Somehow Bloomberg was able to bring onto their show Ron Paul and Paul Krugman to "face-off" in a debate. It's twenty minutes long, with worthwhile links below the video:

Here's Paul Krugman's first comments on his blog post-debate:

"I responded that I am not a defender of the economic policies of the Emperor Diocletian."

Here's Krugman's second set of comments:

Think about it: you approach what is, in the end, a somewhat technical subject in a format in which no data can be presented, in which there's no opportunity to check facts (everything Paul said about growth after World War II was wrong, but who will ever call him on it?). So people react based on their prejudices. If Ron Paul got on TV and said "Gah gah goo goo debasement! theft!" -- which is a rough summary of what he actually did say -- his supporters would say that he won the debate hands down; I don't think my supporters are quite the same, but opinions may differ.

And finally, here's Kevin Drum on the whole spectacle:

Krugman is right, but I think he's also missing the point here. Wars of ideas are typically won in print: in journals, in books, in magazine articles, and in monographs. The audience is fellow professionals in your field, the language is often technical and abstruse, and you keep score by counting citations, being invited to conferences, and amassing disciples.

Public debates, including their gruesome modern variant, the three-minute hit on cable TV, aren't about that. They're solely designed to influence public opinion, and you keep score at the ballot box. Nobody cares if Ron Paul is technically right about the Romans debasing their currency, and nobody cares whether that really has anything to do with the modern global economy. All that matters is whether he's found an analogy that moves a few of the rubes to his side. Truth isn't just an obstacle in public debates, it's a handicap.

If you want to increase your understanding of a subject, public debates are worthless. But that's because that isn't their purpose. Their purpose is emotional appeal, and understanding actively gets in the way of that. Ron Paul already knows that. I hope Krugman does too.

Yes, most debates are worthless with respect to getting to the meat of the issues; and yet sometimes, just sometimes, especially during Presidential debates, we get morsels of facts that leap out at us and shape our views. That's why we keep having them.

Plus, we can't help ourselves -- we must constantly communicate and debate. Let's face it: we're plain and simple nothing more than social animals.

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Tags: Bloomberg TV, Paul Krugman, Ron Paul

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What's The Pig Book, you ask?

The projects in this year's Congressional Pig Book Summary symbolize the most blatant examples of pork spending by the Federal Government. As in previous years, all the items in the Congressional Pig Book meet at least one of Citizens Against Government Waste's seven criteria, but most satisfy at least two:

** Requested by only one chamber of Congress;
** Not specifically authorized;
** Not competitively awarded;
** Not requested by the President;
** Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or the previous year’s funding;
** Not the subject of congressional hearings; or
** Serves only a local or special interest.

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) is a private, non-partisan, non-profit organization representing more than one million members and supporters nationwide. CAGW's mission is to eliminate waste, mismanagement, and inefficiency in the federal government.

You'll note that although on paper there's been a massive reduction in earmarks in 2012, there are still plenty that have been written into law; our Representatives just took their names off the legislation. CAGW had to root around for many of them, but one of the biggest has been out there in plain site:

$255,000,000 for continued upgrade of the M1 Abrams tank to the M1A2SEP variant, despite DOD's proposal to suspend tank production until 2017 in order to achieve savings. According to a December 16, 2011, article in the Daily Tribune, supporters of the upgrade warned that "idling the program as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars wind down would jeopardize tens of thousands of jobs at more than 560 businesses across the nation."

And isn't that something? The Defense Department doesn't want us to spend $250 million on the tank, but our representatives want to ram it through anyway, since it's really nothing but a jobs bill.

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Tags: Citizens Against Government Waste, The Pig Book

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This is so important that we're reposting this from our Democracy blog:

Angry Christie should be impeached for this:

"The governor subsequently steered $4 billion earmarked for the tunnel to the state's near-bankrupt transportation trust fund, traditionally financed by the gasoline tax. "

Why?

"The report is likely to revive criticism that his decision, which he said was about "hard choices" in tough economic times, was more about avoiding the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax, which would have violated a campaign promise."

They should impeach him; there's no bigger transportation project as important in this country as the one Christie torpedoed.

Paul Krugman seems to agree, as his column today (4/13/12) lays out:

Mr. Christie insisted that his state couldn't afford the cost. As we've already seen, however, he apparently couldn't make that case without being dishonest about the numbers. So what was his real motive?

One answer is that the governor is widely assumed to have national ambitions, and the Republican base hates government spending in general (unless it's on weapons). And it hates public transportation in particular. Indeed, three other Republican governors -- in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin -- have also canceled public transportation projects supported by federal funds. The difference, of course, is that New Jersey is a densely populated state, most of whose residents live either in Greater New York or Greater Philadelphia; given that position, public transit is the state’s lifeblood, and refusing to invest in such transportation will strangle the state's economy.

Another answer is that canceling the tunnel allowed Mr. Christie to divert funds from that project -- as his critics have said, to cannibalize the investment -- and put them into the state highway fund, thereby avoiding the need to raise the state's tax on gasoline. New Jersey gas taxes, by the way, are lower in real terms than at any point in the state's history. But, as a candidate, Mr. Christie said that he wouldn't raise those taxes, so cannibalizing the tunnel helped him avoid embarrassment.

The crucial point about both of these explanations is that they stand Mr. Christie's narrative about himself on its head. The governor poses as a man willing to make hard choices for the future, but what he actually did was sacrifice the future for the sake of personal political advantage. He catered to national Republican prejudices that are completely at odds with New Jersey's needs; he cared more about avoiding embarrassment over a misguided campaign pledge than about serving an urgent public need.

Unfortunately, Mr. Christie's behavior is all too typical these days.

America used to be a country that thought big about the future. Major public projects, from the Erie Canal to the interstate highway system, used to be a well-understood component of our national greatness. Nowadays, however, the only big projects politicians are willing to undertake -- with expense no object -- seem to be wars. Funny how that works.

The thing is, because so much of our transportation future is at stake, its just not that funny that the voters of New Jersey picked Christie in the first place. All of our future generations are going to suffer for it.

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Tags: Chris Christie, Hudson River, Port Authority

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