the only difference is in the direction.

But issuers of securities, whether they be corporate equities or government bonds, generally have strong personal incentives to see asset prices go up, or at least remain flat.  No CEO thinks short-selling is justified, but in fact the ability to sell short is critical to having quality pricing signals (see below for a discussion of how short-selling helps limit bubbles).

Of course, Corporate CEO's may gripe about short sellers, but they basically have to just live with them.  But governments are different.  They can actually ban what they don't like and have done so now in Germany.  What's next, a law saying that once you have bought a government security you are never allowed to sell it?

Postscript: Here is an example of how short selling reduces volatility.  First, some background

Chester Spatt, who was chief economist at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from 2004 to 2007, said that Germany's short-selling ban would probably end up causing more market turbulence and not less.

"Like many types of well-intentioned regulation, this is likely to misfire," he said in an interview. "During our financial crisis in 2008, there was a ban on short-sales for about three weeks .... That ban was very counterproductive. It didn't help stabilize asset prices at all."

Here is an example of why this happens, as I discussed in an earlier post during that temporary US ban:

At the start of the bubble, a particular asset (be it an equity or a commodity like oil) is owned by a mix of people who have different expectations about future price movements.  For whatever reasons, in a bubble, a subset of the market develops rapidly rising expectations about the value of the asset.  They start buying the asset, and the price starts rising.  As the price rises, and these bulls buy in, folks who owned the asset previously and are less bullish about the future will sell to the new buyers.  The very fact of the rising price of the asset from this buying reinforces the bulls' feeling that the sky is the limit for prices, and bulls buy in even more.

Let's fast forward to a point where the price has risen to some stratospheric levels vs. the previous pricing as well as historical norms or ratios.  The ownership base for the asset is now disproportionately made up of those sky-is-the-limit bulls, while everyone who thought these guys were overly optimistic and a bit wonky have sold out. 99.9% of the world now thinks the asset is grossly overvalued.  But how does it come to earth?  After all, the only way the price can drop is if some owners sell [remember, we are discussing a world where naked shorting is banned], and all the owners are super-bulls who are unlikely to do so.  As a result, the bubble might continue and grow long after most of the world has seen the insanity of it.

Thus, we have short-selling.  Short-selling allows the other 99.9% who are not owners to sell part of the asset anyway, casting their financial vote for the value of the company.  Short-selling shortens bubbles, hastens the reckoning, and in the process generally reduces the wreckage on the back end.

Without short-selling, the only folks involved in the price-discovery process are those who have self-selected as being more bullish than average.  Short-selling vastly broadens the number of people, and thus the perspectives and information, involved in the pricing process.

I think "cargo cult" is a great moniker for this kind of regulation.  The price of European bonds are declining as lots of people sell?  Then lets ban selling, that will take care of the problem.   Just ignore that large government deficit behind the curtain.

A reader sent me this interesting story about immigration within Cuba:

"I was caught because I was an illegal," explained a bicycle taxi driver as he gripped the rusted blue handle-bars of his vehicle in Havana's Central Park. "And because I'd been here several times before, I was deported back."

But the driver working his trade in the capital city did not arrive in Cuba from another country. Instead he is among the thousands who have come from rural provinces in search of work and a place to live - but who have been deported back because of "Decree 217."

The 1997 law restricts rural migration to Havana, making this taxi driver an illegal resident in his own capital city.

"If you're illegal you can't be here in Havana," said the driver, originally from Cuba's eastern Holguin province. "You don't have an address here in Havana."...

Economic conditions were generally worse at the eastern end of the island, according to Cuba analyst Edward Gonzalez, a professor emeritus at the University of California Los Angeles.

"[The eastern region] has always been the less affluent, impoverished part of the island," he said, "heavily dependent upon agriculture, less on tourism, and also happens to be more black and mulatto."

The effort to keep migrants out and prevent overcrowding in Havana may have resulted in police discrimination against darker-skinned Cubans presumed more likely to be illegal, Gonzalez said.

John Sossel's excellent weekly show is available on Hulu.

Actually a working version of Pac-Man (use arrow keys).

More here on the failure of European green energy subsidies.

At a speech a while ago, I told this to an investing group a while back:  Do the math.  You can't build a growth company on public subsidies.  It may be possible to grow at first when the subsidized activity (e.g. solar) is a tiny percentage of the market.  But once it starts to grow, the projected subsidies are astronomical.  The German solar subsidy is something like 50 cents per KwH -- to give one a sense of scale, the typical electricity price from fossil fuels there or here is something like 8-10 cents per KwH.  Subsidizing just 20% of US electricity production at this kind of rate would cost $50 billion a year.  Subsidizing all production would cost a quarter of a trillion dollars a year.

Take a company dependent on subsidies, figure out what their implied size is in 10 years based on current stock multiples, and then calculate what the public subsidy at current rates would have to be to support that size and a reasonable market share (because competitors are following the same model).  Investors who do this will quickly figure out that the subsidies needed to support their favored company are unsustainable.  Phoenix-based FirstSolar, a sometimes-darling of Wall Street, has had  a rocky year.  Its stock price has had several steep falls, each one just after rumors that Germany would cut its solar subsidy rate (actually its feed-in tariff, but the same idea).

My advice to the group was that if you were investing in green energy, either your company had a three year plan to reduce costs to be able to compete profitably in a subsidy-free environment, or else you are investing in pets.com.

Update: If you have Nancy Pelosi's husband on your board, you can probably extend your window to five years.

I will tell you, those who agree with me on the immigration issue in the Democratic Party are trying as hard as they can to turn me against immigration.  This same thing happened in the Iraq war.  I was against the war, as I thought it a poor use of resources (there are just too many bad governments in the world to take them all down that way).  But when my fellow anti-war travelers agreed with me for stupid reasons (we must defer to Europe, Sadam is not a bad guy, etc.) it almost made me change my mind.  If the people who agree with me are idiots, is that a bad sign?

TJIC has similar thoughts here, and I watched in amazement as the Mexican President yesterday criticized US immigration policy for being to harsh, despite the fact it is far more open than Mexico's own immigration policy.

I am a little late on this but want to link it none-the-less:

As predicted was inevitable, today the Spanish newspaper La Gaceta runs with a full-page article fessing up to the truth about Spain's "green jobs" boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States. It is now out there as a bust, a costly disaster that has come undone in Spain to the point that even the Socialists admit it, with the media now in full pursuit....

La Gaceta boldly exposes the failure of the Spanish renewable policy and how Obama has been following it. The headline screams: "Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster."

This is a failure of every single number ever published by supporters of government stimulus programs.  They always fail to acknowledge that the money for these programs came from somewhere.  It was being employed by someone to buy something or to invest in something or to pay someone's wages.  Every private company in the world seems to understand this concept of opportunity cost, so it is amazing that it is so hard to grasp in the media which breathlessly reports every BS number Obama has spit out.

I found this new blog called Whiskey and Car Keys by accident -- I actually am working on a regular writing column and thought about this as a title for the column (from the PJ O'Rourke quote about giving power to government being like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boy).  Anyway, they ticked me off by grabbing a good name ahead of me, but I can't stay mad at a young group blog that seems to be focused on libertarian issues and burrito reviews.