Conor Clarke

Americans have great expectations for the president's job speech tonight. They shouldn't. Statistical evidence shows that democratic leaders have little impact on their economies.… More »

I am in glamorous Kansas City at the moment, and am moving to England in a couple of weeks for two years of graduate school. This will mean less blogging in the near and medium terms. Hopefully it will mean smarter blogging in the long term. (I can hear Michael Goodfellow sharpening his knives in the comment section already: 'Perhaps now you will actually learn something about economics.' Perhaps.) But who knows.I have enjoyed writing this blog immensely and will…… More »

Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute manages the fairly impressive feat of beating up on me in a blog post (I am an "ingrate," along with Matt Yglesias and Felix Salmon) without mentioning or responding to the argument I was actually making. So hey, let me just go ahead and make it again: The tax code's definition of a charity is too broad. Do you disagree, Adam? Still, the separate question Schlaeffer asks is an interesting one: "Why shouldn't we charge rich…… More »

Megan McArdle, Jason Zengerle and Will Wilkinson have been having an argument about whether it's acceptable to carry guns to health-care protests and near the president of the United States. I don't want to try to summarize the whole debate, but I do want to comment on one aspect of it. Jason Zengerle takes the position that a gun-toting protester "makes the job of the Secret Service that much harder--and therefore increases the risk that the Secret Service won't…… More »

Over at the Economix blog, Catherine Rampell produces the following graph, which shows the relationship between SAT test score and family income:Greg Mankiw calls this the "Least Surprising Correlation of All Time" and writes:Of course! But so what? This fact tells us nothing about the causal impact of income on test scores. [...] This graph is a good example of omitted variable bias, a statistical issue discussed in Chapter 2 of my favorite textbook. The key…… More »

Sarah Palin takes to the digital pages of Facebook in praise of embattled and boycotted TV host Glenn Beck:FOX News' Glenn Beck is doing an extraordinary job this week walking America behind the scenes of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and outlining who is actually running the White House. Monday night he asked us to invite one friend to watch; tonight I invite all my friends to watch. Palin thus ensures that the current Beck controversy will continue for at least…… More »

Why not? Lots of people are upset that Nancy Pelosi and Robert Byrd want to do this, but I'm not sure I buy their arguments. Ted Kennedy wanted to to pass a major health-care reform bill. He called it the cause of his life. It's not as if renaming the bill would be contrary to his wishes or in some sense ironic. (Like, perhaps, renaming a gigantic public airport after a man who fired thousands of air traffic controllers and favored limited government more…… More »

Felix Salmon and Matt Yglesias are both upset that all private schools are considered charities for tax purposes. And rightly so. Not only is it questionable whether some of them contribute to the public good, they might (as Matt says) actually detract from it by drawing "parents with resources and social capital out of the public school system and contributing to its neglect." The one thing I would add is this: If you agree with the Yglesias/Salmon logic (as I do)…… More »

Last week I wrote a post that included the following taxonomy of "supply-side economics":The "strong" version of the supply side argument is that tax cuts will generate enough growth to increase tax revenue. (Not to be confused with the general Laffer Curve proposition that tax cuts can do this, which will probably be true under some circumstances -- say, if a tax rate went from 100% to 99%.) The "semi-strong" version is that tax rates are the key factor governing…… More »

This Glenn Beck boycott is fascinating. I wrote a post for Andrew Sullivan on the substance of the matter last week, and I think it holds up okay. Let me just say that I continue to be amazed that some people think there is a free speech issue here. It seems to me that the right to free speech does not give you the right to massive corporate underwriting. Glenn Beck can defend "the white culture" and call Obama a "racist" in poverty and in private.What I'm…… More »

A friendly acquaintance from Cato sent me this article and asked what I think about it. First, I think I like pictures more than words, so let me summarize the article with this chart:This is used to make the argument that "Federal wages should be frozen for a period of years, at least until the private-sector economy has recovered and average workers start seeing some wage gains of their own." Well, I think that's getting a bit ahead of the data. Here are a few…… More »

This Glenn Beck boycott is fascinating. I wrote a post for Andrew Sullivan on the substance of the matter last week, and I think it holds up okay. Let me just say that I continue to be amazed that some people think there is a free speech issue here. It seems to me that the right to free speech does not give you the right to massive corporate underwriting. Glenn Beck can defend "the white culture" and call Obama a "racist" in poverty and in private.What I'm…… More »

Oh look, here's a surprisingly fresh and original sentiment from an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the future of the Obama administration: "the Europeanization of America will again be in full gear, from expanding government control and regulation of as many things as possible, to raising taxes, expanding the size of government, and reducing the choices individuals are allowed." The article goes on to talk about higher taxes, unprecedented big government,…… More »

I understand why the standards for an op-ed published by a public figure (e.g. RNC chairman Michael Steele) in a major American newspaper (e.g. the Washington Post) would by lower than normal. But I still think that, when one such op-ed gets published, it's important to be just as cruel as normal about its flaws and failings.Right then. Here's Michael Steele's op-ed in this morning's Washington Post:Obama's government-run health "reform" would pay for seniors'…… More »

Well, is he? With a little cutting and pasting, here's Ross Douthat in the New York Times:If the Congressional Democrats can't get a health care package through, it won't prove that President Obama is a sellout or an incompetent. It will prove that Congress's liberal leaders are lousy tacticians, and that its centrist deal-makers are deal-makers first, poll watchers second and loyal Democrats a distant third. And it will prove that the Democratic Party is…… More »

Every once in a while there is a potentially self-refuting argument floating around the public debate. Consider the curious case of Senator Joe Lieberman, on the complicated subject of health-care reform (via Think Progress):Morally, everyone of us would like to cover every American with health insurance but that's where you spend most of the trillion dollars plus, or a little less that is estimated, the estimate said this health care plan will cost. And I'm afraid…… More »

I'll beat the dead horse of death panels once more. On "The Week With George Stephanopoulos," John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, had this to say about the Sarah Palin death-panel rumors (via Steve Benen):MCCAIN: Well, I think that what we are talking about here is do -- are we going to have groups that actually advise people as these decisions are made later in life and ...STEPHANOPOULOS: That's not in the bill.MCCAIN: But -- it's been taken…… More »

Fox News reports that the Cash For Clunkers program, which is due to end tomorrow, has probably benefited foreign car makers more than American car makers. I think this is interesting news. But since the Fox article proceeds from the implicitly sinister premise that we are "turning the already dwindling number of American car owners into the growing ranks of foreign car drivers," it's worth making three points.The first is typical and predictable free-trader-ism:…… More »

The Washington Post reports that Grand Poobah Charles Grassley says "the outpouring of anger at town hall meetings this month has fundamentally altered the nature of the debate and convinced him that lawmakers should consider drastically scaling back the scope of health-care reform." Grassley elaborates, via the Post:After being besieged by protesters at meetings across his home state of Iowa, Grassley said he has concluded that the public has rejected the…… More »

Columnist Robert Novak is dead, from a malignant brain tumor, which by most accounts was a pretty terrible way to go. Just about everyone in Washington has a Novak story -- being a Washington institution will do that to you -- and I'm no exception. Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote a profile of Robert Novak for the Guardian newspaper. This, naturally, called for interviewing him, so I did.Novak was, to be perfectly honest about it, the least pleasant person…… More »