I was doing some research on historical Presidential campaigns, and I came across this 1952 ad for Eisenhower:
…and now I have that song running through my head.*
Anyway, interesting to compare that to the campaign ads of today, no?
*And I guess now you might, as well. Sorry.
Don’t you hate it when your Web browser crashes as you’re in the middle of writing a post, and the post hasn’t auto-saved due to same Web browser being weird, and so you lose everything?
Just a hypothetical.
[Although I know it will make no difference to anybody, I feel oddly compelled to write about this.]
The late President Ronald Reagan’s son Michael claims his father was “better” for African-Americans than President Obama is. He reasons:
“Under Obama, black unemployment rose from 12.6 percent in January 2009 to 16.0 percent today. This means that black unemployment has increased by more than one-fourth since Obama took office.
And the Reagan record? African-American columnist Joseph Perkins has studied the effects of Reaganomics on black America. He found that, after the Reagan tax cuts gained traction, African-American unemployment fell from 19.5 percent in 1983 to 11.4 percent in 1989.”
Alright, this practically refutes itself. He is comparing two years of a deep downturn in the business cycle (a recession) under Obama and from which we only started recovering in summer 2009 to six years of a recovery from a (milder) recession which ended in late 1982. (He could have at least started from the beginning of Reagan’s term for a better comparison.)
It seems to me fairly obvious that these statistics regarding African-American employment are nothing more than the products of broad economic trends, rather than the outcome of a particular policy on the part of either President.
It’s a pet peeve of mine that the President, whoever he happens to be, always gets undue credit or blame for the fluctuations in the business cycle which he cannot come even close to fully controlling.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t use this blog as intelligently as I could. I spent all last week informing everyone I know that New York would beat New England on Sunday. No one believed me, but I was, of course, vindicated.
But, as you can see, I did not post anything about it on here. So, there is, alas, no historical record of my powers of prediction for me to point to in future.
So, it sounds like Nintendo is remaking The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the 3DS. Looking at those screens does bring back memories. It must be five years since I last that played game, but I can still remember it well.
The odd thing is, I’ve played other Zelda games since then and I never cared for any of them. Not that they were bad, but they’re just not my kind of game. But Ocarina of Time is something else entirely. It was, in my opinion, the greatest game ever at the time it was released, and even to this day it remains in my Top 5.
Concerning politics, it is often said that “reasonable people can disagree”.
Why?
After all, when it comes to most political issues, it would seem that one side must be right and the other must be wrong, since they appear to believe the exact opposite things on all issues. Presumably, therefore, reasonable people will all be able to figure out what the correct policy is, leaving only unreasonable people to oppose them.
The answer to this, however, is that most people are not (and maybe nobody is) totally sure what the best policy is in most cases. Often, two opposing policies may have different pros and cons and it may not be clear which (to borrow a term from economics) maximizes societal welfare.
However, because this sort of thing is very hard for the average person to understand–no one really has time after a hard day’s work, to examine political nuances–this sort of thing is up to experts to discuss. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to discuss them, so their explanations must be succinct.
(This, in turn, leads to simplifying the issue into terms which make political polarization virtually inevitable, i.e. “It’s impossible to explain all the details–all you really need to know is that [whoever] is bad.”)
It’s not that people are stupid–it’s just that you need an advanced degree in economics to understand whether the Fed ought to print money in a recession or not. And if you go and get that degree, you won’t be able to get the necessary degree in climatology to understand climate change. Add in all the other issues we face and, well, nobody has the time for all that.
This means that we must rely on experts in these fields to make policy recommendations, but this inherently makes people who are not experts in any of these fields feel annoyed, especially if the experts are (or even appear to be) wrong at any time.
This sort of thing, of course, leads to populism and anti-“elitism”. It’s understandable, really–who would want to feel they were being controlled by a bunch of (mostly well-to-do) people who appear (to the layman) not to know what they are doing half the time?
Now, we seemingly have a solution to this problem ready-made in the form of the internet. Unfortunately, so far, it doesn’t seem to be working. Most people don’t seem to use the internet for the purpose of gaining access to more knowledge on many of these difficult subjects.
Two questions:
Really, I don’t know what to make of this very strange excerpt from Rush Limbaugh’s show. He said:
“[L]ook at all the things that were built in five years during the Great Depression: The Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building came in ahead of schedule, built during the Depression, back in the days where we actually built things. And back then there wasn’t talk of extended unemployment benefits. There wasn’t talk of national health care. That mind-set just didn’t exist. And because those things didn’t exist people had to do what they could to fend for themselves, and if that meant picking up, moving to San Francisco, working for whatever you got paid in a dangerous job like building the Golden Gate Bridge or the bay bridges or the Hoover Dam or the Empire State Building, it’s what you did, you found work wherever you could.”
Um… wasn’t building all that stuff part of a government program; and under a Democratic President, no less? Isn’t that supposed to be, like, Socialism? Or else “Liberal Fascism“? I don’t think any of that exactly shows off the virtues of the free-market, at any rate. I may be wrong, but I would have thought Limbaugh would be railing against such awful, awful Government things.
If anyone reading this happens to have more knowledge on this subject, I’d appreciate some enlightenment.
(And yes, for those of you wondering, evidently I lied about not blogging till I could finish that big post I’m working on. I can’t help it.)
…but I just had to post a link to this article by Mark Thompson. An excerpt:
“The ‘debate over debate’ that has arisen in the wake of the tragic assassination attempt of Congresswoman Giffords in Arizona on Saturday, which left 6 dead, including a 9 year old girl, a federal judge, and a bride-to-be has been, and sadly continues to be, perhaps the most childish and depressing debate I’ve seen in my nearly four years as a blogger. The victims, rather than being remembered and honored, are being used as cudgels and footballs to prove a point about how the other teams are more evil than one’s own team.”
I don’t know if “post-partisanship” is an achievable goal, but if it is, that article describes how you could achieve it.
(Hat Tip to Andrew Sullivan)
I’m working on a fairly long, complicated post, but I think it’s going to take me a while to put it together.
So, if I don’t post here for a few days, it’s not because I’ve abandoned the blog; it’s just that I have a limited time available for blogging, and I’ll probably be spending it all working on the one post.
