I'm a registered independent. The last time voted for a mainstream presidental candidate was in 1984 for Ronald Reagan. I don't regret that vote.

In 2004 I KNOW my vote won't matter. Any sane person knows that a vote for a third party has a marginal value of ZERO. But if I am going to vote, then I'll vote my conscience. See www.lp.org/issues/platform/ for what the Libertarian Party believes. First, let me say that I don't fully endorse this platform but it is a better starting place for a meaningful discussion of the role of the government in society and in the economy than the efforts made by the Republicans and Democrats, who are too busy competing for the hearts of the "undecided" voter to care about internally consistent policies.

Here is the cornerstone fo the Libertarian Platform (from their website)

"Freedom and Responsibility - Individuals should be free to make choices for themselves and to accept responsibility for the consequences of the choices they make." The difference between Republicans (who advocate this) and Democrats (who might cringe here) is that Libertarians REALLY believe this. If that opinion marginalizes me so be it. I'm not too fond of the mainstream anyway.

In case you didn't read all of John's excellent post about why he's voting for W, I want to draw your attention to this zinger:

Finally, I shall vote for George W. Bush because I know how a Kerry victory will be interpreted. It will be a signal to George Soros and his various front groups that their billions can buy an election. It will be a signal that the American people care what Hollywood actors like Sean Penn and Ben Affleck have to say about politics. It will be a signal that Michael Moore’s paranoid fantasies are to be treated as serious documentaries. It will be a signal that Americans are so naïve as to accept whatever fraudulent stories the mainstream media will circulate about National Guard records, an imminent return of the draft, and missing Iraqi explosives.

Spot on, John!

It is with great reluctance that I've decided to vote for George W. Bush.

Even though I know my individual vote doesn't matter, I usually try to take voting seriously and vote for the person who is closest to my own views. (Please don't construe this as another "why you should vote" message. Read more here.)

I am proud to have voted for the Libertarian Party candidate in every election since 1988 (the first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote). Although I'm a registered Republican, my views are libertarian. So I've always voted for the LP whenever possible. This year this is not an option. The LP candidate Michael Badnarik is a complete nutjob. For more on why read here and here. Although I have no illusions about the prospects for electoral success of the LP, I once had a hope that they could act as a respected third party of principle. Instead the LP is the political party equivalent of a Star Trek convention.

So this year the choice is between Kerry and W. W has been a huge, massive disappointment. But in every relevant respect John Kerry has promised to be worse.

Let me take stock of the candidates on this issues.

Fiscal Issues (Budget Deficit/Taxes). I think government is too large. Bush has made it larger and Kerry has criticized him for not making it even larger! I don't really care much about the deficit since the real cost of government is largely (though not entirely) independent of the method of finance. Bush is financing his spending binge with deficits and Kerry promises to finance his (even larger) promised spending binge with higher taxes. Advantage: Bush.

Foreign Policy. Screw the UN and the frogs. Seriously, I've come to conclude that we must meet the threat of Arab fundamentalism with strength and preferably on their turf not ours. The rhetoric of the left today is oh so reminiscent of the left during the Cold War. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. Appeasement doesn't make the enemy go away. It emboldens them. Reagan knew that we could defeat the Soviets only from a position of strength and Bush knows that we can defeat the threat of Muslim fundamentalism only from a position of strength. While there is a legitimate debate about the prudence of the Iraq invasion as a tactic, I am fully supportive of the overall strategy to project American strength abroad as needed. Advantage: Bush.

War on Drugs. I think all drugs should be legal. Neither Bush nor Kerry will change the status quo and reduce this awful War on Drugs. Advantage: none.

Abortion. I think abortion is murder. Advantage: Bush.

Civil Liberties. The Patriot Act is not as big a threat (at the margin) as most people think. Much of the Patriot Act was already law and is supported by both parties/candidates. I'm not happy with this, but I don't think Kerry will be any better than Bush. Advantage: none.

Gay Marriage. I wish the government was out of the marriage business. I think people should be allowed to marry their goats if they want. Advantage: Kerry.

Foreign Trade/Labor Policy: If Kerry wins, he'll be in debt to the unions. Expect more protectionism than even Bush has given us. Advantage: Bush.

Environment: Environmental zealots are costing us millions. Let's drill in Alaska! Bush has added some sense of sanity to our insance environmental laws. Advantage: Bush.

Social Security: Bush favors some move away from government run retirement. Amazingly Kerry supports the status quo. Advantage: Bush.

Health Care: Bush will slow the long march toward socialized medicine (compared with Kerry). Advantage: Bush.

This apple didn't fall far from its mother's tree--Chris Heinz calls Bush a cokehead.

A professor at Fort Lewis College kicked a student for wearing a College Republicans sweatshirt; details here. (Hat tip to Wilson Mixon.)

I'd bet dollars to donuts that the offending prof has (perhaps correctly) bemoaned the loss of civil liberties under the PATRIOT Act, (again, perhaps correctly) waved the banner of "academic freedom," or both. If so, we'd have a case where free speech is only for the anointed.

ADDENDUM: Speaking of College Republicans, kudos to Ted Crouse and the rest of the Berry College Republicans who last week honored John Kerry by proclaiming "flip flop day" and trudging around campus in cheap sandals.

1. UNC-Charlotte will offer a course on the tv program "American Idol." Rubbish.

2. Mike DeBow has some fun with Ralph Nader's charging admission to his campaign rallies.

Bob Lawson has asked each of us to say for whom we will be voting on Tuesday, and why. Given how little I’ve contributed to this blog so far, I figured it’s the least I could do.

There’s no sense dancing around the issue—no classical liberal (let alone libertarian) is likely to look toward George W. Bush as a model president. The litany of sins, from massive increases in discretionary spending to new health care entitlements, is likely familiar to anyone reading this blog. And in any case, it is out of place in a statement that is intended to be an endorsement of the president’s reelection.

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Here Craig Depken plots the relationship between state unemployment rates and tradesports prediction prices. He finds a weak negative correlation (-0.09) between unemployment and price, implying that states with above average unemployment have a slight tendence toward Kerry.

So what else might be driving state-by-state voting patterns? An obvious possibility is social or religious issues. Hence I obtained data on the share of each state's population that attends religious services regularly and calculated the correlation with the tradesports prices. The result, 0.14, indicates that states with above average church attendance lean toward Bush.

One concern with this calculation is the religious attendance data. I've used data from the same source for an academic paper and have some concerns that the data are a bit noisy. (For example, the dataset shows church attendance rates greater than 100% for three Alabama counties used in my previous study.) A second issue is the likelihood that using overall church attendance rates obscures important differences across denominations. (I suspect that Southern Baptists are more important to the Bush vote than are Unitarians.)

A third concern is with the use of tradesports prices. On a hunch that the tendency of prices to tend toward the extremes (0 for states like MA that Kerry will carry and 100 for states like TX that Bush will carry), I obtained polling data from electoral-vote.com and recalculated the correlation coefficient. The resulting correlation of 0.20 between church attendance rates and Bush's standing in the polls is indeed larger thereby confirming my suspicion. Still, I would have expected a larger correlation and suspect that the religion data issues discussed in the previous paragraph are salient.

In the last major announcement of an economic indicator before Tuesday's election, the BEA announced that GDP in the third quarter (July to September) grew at a healthy 3.7% annual rate. The 3.7% rate is modest uptick from the 3.3% growth rate of the second quarter. (Of course the media like to play the glass-is-half-empty game by saying the economy failed to meet expectations. Maybe the problem is with the #$%! expectations not the economic growth.)

The politics of the announcement is easy to predict--Bushies will view it positively and Kerry will mutter something about a jobless recovery. I come down on Bush's side here as suggested by the word "healthy" in the previous paragraph.

It'll never happen of course, but the contrarian in me thinks Bush should go around trumpeting the jobless recovery. Why? Because producing more goods and services while using the same or less labor inputs is a sign of an increasing standard of living. Taking less work time to make more stuff means that we can enjoy more leisure. Wouldn't it be great to have one's current paycheck but work fewer hours to earn it?

By the way, my use of the term jobless recovery in the previous paragraphs is not meant to endorse the Kerry view. I'm increasingly coming around to the notion that the abnormal period of labor market behavior is not the modest sluggishness of the Bush period (the unemployment rate didn't get above 6.3%) but the go-go Clinton era. Put differently, the current 5.4% seems more "normal" than the 3.8% rate of April 2000.

This oxymoronic headline brings to mind Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther movies.

A recent article in The Weekly Standard prompted me to revisit the first presidential debate (the source of the quotes below) and write the following letter to the editor:

To the editor:

Although Fred Barnes (“Debate Hangover” October 11) attempts the impossible—chronicling John Kerry’s debate contradictions in less than two pages of print—he misses Kerry’s most important inconsistency.

Sen. Kerry stated that Bush “avoided even the advice of [his] own general … [who] said you're going to need several hundred thousand troops.

He also asserted that

[Iraq’s] getting worse by the day. More soldiers killed in June than before. More in July than June. More in August than July. More in September than in August. And now we see beheadings. And we got weapons of mass destruction crossing the border every single day, and they're blowing people up. And we don't have enough troops there.

Yet, somehow the senator envisioned that “we could begin to draw the troops down in six months.”

To summarize, Sen. Kerry thinks that there were insufficient troops from the outset, that conditions have since deteriorated, but that it will soon be possible to begin withdrawing forces. Utterly incoherent.

E. Frank Stephenson

You'll just have to read this one for yourselves, but here's a teaser courtesy of Jon Sanders:

Americans trudging off to the polls next Tuesday will be facing more than a choice between Kerry and Bush or between a Democrat and a Republican. Once the curtain closes they will be facing a choice between freedom and fascism. ...

The Bush regime does not dare to relinquish power. They are guilty of far too many hanging crimes, ranging from mass murder on 9-11 to numerous war crimes. ...

Don't cry for the passage of the democratic government. Weep for the real patriots that will be swept away to the concentration camps or whose blood will cover the streets ...

UPDATE: Here's some background, though be warned much of it is difficult to stomach. I can't imagine that this bilge (Bush's America is somehow similar to Nazi Germany, get real!) would actually make someone more likely to vote for Kerry.

North Carolina's John Locke Foundation has a blog called The Locker Room. It's a good place for ex-pat Tarheels such as myself to keep up with NC politics and to read what's on the ever-excellent George Leef's mind. Currently, the Locke bloggers are having some fun with potential "October surprises."

I knew there was a reason I like red wine over white. UPDATE: Ok, upon reading more carefully this study looks to me to fall into the "junk science" file. But I still like red wine better!

Whew. My frequent flyer miles just might be safe on Delta afterall.

I hope you had a good view of last night's excellent lunar eclipse.

Can't you just hear the creationists squirming over this cool discovery? Meanwhile, J.R.R. Tolkien fans rejoice!

Yet another paper finds that terrorism is not significantly higher for poor countries. (Disclaimer: I have not read the entire paper so I cannot vouch for the methodology of the study.)

Cato has a new report out on the economic impact of a stadium for the DC Rent-Seekers. It's authored by well-known sports economists Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys and, like virtually every other respectable piece of research on the topic, finds that there is no economic development rationale to justify public funding of the stadium.

NPR reports that the NYC Subway celebrates its centennial today. (Audio of the story is here; scroll down the page.) I've heard that the system started as a private enterprise then was taken over by the greedy hand of government; not surprisingly there was no metion of private enterprise in the NPR report. I've been unable to locate a good background source; the best I found is here. I hope to find something better and update this post; suggestions are welcome.

UPDATE: Some information on the government takeover of the NYC Subway system in 1940 (hence the subway was privately owned and operated for it first 36 years) is contained in Henry Hazlitt's article "Socialism, US Style" in the September 1966 issue of The Freeman. The article is not on the web but is reprinted in Public Means, Private Ends: Voluntarism vs. Coercion edited by my colleague Wilson Mixon.

Yesterday's WSJ had an article (sorry subscription required) about eggheads who analyze the likelihood of various election outcomes using high-powered statistical techniques. Two of the sites are here and here.

Sorry to offer such brief explanations but I'm hurrying off to celebrate my wife's birthday.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the WSJ article.

So Bush is mediocre and Kerry is awful--wouldn't it be nice to have a "none of the above" option? The Detroit News sure thinks so. I'm betting such a choice would get at least 75% of the vote. Hat tip: Mini-Me.

Arnold Kling enlightens.

Richard Rahn has an article about Kerry's "Tax Hypocricy". Here's one quote:

Last year, Mr. Kerry and his wife paid only 13.4 percent of their declared $5.5 million income in federal taxes. President and Mrs. Bush, whose income was only 15 percent of the Kerrys', paid a tax rate more than twice as high, 27.7 percent. Despite all of the senator's bombast about the rich paying more, under his plan he and Mrs. Kerry would still pay a lower average rate than most middle-income Americans.

John Kerry bemoans the recent increase in college prices. Ironically, reality is a bit more, ahem, nuanced. Jon Sanders explains.

Not since the O.J. trial had bloodstained socks caused such a stir.*

* Ian O'Connor, "Ex-Knicks star passes gamer title to Schilling," USA Today, 26 October 2004.

(1) Cape Town is the most stunningly beautiful city I've ever seen in terms of natural beauty. I hiked around and up Table Mountain and the nearby wine farms are great.

(2) The good news: Many observers think the AIDS estimates for South Africa are grossly exaggerated. (If so many people have AIDS, and aren't getting treatment, why aren't they dead yet?) They think the numbers are incorrect extrapolations from a few subsets of the population and that the government doesn't care to correct the numbers because there's a lot of western aid riding on AIDS.

(3) The bad news: The Jewish population in Cape Town had declined to about 50-75,000 from 125-150,000. Canaries in the mine?

(4) The Afrikaans language is a form of low Dutch most similar to today's Flemish. It is a very simple language with no verb conjugation (I is, he is, we is, they is). Everyone who speaks English already knows some Afrikaans. "My hand is in warm water" is Afrikaans for "My hand is in warm water" in English. :-)

(5) White South Africa is as rich as Europe and black South Africa is as poor as anywhere in the world.

Here's an article about the currency situation in Cuba. Money quote:

"The trick will be to force Cuban citizens to accept the Cuban convertible peso and be just as comfortable putting them in their mattress as their dollars," Kavulich said.

Well, good luck with that.

Hat tip: Russ Sobel

Two interesting papers on voting:

1. This Cato paper considers the issue of voter ignorance. I buy into the notion of rational ignorance but the level of ignorance among Americans makes me shudder when thinking about all the schemes such as early voting or Matthew Miller's notion of a national voter lottery that are intended to get more of these folks going to the polls. I suspect we'd get even more legalized theft like the pills for seniors program.

2. We can expect to hear lots of teeth gnashing about voting equipment on Nov. 2. Steve Knack and Martha Kropf looked at the usage of various types of voting equipment (punch card etc.) in the 2000 election; here's the abstract of their paper:

The American public became newly acquainted with the disadvantages of punch card ballots in the aftermath of the 2000 Presidential election. A widespread perception emerged that counties in Florida and elsewhere with a greater percentage of minorities and poor people were more likely to employ antiquated voting machinery that produces a disproportionate number of undervotes and invalid ballots. This study provides a systematic analysis of this question, combining county-level demographic data from the Census Bureau with county-level data on voting equipment collected by Election Data Services, Inc. We find little support for the view that resource constraints cause poorer counties with large minority populations to retain antiquated or inferior voting
equipment. In most states, it is whites, the non-poor and Republican voters who are more likely to reside in punch card counties rather than African Americans, the poor and Democratic voters. Moreover, counties with punch card systems tend to have higher incomes, higher tax revenues, and larger populations than do counties with modern voting equipment.

Of course, their findings won't stop opportunistic politicians from running around yelling disenfranchisement. (Maybe that would make a good election night drinking game.) For the full paper, click here.

GeekMedia has tinkered with the tradesports futures market to produce a state-by-state mapping of the presidential future market. Even neater--one can adjust the parameters for predicting a state will be a Bush state or a Kerry state and see what happens to the elector vote totals. Hat tip to James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" email.

Q: What do Michael Jackson and Manny Ramirez have in common?

A: The both wear a glove on one hand for no apparent reason.

Yes, this is a painfully old joke but Ramirez's adventures in fielding made it seem appropriate.

An excerpt from an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article on a police officer who robbed three banks:

Frank Rotondo, executive director of the Georgia Police Chiefs Association, was surprised that an officer with so many infractions was still on a police force.

"It seems like an inordinate amount'' of discipline, Rotondo said. "I've been in law enforcement 34 years, and I've never been disciplined."

In many police departments, especially in smaller towns, someone with so many violations would have been fired long ago, Rotondo said. But in Atlanta and other large cities and counties, it's harder to fire an officer, because of job protections afforded to government employees and because of the police union's influence, Rotondo said.

"The reality is you will see poor or marginal employees covered up more . . . where unions exercise a lot of control," he said.

Dartmouth's Andrew Samwick has a couple of interesting posts on Vox Baby:

1. One of the alleged shortcomings of the Bush administration is a vast pool of workers who would just love to have jobs. The implication is that decreases in the unemployment rate are attributable to people dropping out of the labor force and no longer being counted as unemployed by the BLS. Samwick crunches some numbers.

2. For all the snooty folks who think Kerry is so overwhelmingly intellectually superior to the inarticulate president, Samwick posts on the candidates' debate vocabulary. It's not pretty--Bush scores at a 6th grade level and the genius Kerry comes in as a 7th grader.

And from Southern Appeal:

German archaeologists have discovered the lavatory on which Martin Luther wrote the 95 Theses that launched the Protestant Reformation.

In a 10/18 WSJ article Allen St. John attributes the success of the five “World Series wild cards” (WSWC) to the difference between their on-base percentage and the on-base percentage allowed by their pitchers. Labelling this statistic the “Beane Difference” in honor of Oakland GM Billy Beane, Mr. St. John writes that “It’s no surprise that WSWC squads have have positive … Beane Diffs.” Unfortunately for Mr. St. John’s hypothesis, 95% of all playoff teams in the wild card era (since 1995) have had positive Beane Diffs. Hence, the fact that the five WSWC teams had a positive Beane Diff really doesn’t get us very far in explaining why some wild card teams have been successful in reaching the World Series.

Moreover, none of the five WSWC whose success Mr. St. John attempts to explain had the highest Beane Diff among the four teams in their league vying for a World Series slot. The 2002 Giants and Angels had the second highest Beane Diffs among their competitors; the 2000 Mets, 1997 Marlins, and 2003 Marlins all had the third highest Beane Diff. Lest one is concerned that examining rankings can obscure small differences in magnitude; the WSWC Beane Diffs trailed the highest Beane Diff teams by 0.008 to 0.030.

Broadening the scope to include division winners, Beane Diff also appears to be a poor indicator of which team will advance to the World Series. In the wild card era, a team with the highest Beane Diff has advanced to the World Series 8 out of a possible 20 times (10 years x 2 teams per year). The second highest Beane Diff team has made the series 4 times, the third highest 7 times, and the lowest Beane Diff team has made the World Series once (1997 Indians). Thus, other than discounting the chances of the team with the lowest Beane Diff, the statistic does not have much predictive power as to which playoff team will advance to the World Series.

Mr. St. John can take some consolation. His article may have done a lousy job of explaining the success of the 5 WSWC teams prior to 2004; however, there is now a 6th WSWC team. And this year’s Red Sox just happen to have the highest Beane Diff among the American League playoff teams. Even broken watches …

So back to the main question of Mr. St. John’s article: What explains the 6 WSWC teams in the 10 years? I bet that, after making some allowances for injuries or the possibility that season-long Beane Diffs may not be a perfect indicator of a team come October, it is more or less random chance. If all teams entered the postseason equally talented (i.e., with an equal probability of winning) then the expected number of wildcards to have made the WS in the last 10 years is 5. And since it is entirely possible that a wild card team is the second best team in its league, it’s hardly surprising that there have been 6 WSWC. Indeed, the wild card team has had the second highest Beane Diff in its league 8 times in the past ten years; moreover, the wild card teams have had the highest Beane Diff as many times (4) as they have had the lowest or next to lowest Beane Diff.

UPDATE: I've now also looked at the World Series match-ups. Only 5 of the last 9 winners have had higher Beane Diffs so again we seem to have pretty low predictive power. (Note: A quick check of the mean Beane Diff by league finds similar means so I don't think the World Series comparison is skewed by the AL's DH rule. This makes sense since AL hitters would have higher on-base percentages and AL pitchers would have higher on-base percentages allowed.) For what (apparently little) it's worth, the Red Sox (0.042) have a higher Beane Diff than the Cardinals (0.031).

Thanks to ArmchairGM for a nice addition to my post:

The WSJ named this stat the “Beane Difference” in honor of Oakland GM Billy Beane. Beane, of course, is a proponent of on-base percentage (although hardly OBP in spite of everything else), but he is also a leading proponet of the theory that the playoffs are a crap shoot. In Moneyball, Beane is quoted as saying “[his system] doesn’t work in the playoffs . . . [his job] is to get us to the playoffs. Everything after that is [dumb] luck.”

The presidential campaign has gotten ugly lately--January surprises for Social Security, secret plans for a draft, etc. Then Marie Antoinette Heinz Kerry unloaded on Laura Bush in USA Today:

Q: You'd be different from Laura Bush?

A: Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job — I mean, since she's been grown up. So her experience and her validation comes from important things, but different things. And I'm older, and my validation of what I do and what I believe and my experience is a little bit bigger — because I'm older, and I've had different experiences. And it's not a criticism of her. It's just, you know, what life is about.

Gosh--it must be hard work to be a billionairess, even harder than being a teacher and librarian as was Laura Bush. And how about the implication that being a fulltime mom isn't a "real job"? (I'd bet dollars to donuts that MAHK used nannies.) Disgraceful. We may have two mediocre candidates for president but there is a heck of a lot of difference between the would-be first ladies. Marie Antoinette's classless barrage even outdoes her husband's latest bit of elitist condescension:

"Can I get me a hunting license here?" Kerry asked store owners Paul and Debra McKnight.

You just knew that old Arnold's Republican Convention speech wouldn't play well with his in-laws. Apparently his wife made him pay dearly.

Home Fire Inspired By Movie, Beers, Man Says
'Day After Tomorrow,' Plus 9 Or 10 Beers, Led To Fire, Georgia Man Says

Full story here; some things just cannot be made up.

So there's a shortage of flu vaccines--Cafe Hayek's Russ Roberts gets to the heart of the matter here and here. Surprise, surprise, surprise--it has something to do with price controls.

UPDATE: Rich Lowry of National Review also has a good article. He fingers, among other things, the ClintonCare move to have the government as the predominant buyer of vaccines. This has reduced the price that vaccine makers receive and made it a less attractive line of business. Monopsony anyone?

One might want to keep this in mind next time John Kerry spouts off about how Bush's prescription drug plan does not let the government use its buying power to push down drug prices. The Bush version is bad enough, but Kerry would only make it worse.

Peter Gordon blogs on a recent WSJ article about international happiness rankings. The underlying idea, one that I don't necessarily buy into, is that it is better to measure people's satisfaction rather than their material well-being. Gordon doesn't entirely buy it either noting that 3.5% of Puerto Rico's population has moved to the lower ranked U.S.

Gordon's post reports happiness scores for 21 countries that were in the print version of the WSJ. The 21 are taken from a larger survey of 81 or so, but he could not find the scores for the other countries and I didn't have any better luck.

Hypothesizing that economic freedom makes people happy, I had my capable student assistant Michael Hulsey look up the economic freedom ratings for the countries. (Of the 21 countries only 15 were included in the EFW rankings; the ones without data include Puerto Rico, Northern Ireland, and some former Soviet republics.) I then calculated the simple correlation coefficient between the level of economic freedom and the level of happiness--a robust 0.79. I ranked the countries 1 to 15 on both happiness and freedom; the correlation between the rankings is 0.56. Of course, this is a small sample and the statistical analysis is rudimentary, but it appears that free people are happier people.

Hat tips to co-blogger Bob for his EFW handiwork and to my assistant Michael Hulsey.

From the Toledo Blade:

A Defiance County man has been arrested for allegedly filing more than 100 false voter registration forms in exchange for crack cocaine from a Toledo woman working on behalf of the NAACP’s voter registration drive.

Letter to the Editor, Columbus Dispatch, 17 October 2004.

‘Structural deficit’ is irresponsible spending

In the recent Dispatch article about Ohio’s impending budget deficit, "Assembly may face $5 billion deficit", Lee Leonard wrote, "It’s called a structural deficit — the amount of revenue lacking just to fund existing program costs and obligations for another two years."

Ohio’s total general expenditures increased from $24 billion to more than $48 billion from 1992 to 2004. That’s a growth rate of 6 percent per year. Meanwhile from 1992 to 2002, personal income grew at an annual rate of 4.19 percent. Adjusting for inflation and population growth would require an increase of just 2.82 percent.

Had the state budget increased at only the rate of personal-income growth, thus assuring that the state would spend a constant share of people’s incomes, the budget today would be smaller by more than $9 billion. We’d have a surplus today, not a deficit.

Had the state budget increased at only the rate of growth of population and inflation, thus assuring the state would spend the same real amount per person, the budget today would be about $15 billion smaller. This would be enough to cover this deficit and completely abolish the Ohio income tax!

There’s nothing "structural" about this deficit. Runaway spending by a string of governors and legislatures is to blame.

BOB LAWSON
Professor of economics
Capital University
School of Management
Bexley

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting article detailing the debate about the efficient market hypothesis. (Jon E. Hilsenrath, "As Two Economists Debate Markets, The Tide Shifts," Wall Street Journal, 18 October 2004). The article is presented as a battle between Eugene Fama and Richard Thaler.

Without getting into the debate about the efficient markets hypothesis, however, one thing bothers me about the article. Here's the excerpt that got me thinking:

As a young assistant professor in Rochester in the mid 1970s, Mr. Thaler had his doubts about market efficiency. People, he suspected, were not nearly as rational as economists assumed.

Mr. Thaler started collecting evidence to demonstrate his point, which he published in a series of papers. One associate kept playing tennis even though he had a bad elbow because he didn't want to waste $300 on tennis club fees. Another wouldn't part with an expensive bottle of wine even though he wasn't an avid drinker. Mr. Thaler said he caught economists bingeing on cashews in his office and asking for the nuts to be taken away because they couldn't control their own appetites.

Mr. Thaler decided that people had systematic biases that weren't rational, such as a lack of self-control. Most economists dismissed his writings as a collection of quirky anecdotes, so Mr. Thaler decided the best approach was to debunk the most efficient market of them all - the stock market.

Perhaps this is a simplistic version of Mr. Thaler's work (which I'm not that familiar with). If so, then what I'm going to say might be a bit off. If so, please feel free to let me know.

It seems to me that Thaler is attacking a straw man - at least as I see it. The rationality assumption just assumes that, given their preferences and abilities, people pursue their ends the best they know how. This doesn't preclude them from being wrong.

If the rationality assumption meant that people made some *optimal* choice (whatever that is), Thaler might have a point. Clearly, that is not what economists mean, however, otherwise why would we have to teach our students not to take sunk costs into account.

[This is not to say that Thaler might not have a point about using people's biases in the design of programs. I'm agnostic on that point (at least for now).]

Craig Depken has several more excellent posts on the fleecing of the Arlington TX taxpayers for a football stadium. This one in particular is interesting because it features an editorial cartoon with the money line:

"Don't listen to those university economics guys. I figure those who can, do...those who can't teach economics."

Evidently the cartoonist has never heard of one (probably many) of the concepts that we university economics guys teach--moral hazard. Think about the incentives that the folks who do economic impact analyses face--if they don't come up with a large projected economic benefit they're not likely to get future contracts. By contrast, academic economists like Depken do not have the conflict of interest that people whose livelihoods depend on coming up with inflated numbers.

By the way, I bet the same newspaper that is so gung-ho on giving a multi-million dollar stadium subsidy to Jerry Jones editorializes out of the other side of its mouth about helping the poor etc.

The Economist surveyed 56 academic economists on Bush's policies and Kerry's agenda. Not surprisingly, the results are pro-Kerry. Although academic economists are not as leftist as, say, sociologists or English professors, my guess is that they run about 2-to-1 Commiecrat.

The survey is, however, surprisingly shoddy. For example, question 6 asks respondents to "Overall, please rate Mr Bush's economic plan." The problem is that there are multiple, contradictory, reasons why one might give the plan low ratings. John Kerry, for example, thinks Bush's prescription drug plan was insufficiently generous. Others, including your humble blogger, dislike Bush's creating yet another government entitlement.

Teresa Heinz Kerry (I just couldn't bring myself to bring up Marie Antoinette again) plays doctor. Her treatment for arthritis:

“You get some gin and get some white raisins — and only white raisins — and soak them in the gin for two weeks,” she said. “Then eat nine of the raisins a day.”

I wonder how she arrived at taking exactly nine--not eight, not ten--raisins.

Hat tip: James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today"

I grew up a hip-hop fan and still regularly listen to pre-1995 hip-hop. Over the last several years I have rediscovered country music. (I say rediscovered, because the first concert I ever attended was a Charlie Daniels Band concert when I was six.)

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