What Gripes Me: The Golden Rule

As in this case reported in the Times:

"Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $553 million and admit to criminal wrongdoing on Tuesday, settling a long-running investigation into tax shelter fraud that prosecutors say generated billions of dollars in bogus tax benefits."

"... Deutsche Bank will avoid prosecution for helping 2,100 customers evade taxes through 2,300 financial transactions. The arrangements, which took place between 1996 and 2002, helped wealthy Americans report more than $29 billion in fraudulent tax losses, according to the Justice Department."

Them as has the gold, rules; or at least break the rules.  (I know, Republicans, this is class warfare.  The war of class on the masses. Can anyone guess I'm not in a holiday mood today?)

Bronze Star Cook

Via Marginal Revolution, this short post on the Army Ranger and Bronze Star winner who's also a great pastry cook: no. 3 in the world.

Render Unto Caesar

A friend argues we should not have any marriages recognized by the civil authorities; everyone should use civil unions and leave marriages to the churches. That almost feels like Matt Yglesias on Christmas: let's have a universal secular festival on the solstice and leave Christmas and Hanukkah to their respective religions.

Government Project Wastes Millions on Failed Projects

A big government project, announced with much fanfare 5 years ago, admitted today it had failed to achieve its objectives after spending $450 million of taxpayer money. Few would be surprised by such a story.  But it turns out that the sentence (mis)describes a Bill Gates project.  Best I can tell, the project was similar to something the government might have done, particularly if you had someone like Rep. Dingell pushing NIH and funding its efforts. It actually was a group of projects, mostly conceived as top-down efforts, some of which were successful but most of which didn't meet their objectives.  

To be clear, I don't regard this as a waste of Mr. Gates' money, but I am intrigued with the similarities and differences with similar government efforts.

Christmas Tree Exhibited in 1840

I follow a couple of York, PA blogs because one line of ancestors lived there for a while.  Here's a post on an exhibition of a Christmas tree in 1840, plus related bits and pieces.

GPRA II Fails

I blogged on Senate passage of this bill but it failed in the House.  Brought up under suspension of rules, it failed to get 2/3 of the votes.  The incoming chair of Gov Oversight, Rep. Issa, has some problems with it because the Senate stripped his amendment requiring program-level goals.

New Type of Crop Insurance--Weather-Based

Via Farm Policy, here's the website of WeatherBill, which touts itself as a new type of crop insurance. I'm not clear how it works, but the leader used to work for Google so presumably it's based on better/faster access to data.   You do have to input some of the data from your crop insurance policy. And the policies are weather-specific: i.e., "rain on hay", "spring freeze", etc. Whether they can reinvent crop insurance, we'll see.

On Teachers and Education

Greg Mankiw passes on an estimate of the value added by a teacher who's one standard deviation better than the average: $400,000 for a class of 20.  Meanwhile, a comparison of the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) scores by discipline puts elementary educators 5 rungs from the bottom, with secondary and higher education above, but still below average.  (Public administration was just above elementary education, but I was happy to see, as a failed historian, history was third from the top--all rankings based on verbal scores.)

Declining Usage of Productive Capability

This post at Calculated Risk has a series of graphs, one of which shows the usage of productive capability over the years. What strikes me is that usage was at 88 percent or so in 1967, but the peak declined to 85 percent in the 1980's and 1990's and to about 82 percent in the 2000's. I wonder what's going on?

• Is there a systemic problem with the statistics?
• Are companies investing too much in capabilities?
• Have tax breaks for investment resulted in over investment?
• Something else?

Madison Is Right Again: Joe Lieberman

I interpret Madison's arguments for a big republic in the Federalist Papers as predicting Joe Lieberman would be a darling of the liberals, at least for a day. I may be stretching a bit, but Madison foresaw a number of different interests in competition, which seems to me logically to result in overlap and cross-pressures.  So while Lieberman has been a hawk and a friend of McCain on many issues, so much so he was beaten in the last Democratic primary, he's been good on many domestic issues and turned up trumps on Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

I'm probably showing my age, but I've more tolerance for such politicians than many, such as the Republicans who go hunting for RINOS (Republicans in name only).