Detailed Abstractions

Here we go again…. yet another marketing campaign by the Obama Administration to tout bail out packages that has yet to do anything they’ve previously promised (DA Post here) as a rousing success.   These silly marketing games seem to work well for politicians, but what logic tells us is that you can’t prove a negative.  The Obama Administration can tout bailout monies spent for any reason in to any success they please because proving that it would’ve been better without the money is a nonexistent hypothetical situation for which we can only guess.

& with upcoming elections, for which Democrats currently seem to be in some trouble (polling data here via RealClearPolitics), they will continue this regardless of any true facts which show the opposite.  This week, with some gall, they plan to use the auto show in Detroit (here via Policito):

When the president travels to Michigan on Friday, he’ll tout the revival of General Motors and Chrysler since the auto companies received billions in federal aid and government-assisted bankruptcies….

I say with gall, because they fully intend to tout even more success with blown money when the only major car company to NOT take bail out money is doing better than their rivals (here via Star-Tribune):

DEARBORN, Mich. – Four years ago, Ford mortgaged everything down to the blue oval logo to save itself. Now, even as Americans remain skittish about the economy, it’s reaping big rewards and stealing business from stumbling rivals.

Ford said Friday that it made $2.6 billion from April through June, its fifth straight quarterly profit. The company, which reported record losses in 2008, now predicts it will end 2011 with more cash than debt.

With its two longtime Detroit rivals still finding their way after spending time in bankruptcy last year, Ford, which never took government bailout money, extended its success story…..

Yep, instead of using this time to stand up for the ingenuity, the self reliance, the perseverance of private individuals working without taking tax money, they will use this to tell us all how much better off we are than if they hadn’t.

Oh… and in case you might be one of those people who know about Ford’s success, they have an answer for that as well (here via Detroit News):

Washington — The Senate’s top Democrat argued Ford Motor Co. probably would have collapsed if the government hadn’t bailed out its top two competitors….

So there you have it, even with logical evidence to the contrary, not only did the all knowing government help out two companies that are still barely surviving, but also completely fixed a company for which they contributed nothing directly.

Well, the verdict is in. The Republicans are being cast as the party of no.  The party without ideas.  The party of obstruction.

Please make no mistake about it, this marketing push isn’t really about obstruction, but about the upcoming elections.  Just as President Clinton did brilliantly prior the 1996 elections when he cast all Republicans as following Newt Gingrich and obstructing spending laws, the Obama administration is moving forward in much the same pattern.

This is possible because the White House, regardless of occupant, has historically been able to control the news cycle.  In my opinion, this should be an indictment on journalism as a whole when alternatives which exist aren’t being reported, but simply put:  when the President talks, news happens.  When your normal representative talks, you’re lucky if you even hear about it.

It worked during the Clinton Administration on spending, it worked during the Bush (43) Administration on the Patriot Act, & it certainly might work again this time. Irregardless, the campaign is back and in high gear (here via USA Today):

…”Too often, the Republican leadership in the United States Senate chooses to filibuster our recovery and obstruct our progress,” Obama said. “And that has very real consequences.”…

Or here via NY Times blog, here via WaPo, & on and on and on…

From a critical point of view however, obstructionist should not automatically be a pejorative.   Without analyzing what exactly is being obstructed, this is little more than name calling.

As an example, if say in the 1940s Congress was actively trying to “obstruct” the intermittent of thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans, this would not only be a moral good, but any thoughts to compromise solely to be seen as a non-obstructionist would be wrong.  What would be a compromised alternative?  House arrest?

Additionally, we have to be on the lookout for the differences between the marketing of bills and their actual language.  Think of the new health care legislation.  President Obama’s promises of more health care for all at cheaper prices, simply don’t seem to be fulfilled by the 2500 page law passed… or maybe they are being fulfilled, but like the Patriot Act, no one really knows what the new legislation actually means (here via Cato):

…The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act represents the most significant transformation of the American health care system since Medicare and Medicaid. It will fundamentally change nearly every aspect of health care, from insurance to the final delivery of care.

The length and complexity of the legislation, combined with a debate that often generated more heat than light, has led to massive confusion about the law’s likely impact….

Or on yesterday’s Meet The Press Rep. Van Hollen stated (transcripts here via MSNBC):

…The frustration is there are lots of important bills to push for jobs that are sitting over in the Senate.  But it’s not the fault of the Democratic leadership in the Senate.  I mean, frankly, you know, John Cornyn and his allies have been trying to block a whole lot of very important jobs measures.  We in fact sent a piece of legislation over very recently that would remove these perverse tax incentives to ship American jobs overseas, that give American corporations a bonus if they ship American jobs overseas….

Just like health care, the basic idea that our representatives are working on private job creation incentives is a good one.  But just like the Obama Administration’s promises on health care, Rep. Van Hollen is selling us a job creation bill which has little chance of actually creating jobs.

To translate – what they mean by “removing incentives” is to increase taxes on businesses who outsource.  Now, some may want this to happen for various reasons, but the economics are pretty straight forward.  Tax increases have never increased jobs & forcing a tax such as this could actually result in companies simply moving their head quarters as well.

To be fair, there are bills I don’t believe the Republicans should block, for instance the extension on unemployment benefits (though it seems likely to pass soon: here via The Hill).

Yes, the point isn’t that the Republicans are doing the right thing and the Democrats are failing at every single step, the point is only intended to remind us of the old saying about representative governance:

The people will get the government they deserve.

& so long as we allow marketing campaigns to have more force in elections than critical analysis does, we will likely continue to be disappointed.

More bad news for Obama & the Democrats for 2010 elections.  Via The Atlantic here:

Chris Cillizza’s Morning Fix reports new data from Gallup showing that independents now favor a generic Republican candidate for Congress over a generic Democrat by 12 points….

& as is continually the case with this congress, more bad news for freedom.  Via The Hill here:

The 30-second campaign ad could become a thing of the past for third-party groups if the Democrats’ campaign finance legislation becomes law.

Media strategists argue the new disclosure requirements would eat into the majority of their ad time….

& while we’re talking about lack of freedom…. what might Kagan do about this “disclose” act?  Via Reason.com here:

As solicitor general of the United States, Elena Kagan argued in front of the Supreme Court that the federal government had the constitutional authority to ban certain political pamphlets. She also strongly implied that some political books, if they were partisan enough, could also be censored…..

Does is matter that she’s against free political speech?  Unlikely…. via Yahoo News here:

…Kagan’s performance in the Judiciary Committee drew praise from Democrats and compliments even from some critics, putting her on a path to confirmation by the full Senate sometime in July.

“She will be confirmed. I believe she will be confirmed,” said Republican Orrin Hatch, a member of the Judiciary Committee, predicting there would be at least some Republican support…..

& least we forgot, there’s still an oil spill…. which is being screwed up by the same government that is promising to “fix” healthcare….  Via The Heritage Foundation here, all kinds of people are offering help, but we’re still considering it:

In total, there have been 27 countries and 5 international organizations offering boom, dispersants, skimmers, vessels, bird rehabilitation equipment as well expertise. Along with the other important action items for the administration to undertake, accepting international assistance must be a more urgent priority. The Department of State has a chart that lists the equipment and expertise sitting on the sidelines with most of the status orders “under consideration.” Owners of the equipment have been rapid in their response to government queries but the equipment remains idle. It simply needs to be better….

Not to mention the economic killing impact the asinine moratorium is having:

Meanwhile, the Gulf continues to suffer. It’s not just government incompetence when it comes to the environmental cleanup; the administration’s policy decisions are making the economic harm much worse – especially the offshore drilling moratorium. Although the ban was only meant to affect those rigs operating in water 500 feet or deeper, it has led to a de facto ban on shallow water drilling….

Butler said that only one of his four drill rigs are operating; all four were drilling before the spill. Spartan has six contracts that would put his entire fleet back to work, but he can’t get going until the permits come through, he added. The week before last, Butler said he had to lay off 72 employees. Come Tuesday he’ll have to let another 140 go. “That’s 140 families, is how I look at it,” Butler said….

Not only incompetence in the clean-up, idiocy in quickly implemented, but poorly thought out regulations (DA post here), The Atlantic takes all this and poses an interesting moral question here:

In this video from Climate Desk partner Need to Know, Atlantic correspondent and oil expert Lisa Margonelli talks to Jon Meacham about halting drilling in the Gulf. She explains her view that Americans don’t have a right to drive cars and use gasoline unless we’re willing to drill for it in our own backyard….

For good news – research conducted on parents and children in reference to video games demonstrates that most parents actually don’t need government help.  Via The Technology Liberation Front (here):

• 93% of the time parents are present at the time games are purchased or rented
• 64% of parents believe games are a positive part of their children’s lives
• 86% of the time children receive their parents’ permission before purchasing or renting a game
• 48% of parents play computer and video games with their children at least weekly
• 97% of parents report always or sometimes monitoring the games their children play
• 76% of parents believe that the parental controls available in all new video game consoles are useful

It might be scary to those in government who are continuing to try to push more laws concerning how parents raise their children as it discounts the need for those laws, but for us normal folk – it gives us what we see everyday:

Once again, these findings illustrate that parents are parenting!

Ahhh… the NY Times – telling us how great it is to die in Rwanda of a heart attack with health insurance, than to survive a heart attack in the US without (via Cato here).  The premise from the NY Times is a Rwandan official who is just besides themselves when they met an American college student who doesn’t have health insurance.  Cato wonders what they are thinking when:

…[In Rwanda] Dialysis is “generally unavailable.”  As are many treatments for cancer, strokes, and heart attacks, making those ailments “death sentences” more often than in advanced nations.  Life expectancy at birth is 58 years, compared to 78 years in the United States.  Rwandan children are 15 times more likely to die before their first birthday (7 vs. 107 deaths per 1,000 live births) and 25 times more likely to die before turning five (8 vs. 196 deaths per 1,000 live births) than U.S.-born children.  (If you want to meet some Rwandan kids struggling to make it to age 5, read my friend’s blog, Life of a Thousand Hills.)  And yet, the saddest thing is a healthy-but-uninsured American college student…..

But the NY Times isn’t alone in their idiocy (as usual).  Via Reason.com (here), they wonder how a floating grocery store can possibly be a bad thing?

Nestle has put together a floating supermarket barge, and on Friday it sailed the product-laden boatmarket (superboat? grocerybarge?) into brave new Amazonian emerging markets…

My first reaction: Neat!…

Apparently that reaction is not shared by all. At Alternet, Michele Simon, a public health lawyer and author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, calls this an “especially disgusting news item” about which “writing about it is the only way I know to release my outrage. My version of screaming from the rooftop.”…

Yes, apparently many pundits from around the world are working tirelessly to keep all the options they have out of the hands of lesser people… for their own good of course.  As reason writer Ms. Mangu-Ward summed it up:

…Nestle is sending its boat into the hinterlands precisely because those hinterlands are now full of people who might be able to swing the purchase of the occasional chocolate bar, something well outside the scope of their financial lives just a few years ago. Hardly the sort of thing that makes me want to take to the rooftops–or the Internet–to express my outrage….

Arlen Specter….you remember, the guy who was going to lose his Senate seat so changed parties from Republicans to Democrats…. only to be soundly defeated in the primary?  Well, if you care, you can see an example of the last, desperate gasp of a man losing all of his power (via Politico here).

Good news on the medical front.  Via Bloomberg, Stem Cells From Own Eyes Restore Vision to Blinded Patients, Study Shows:

Patients blinded in one or both eyes by chemical burns regained their vision after healthy stem cells were extracted from their eyes and reimplanted, according to a report by Italian researchers at a scientific meeting….

For those that have been asleep for the past few days, quick recap:  an old, slightly senile reporter, who should not have had a job for about 20 years went on a radio show and said some really stupid and factually incorrect stuff (here):

[White House Correspondent Helen] Thomas caused an uproar with her recent remarks that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Poland, Germany, America and “everywhere else.”…

Within a few short days, the controversy pulled faux outrage from every corner of society, including the White House itself.  Ms. Thomas went from being incorrectly seen as a sweet old lady, to now being seen as she really is.  She was in the process of losing her press credentials, was suspended from her job, and then decided to do what she should’ve done decades ago…. retire:

Helen Thomas , a veteran columnist for Hearst Newspapers, announced her resignation today shortly after the White House condemned her remarks about Jews as “offensive” and “reprehensible.”…

So basically what we have here – is a bunch of people who are upset over a crazy woman saying crazy things.  The reason they have to be feign anger is because they’ve been defending her childish behavior for years and telling us what a great person she was for standing up to power.

Now some may ask – isn’t some of the anger deserved?  & the answer to that is yes.  Telling any race of people to go back “home” to the countries which tried to wipe them out in a world wide Holocaust deserves societal scorn. But the truth is, we don’t typically heap societal scorn on 89 year olds.

We’ve rightfully come to understand that they not only grew up in very different times, but some are a little off.  Please note, this isn’t to say all 89 year olds will wax philosophically about hating the Jews, just that when your family elders who are 89 spout something idiotic or racist at the Thanksgiving dinner table, they are simply ignored.

I might have to talk to my daughter about what was said and how stupid and racist it was, but we generally don’t attack old people with a penchant for senility.   We ignore, deflect, and move forward all while secretly wishing it hadn’t ever happened.

So…. I’m not angry at Helen Thomas.  I firmly believe what she said was racist, idiotic, and juvenile, but she’s nothing more than a senile reporter.  It’s odd I know, but I don’t get upset when crazy people say crazy things.

Something else to note – this love affair the White House and major media had with Helen Thomas, is what got her into this problem in the first place.  There is absolutely no reason anyone should care what Ms. Thomas has to say beyond her reporting the facts she obtains from the White House press briefings.

I say this, because she is a reporter… well, she is a crazy woman with journalistic credentials, but nonetheless – her job for her entire life has been to tell the public news she’s heard from government officials.  She has never ran anything, never worked in a government capacity on anything she reports on, never even proposed she was/is an international policy expert… and she seemingly didn’t want that.  She wanted to be a journalist, not any of these other things.

However, since she “stood up to power” (IE: asked juvenile questions to those in power) and stood up to the right people (mainly Bush), she has been promoted from journalist to all seeing without so much as fake reason for why we should care what she has to say about anything outside of her official duties.

I know, it’s odd of me again, but I like my international policy information to come from people with knowledge of internal policy & while all these people might be smarter than I am… my mechanic, my doctor, my lawyer, and yes, even Helen Thomas… they simply don’t fit that bill.

What’s more frustrating that the faux outrage though is some attempts to wrangle this whole mess into some sort of free speech thing from the most unlikely of places (here via Reason):

…True, I find some comfort in knowing that this unprofessional crackpot never will haunt a president, common sense, or the public again. But I wince at the rapidity of her demise. And I feel a nagging anxiety about a journalist’s losing her job over nothing more than a controversial statement….

To be fair, the author goes on to admit this is a private decision being made by a private company which is not bound by the first amendment, but he writes as if firing a senile staff member after they’ve been shown to be a bigger liability than all their assets combined is about free speech.  To be correct however, it’s not.

To gauge the effectiveness of this argument, we can run it to its logical conclusion.  Not always, but this is a sometimes helpful trick to see whether an argument is valid or just whining. So let’s ask this question – IF we agreed completely that Helen Thomas should not be fired, what does this mean?

Doesn’t that also mean we are saying that if the publication she works for is losing money due to her exercising her first amendment rights, they still have no recourse?  They should just keep losing money?  & If it doesn’t mean any of this, then what’s the point of bringing it up?

While reading, I’m unsure where David Harsanyi is going with this other that to try to equate a private business releasing an employee with hate speech paranoia.  Though I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to imply that Ms. Thomas can’t be fired, his argument is leading in that direction.

No, he likely doesn’t believe that she can’t be fired.  The more likely cause of his machinations is that of simple self preservation.

Because no matter how much Mr. Harsanyi wants to make this about free speech or hate speech idiocy and no matter how many other public figures want to make this about racism, the truth is there for all to see. An old lady, who likely should’ve retired long ago, said some crazy things that forced her retirement.

Proving how little we truly understand about addiction, a new study (via UK Telegraph here):

Bingeing on junk food is as addictive as smoking or taking drugs and could cause compulsive eating and obesity, a study has found.

According to the research, rats when given junk food, will crave it in a similar fashion to much harder drugs, as it all uses the same pleasure center:

…As these pleasure centres become less and less responsive the animals quickly develop compulsive overeating habits, consuming larger quantities of high-calorie, high-fat foods until they become obese.

The very same changes occur in the brains of rats that over consume cocaine or heroin…

I wonder if this will put to rest the nicotine is addictive as cocaine meme?  Or possibly destroy the idea of heroin addiction altogether?  Whatever it does do in the end, it should give us pause anytime we hear “as addictive as…”

John Stossel on government testing (here).  Among the other illuminating information, you can read about GAO’s audit of energy star products, including this gem:

…The GAO attached a feather duster to a space heater, sent the photo to the EPA, and got approval in just 11 days…

All told:

GAO sustained Energy Star certifications for 15 bogus products, including a gas-powered alarm clock.

Via WSJ, In War Between States and Feds, Utah Strikes Latest Blow:

All is not well between the states and the federal government….states in recent months have signed sovereignty statements….last week, more than a dozen states sued to strike down the new federal health-care law…..Now….Utah Governor Gary Herbert on Saturday authorized the use of eminent domain to take some of the U.S. government’s most valuable parcels….

This should get interesting.

Lastly, an interesting idea via HBR (here).  Asking CEO Tim Brown:

…what does it take to bring about such mass behavior shifts? Are there approaches that businesses could use, too, to influence behaviors on a micro level, and gain benefits on a macro one?…

In a great piece over @ The Christian Science Monitor, Arnold Kling & Nick Schultz argue well that Markets fail. That’s why we need markets:

…This seemingly paradoxical view is based on several overlapping strands of research in economics as it pertains to development, history, technology, business expansion, and new-firm formation. According to this view, entrepreneurs at work in the economy – in finance, high tech, manufacturing, services, and beyond – are constantly experimenting, creating new business models, techniques, and technologies that upend the established order of things.

Some new technologies and innovations are genuine improvements and are long-lasting welfare enhancers. But others are the basketball equivalent of pump fakes – they look like the real deal and prompt market actors to leap hastily into action, only to realize later that their bets were wrong.

Given this dynamic, markets are unpredictable, prone to booms and busts, characterized by bouts of exuberance that are rational or irrational only in hindsight.  But markets are also the only reliable mechanism for sorting out this messy process quickly. In spite of the booms and busts, markets drive genuine long-run innovation and wealth creation.

Not as eloquently as they did, I wrote about this earlier in the year (here):

…the dynamic system of the United States might have felt more pain that other countries during this crisis, but due to the mostly decentralized economic model, we will recover more quickly than most…

It then seems for most people to become a question of risk adversity.  Do we allow for individual freedom and understand that sometimes failure is a part of the process?  Or do we constantly attempt to control individual behavior for fear of potential negative consequences?

Only if we first believe in the premise that by trading freedom for stability, we actually get stability.  The CSMonitor article continues:

…When governments attempt to impose order on this chaotic and inherently risky process, they immediately run up against two serious dangers.

The first is that they strangle new innovations before they can emerge. Thus proposals for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, a systemic risk regulator, a public health insurance plan, a green jobs policy, or any attempt at top-down planning may do more harm than good.

The second danger has to do with the nature of political economy. Politics creates its own kind of innovators who can be as destabilizing to markets as market actors themselves – but in far more pernicious ways.

Economists call these political entrepreneurs “rent-seekers.”…

…This gets to the key difference between markets and governments. When innovation-driven excesses and imbalances are recognized in the marketplace, the system can correct itself quickly. This is less the case when government policy failure occurs.

Because political failure is less publicly tolerable than market failure, the temptation becomes for policymakers to avoid acknowledging their role in creating or perpetuating problems.  Or they double down on bad bets. So rather than recognize the government’s central role in the housing boom and bust and quickly changing its ways, we see the federal policy apparatus continuing to throw good money after bad in the mortgage market and on Wall Street….

I wrote about this “doubling down”  (here):

…For those playing the home game, this means we are taking a problem caused by excessive credit and government incentives and trying to fix it by:

1. Preventing the normal contraction that needs to happen by artificially propping up failed business and bad home purchasing decisions.
2. Keep money cheap by keeping interest rates very low.
3. Then, repeat the same process that got you to the recession in the first place by incentivizing the market to buy a commodity (housing) which is still overvalued in some places….

& made the perplexed statement (here):

…I’m not really into prediction making as it’s obviously fraught with so many problems, but I’ll never understand how the solution to cheap money and an over investment of housing, is to keep money cheap and incentivize home buying…

As historically known, the vast majority of centralized government intrusions into free markets and free people has led to disastrous consequences.  NBER research suggests that two of the reasons for the current global economic crisis are due to unfree markets:

…The inability of emerging economies to absorb savings through domestic investment and consumption due to inadequate national financial markets and difficulties in enforcing financial contracts; the currency controls motivated by immediate national objectives;…

Everywhere we look objectively, freedom gives us more of everything.  Do you want to fix healthcare?  Using the government will likely lead to higher rates and more control, using individual freedom however doesn’t cost much as has been proven in other avenues such as food.  Something I think is just as important as healthcare, but been left to the market unlike health care.

& the market has responded.  Food costs as a percentage of disposable income has decreased from 23.4% in 1929, to just 9.6% in 2009 (here).

Meanwhile health care costs continue to increase with government regulation.  In just the past 5 years spending on health care as a percentage of GDP has continue to go up and is projected on that trend still.  In 2005 spending was 15.9% of GDP whereas in 2009 is it 16.9% and projected to be 19.5% in 2017  (here).

It seems that the overwhelming majority of evidence suggests to honestly help the most needy, freedom is not only a moral good, but a requirement for anything approaching success…. yet what seems to be an irrational fear of “economic crisis” many people can’t see the forest for the trees.

Yesterday,  the Federal Reserve, through the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) released an updated statement about their views on the economy, the prior one having been released on November 4th.

You can read the full text @ the Blog Calculated risk (here).  Among other things in the statement, the main changes in thinking since November are encapsulated in the opening paragraph:

Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in November suggests that economic activity has continued to pick up and that the deterioration in the labor market is abating. The housing sector has shown some signs of improvement over recent months….

Of course it has!  With the FHA pushing home loans like Fannie & Freddie have (here @ DetailedAbstractions) & continuing to pay people to buy houses (8K dollar tax credit extended @ LA Times) and property prices declining as the market corrects prior bad incentives (here @ DetailedAbstractions), the result is obvious .  Given non-market, but economic incentives to purchase property, property prices in real terms decrease, therefore demand increases.

What this does not say however is whether this is sustained.  Lots of individuals for instance took advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program (here @ DetailedAbstractions) mainly resulted in a short-term boost in car sales, but at the expense of lower future sales.

This of course doesn’t mean the housing market isn’t on the rebound, but I see no evidence that really allows this conclusion at this time.

It continues:

…Household spending appears to be expanding at a moderate rate, though it remains constrained by a weak labor market, modest income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit.  Businesses are still cutting back on fixed investment, though at a slower pace, and remain reluctant to add to payrolls; they continue to make progress in bringing inventory stocks into better alignment with sales. Financial market conditions have become more supportive of economic growth.

Although economic activity is likely to remain weak for a time, the Committee anticipates that policy actions to stabilize financial markets and institutions, fiscal and monetary stimulus, and market forces will contribute to a strengthening of economic growth and a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization in a context of price stability.

& there’s the rub…  The Federal Reserve is supposed to be an independent branch of the government outside of any specific administration, but when publishing statements which disagree with basic economic thought one might start to wonder.

In fairness, it could also be just simple self-interest in that they need to justify spending billions on bailing out bad companies., but to use the words, “policy actions stabilized the market” makes this seem unlikely, but I digress.

The main issue with this portion of the statement is that’s its simply untrue.  New policies such as “too big to fail” which the Federal Reserve admitted can’t continue (here @ Business & Media),  have seemingly become official  government policy (here @ Reason Foundation).

Additionally, there is widespread agreement that the new financial regulations the administration is pursuing will result in higher costs of doing business (here @ The Economist, here @ Cato, here @ Reason Foundation, among others).   These new barriers to entry will stifle new business creation, creating less incentive for economic activity.  Additionally, just as “too big to fail” was supposed to fix large interconnected companies, but instead ended up cementing that status for certain corporations, the new regulations are highly unlikely to prevent a  recession for similar reasons from happening again (here @ DetailedAbstractions).

All in all, it seems the Federal Reserve has taken a very short-sighted approach and produced a political paper, not an economic one.