DOOM: Poor poor pitiful me

You remember that IRS scandal that Democrats have been desperately hoping would go away? It’s not going away. It’s pretty clear at this point that Lois Lerner deliberately targeted Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny (read: harassment) to hinder the Tea Party groups from organizing and raising money. That this was done to aid Democrats is pretty obvious. Ms. Lerner has been on a paid vacation from the IRS ever since the scandal broke. So far no punishments have been meted out -- to Ms. Lerner or anyone else at the IRS involved in the scandal.

Larry Summers withdraws his name for the position of Fed chairman. Theory A: Summers anticipated the beating he was going to get during confirmation and wanted no part of it. Theory B: Summers’ boss Obama anticipated the beating Summers was going to get during confirmation hearings and wanted no part of it. This means Yellen is probably a lock, though in truth she’s hardly a better pick than Summers on the merits.

Bad history, worse policy.

Missed by both sides was that the rush into housing signaled something seriously wrong with the economy (which this reviewer wrote about for National Review Online in 20061). A purchase of a house doesn’t make one more productive, it doesn’t lead to software or other commercial innovations that drive economic efficiency, nor does it open foreign markets. Housing on its best day is a consumptive sink of wealth, and when housing was all the rage in the earlier part of the new Millennium, the fact that it was made it apparent that consumption of housing was detracting from investment in the productive parts of the economy.

Keith Hennessey and Ed Lazear present some thoughts on the financial crisis of 2008.

The Democrat war on the young. Yet young people continue to vote Democrat by a large margin. It passeth all understanding.

The cost of the Great Recession? About $30 trillion...and counting.

Four of every ten college grads don’t need a degree for their work. But then, increasingly, college is just a four-year vacation in between high school and adulthood. It’s not really intended to impart any real knowledge or skills, unless you major in the hard sciences or engineering. It’s a place to have fun, drink a lot, have casual sex, and attend a lot of leftist indoctrination courses disguised as “women’s studies” or “African American studies” classes.

What’s wrong with Kansas? Well, one of the things is that they have a huge unfunded pension liability. It's not just "blue" states, folks. It's most of them.

Greek unemployment now at 27.9%.

California plans to hike the minimum wage to $10 by 2016; will act shocked, shocked when unemployment subsequently spikes. And when off-the-books jobs (which don’t generate income taxes and tend to employ off-the-books people) start to proliferate.

Yet another ObamaCare success story.

Italy damned nearly bailed on the Euro in 2011.

posted by Monty at 08:09 AM

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