Monthly Archives: October 2012

“It’s a drag. They’re making me do my homework”

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Obama is the laziest, least involved President possibly ever. He really cares little about policy and has no taste for the engagement of the political process. He likes the pleasures of office, just doesn’t like what it actually requires, like knowing things in depth and thinking things through to the end.

The debates are, however, the real thing, and he is about to take on someone who knows what he thinks and has developed his ideas in the best way possible, by writing a book. Romney wrote No Apology: Believe in America in 2010 and it showed in the debates he had within the Republican side. He understood each issue and has an articulate and soundly based conservative perspective on every issue that matters.

He would therefore be a very good president, possibly a great president. But there are two halves to this. To be president, great or otherwise, requires someone to be elected president first. For reasons largely invisible to me, Obama is seen as the great campaigner and a great orator. While it seems to me he is capable of reading his script with the best of them, off his teleprompter, not so good with many big time errors along the lines of “you didn’t build that”.

And of course there is the media which largely shares his deep leftist views who will for that reason do everything they can to get him through. This matters a very great deal. But really, when I think of what will work for Obama, I am reminded of this, which will be at the centre of everything Obama says. It is from Peggy Noonan and I have quoted it before many times because I think of this as the single most important fact of the Obama presidency and campaign. She wrote this in 2011:

The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’

What Obama finds a drag is to be without his teleprompter but needing to get into his largely dim mind the conclusions from these terabytes of historical data so that they can be stated exactly right.

The debate in the US is on the evening of 3 October. For fans in Australia it starts at 11:00 am Thursday morning on SBS.

The president really stretches the limits

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The fact checker at the Washington Post has picked up yet another of those Obama untruths. They must have discovered that lies told to Democrats makes no difference to their voting patterns since the Post now seems so willing to point them out. So, did the Bush tax cuts cause the GFC as Obama has continually said. Over to you, Mr Fact Checker at the Washington Post:

The financial crisis of 2008 stemmed from a variety of complex factors, in particular the bubble in housing prices and the rise of exotic financial instruments. Deregulation was certainly an important factor, but as the government commission concluded, the blame for that lies across administrations, not just in the last Republican one.

In any case, the Bush tax cuts belong at the bottom of the list — if at all. Moreover, it is rather strange for the campaign to cite as its source an article that, according to the author, does not support this assertion.

We nearly made this Four Pinocchios but ultimately decided that citing deregulation in conjunction with tax cuts kept this line out of the ‘whopper’ category. Still, in his effort to portray Romney as an echo of Bush, the president really stretches the limits here.

Only a level 3 lie, not the gale force Pinocchio 4. But since it doesn’t get in the way of distribution of Obama phones, what possible difference could any of this make?

If you share the housework you are more likely to divorce

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The advice I used to give couples as they were about to marry was to tell the bride that she should expect to do most of the cleaning and most of the cooking. But since it was always badly taken, I have stopped giving this advice although I think it still. On the cooking side I can see that I was wrong – although I did take my own advice on that one. With cooking, it is astonishing the number of fellows I know who cook almost all of the time, and this is even in households where the woman either works only part-time or not at all. Seems OK for them so who am I to say anything.

But this article is about cleaning house and this is what the study found:

In what appears to be a slap in the face for gender equality, the report found the divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work.

‘What we’ve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesn’t necessarily contribute to contentment,’ said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled ‘Equality in the Home’.
The lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was surprising, the researcher said.

‘One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite,’ he said.

The figures clearly show that ‘the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,’ he went on.

It’s only a probability thing, of course, but on this one, if you want a stable marriage, I would go with the odds.

Why doesn’t anybody mention Keynes any more?

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The Chinese economy is in descent, not quite free fall but close enough.

AUSTRALIAN mining companies and the federal Treasury face fresh pressure as China’s already sluggish economy heads for a further slowdown.
The latest surveys of China’s manufacturing industry showed that activity has continued to ease as the world’s second-largest economy faces a seventh consecutive quarter of slowing growth.

China’s biggest problem remains the continuing malaise in the critical export sector where growth has slowed dramatically due to poor economic conditions in its largest market, Europe, as well as the US, as wages and other costs in China continue to climb.

The closely watched official purchasing managers index (PMI), which covers large businesses, remained in negative territory at 49.8, up from 49.2 in August — its second month in negative territory. Any result below 50 shows activity decreasing.

A parallel HSBC survey of small and medium businesses saw the 11th contraction in a row with a result of 47.9.

Both results were lower than market expectations, and HSBC’s export sub-index hit a 42-month low.

You never hear Keynes mentioned any more, except maybe by me. Wherever we had these Keynesian stimuli, the result has been abysmal. The Australian economy, tied as its success was to Chinese growth, is also melting. The laughable attempt to bring the budget into surplus – highly destructive as well since it will be mostly attempted on the tax revenue side – is now matched by a desperate desire to see interest rates come down. We have a low official unemployment rate but that’s because so much of it is driven by public spending unsupported by value adding economic activity. It can’t last. As the front page article in The Australian points out:

Although the jobless rate is low, domestic pressures are building. The employer lobby Australian Industry Group’s latest business survey, released yesterday, shows that for the seventh consecutive month, a majority of manufacturing firms are contracting.

Contracting industry and they are rushing to balance the budget! Shame this never occurred to them in 2008.

Radio Australian Interview: I’ve just done a Radio Australia interview on Ross Garnaut’s comments last night where he said that Australia’s salad days had gone and our dog days have begun. His comment, from last night’s Lateline:

I said now we’re living in the salad days. In the salad days, ordinary economic policy looks good and good economic policies look stellar. But it won’t be very many years when the salad days turn into the dog days, when good economic policy looks terrible and ordinary economic policy looks in the dogs. . . .

Certainly the rhetoric from the Government about restraint in government expenditure is consistent with what’s required, and in fact in the last couple of years we’ve run very tight budgets by long historical standards.

But this has to be maintained now for quite a long period of time and I think lots of Australians haven’t assimilated that. We’ve got elements of the Australian community thinking that economic reform now is what gives more money to them.

And who’s his example for those who don’t appreciate the need for restraint, the Business Council. Wandering around the main town squares in Athens and Madrid ought to provide a better idea of who wants governments to keep spending money they no longer have.

Three days to the first debate

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What’s all this business about a new course in the Middle East? How’s that supposed to win elections? It’s free phones and other free stuff that matters. The rest is just for people who read newspapers and blogs where not a single independent voter can be found.

Anyway, it’s three days to the first debate in which everyone is predicting a loss for their own side. Exhibit A here. And Exhibit B here.

My guess, I will think Romney took him apart and Paul Krugman will think the same about Obama. I hope so anyway, at least the first part.