13 thoughts on “Q: How Can You Tell Republicans Won An Election?”

  1. What a logically disconnected piece of trash. Barely a step above shouting ‘Enron! Halliburton! Booosh!’ at your lefty choir of choice.

    Let us hope these goofy people go on to show how these ‘EEEE-vile’ top 1% people receive their ‘EEEE-vile’ money and why they don’t deserve it. I won’t hold my breath.

  2. You know how I can tell Kristoff is an idiot?
    “And that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings.

    The guy sounds like he’s been slurping cosmos with Angryclown.

  3. The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

    What economically illiterate people like this don’t realize is that wealth, to be “distributed” has to first be created and there are risks in stepping out of line to do so. A very small percent of wealth in America is inherited. If there weren’t a premium for that risk, i.e. higher earnings and wealth, there would be no reason for anyone to create it and the jobs and growth that come with it.

    Liberals always want to divide the pie more “evenly” whereas capitalists want to make it bigger, which benefits everyone, including the government, in the end.

  4. It is difficult to take Kristof seriously.
    He writes “that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings”.
    A few paragraphs later he writes:
    “When inequality rises, the richest rake in their winnings and buy even bigger mansions and fancier cars. Those a notch below then try to catch up, and end up depleting their savings or taking on more debt, making a financial crisis more likely. ”

    Kristof is a Pulitzer prize winning author.

  5. Kristof is a Pulitzer prize winning author.

    And Krugman won a Nobel Prize in Economics. That bonehead thought the stimulus was too small and that we need another one.

  6. He writes “that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings”.
    A few paragraphs later he writes:
    “When inequality rises, the richest rake in their winnings and buy even bigger mansions and fancier cars. Those a notch below then try to catch up, and end up depleting their savings or taking on more debt, making a financial crisis more likely. ”

    That’s that nuance thing, Terry — we’re just too dumb to understand it.

  7. Republican dream world: 10% of population makes $150,000 a year. 90% makes $50,000 a year.

    Democrat dream world: 100% of population makes $25,000 a year.

  8. So the NYT hates America because everyone has equal opportunity, and we are all richer due to that. Venezuela has (or tries to have) equal outcome, where everyone is equally poor.

  9. “Democrat dream world: 100% of population makes $25,000 a year”

    Well, everyone but them that is!

  10. Didn’t Obama say something last year about people making “too much” money? Outside of that being a freudian slip I think that’s amazingly disturbing the leader of the free world thinks that.

  11. Didn’t Obama say something last year about people making “too much” money? Outside of that being a freudian slip I think that’s amazingly disturbing the leader of the free world thinks that.

  12. Kristof probably has expertise in some topic, but it is not economics.
    I looked at the paper he references, “Expenditure Cascades”.
    It is a “working paper”, meaning it has not been published. Kristof links to an abstract of the paper. The entirety of the 2007 version (with the same title and two of the three authors) is here: http://www.aeaweb.org/annual_mtg_papers/2007/0107_1300_0202.pdf

    One of the authors described his findings in (where else?) the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/business/17view.html

    The paper is heavy on statistical data sets. This can drive you crazy if you are used to reading “hard” science papers. It is very difficult to avoid confusing correlation and causation. In the NYT piece Frank says that in his work he controlled for factors other than growth in income inequality. If you read the paper, you find that he controlled for some factors, like population density and racial makeup, but not for others, such as family size, percentage of home owners versus renters, availability of unsecured credit, etc.
    What Frank and his co-authors have done is examined census and other data from the 100 counties where income inequality increased the greatest between 1990 and 2000, and then assumed that any increase in social pathologies in those counties (divorce, bankruptcy, long commute times) are caused by the increase in income inequality in those counties.
    Is this a valid conclusion? Maybe, maybe not.
    In my opinion one of the reasons the country is in such terrible shape is because politicians and op-ed writers who do not understand the limitations of these sorts of “studies” misuse them as arguments in favor of their prefered public policy.

  13. Kristof is a Pulitzer prize winning author.
    That award carries all of the substance of a Nobel Peace Prize.

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