August 18, 2010 archive

The Tea-Sucker Manifesto

The Wall Street Journal is currently displaying “A Tea Party Manifesto” at the top of its website, and this thing includes a declaration of war on the Republican Party.

The tea party movement is not seeking a junior partnership with the Republican Party, but a hostile takeover of it.  

After that relatively bold war-whoop, most of the rest of it is just about the sort of anti-government hate-speak that you might expect.

By definition, government is the means by which citizens are forced to do that which they would not do voluntarily. Like pay high taxes. Or redistribute tax dollars to bail out the broken, bloated pension systems of state government employees. Or purchase, by federal mandate, a government-defined health-insurance plan that is unaffordable, unnecessary or unwanted.

By definition! It couldn’t be more obvious! Only a fool would dispute these self-evident truths!

If the College Educated hit 16% unemployment, would it be different?

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

Also at Agent Orange

While Matthew Yglesias tends to be susceptible to patently absurd conventional wisdom economics, he does have his moments, as back in February when he observed:

The people in all the key jobs-not just the members of congress and cabinet secretaries and FOMC members and newspaper editors, but the bulk of the people who staff those people-are virtually all college graduates. And the way America works in 2010 those people are overwhelmingly going to have friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who are also college graduates. And while the labor market outlook for college graduates is bad by the standards of recent history, it’s really not catastrophic. Things look very different for people with high school diplomas.

The figures are stark, and starker when plotted as a graph:

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