The US Federal Reserve has announced its long-awaited renewal of quantitative easing (cutely labelled QE2). It’s $600 billion of new money to buy US Treasury notes with an average duration of five years, along with recycling of some money from the mortgage bailouts, also into T-note purchases. That sounds like a lot, but the reaction from Brad DeLong (endorsed by Paul Krugman) has been a big yawn. With the five-year bond rate at just over 1 per cent, the amount the private sector would demand to hold these bonds (that is, the annual interest payment) is about $7 billion, which is rounding error in the context of the current crisis.

I had been thinking that the Fed might take the much riskier (and politically trickier) step of buying corporate bonds. That would seem more likely to promote investment, but would obviously involve a good deal of winner-picking, with the associated potential for (real or perceived) corruption.

But what is really needed here is fiscal stimulus focused on job creation, combined with a long-term plan for fiscal consolidation (that is, higher taxes and/or lower expenditure). Instead, what the US appears likely to get is a permanent tax cut for the rich, partly offset by lots of job-destroying nickel-and-dime cuts in current expenditure. Many of these cuts will prove to be counterproductive or unsustainable in the long run.

Well, that was depressing. My fellow Wisconsinites managed to replace the best Senator in the US senate with a ninny — I’d have been happy to have the Dems lose control of the Senate in return for keeping Feingold, personally. By contrast, at least the voters in Racine had the sense to retain our best State Assemblyperson in the face of a massive Republican effort to defeat him.

But, in the light of Daniel’s post below, I’m very curious what the the opponents of his argument (and there are many) are thinking about Florida. Cheers to the Democrats and their voters for throwing the race to Rubio! Well done, chaps! Update: when I checked the numbers Rubio was still polling slightly under 50%, but now I see he got just over 50%, so maybe it wasn’t thrown.

The roots of the debacle that will be Election Day 2010, for US Democrats, lie right here:

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Nothing, I think, can encapsulate Obama’s arrogance, or his profound alienation from ordinary Americans, so well as this chanting-and-smirking festival from last fall — complete with teleprompter and foreign-languagestan “translation” for all you “world citizens” out there.  The White House, realizing its colossal error in judgment (and noting with alarm that overnight, 16 percent of Americans suddenly came to believe that Obama is Hindu), tried desperately to cover its tracks by moving Diwali 2010 to just <i>after</i>  the midterm elections, to November 5.  But to no avail.  The damage has been done.

May our new Senators — especially Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Pat Toomey, and Rand Paul — deliver us from Diwali and all it implies.

<b>Broder Version:</b>  He came in here and he chanted in the place — <i>and it’s not his place</i>.

As the US goes to the polls, there is not exactly a shortage of commentary telling people how important it is that they vote, and so it’s been almost traditional (by which I mean, I did it at least once) for me to provide a small voice for the forces of apathy. This year, though, I want to address a particular and in my view rather pernicious species of electoral wowserism – the belief on the part of the Democratic Party that it has something approaching property rights over the vote of anyone to the left of, say, the New York Times opinion page.

The argument I want to establish here is that the decision about whether or not to vote Demcrat (versus the alternative of abstaining or voting for a minor party) is a serious one, which is up to the conscience of the individual voter to make, and which deserves respect from other people whether they agree with it or not. Obviously in making that argument, I’m going to have to venture into a number of unpalatable home truths about the Democrats as they are currently organised (abstract: ineffectual, cowardly, surprisingly warlike, soft-right, generally an obstacle to the development of social democratic politics), but let’s get this clear right up front – voting Democrat might often be the right thing to do in any given case, depending on local conditions; it might even usually be the right thing to do. What I’m not going to accept, however, is that it is always or definitionally the right thing to do.
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Windsor and Maidenhead Council (UK) “is planning a reward scheme”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/31/council-plans-big-society-reward (supermarket tokens and the like) for volunteers to help implement David Cameron’s “Big Society”:

bq. it is likely residents would get a loyalty card similar to those available in shops. Points would be added by organisers when cardholders had completed good works such as litter-picking or holding tea parties for isolated pensioners. The council says the idea is based on “nudge theory” – the thought that people don’t automatically do the right thing but will respond if the best option is highlighted. Points would be awarded according to the value given to each activity. Users could then trade in their points for vouchers giving discounts on the internet or high street.

Maybe the Council should have read more widely, since according to another body of literature (Bruno Frey, “Sam Bowles”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5883/1605 ), they risk sending out a signal that only a mug performs good works for no reward. An interesting natural experiment, to be sure, but not one that I’d wish on the residents of Windsor and Maidenhead.

It’s just a minor chest wound.

“Gideon Rachman”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2010/10/a-night-at-the-oxford-union/

bq. The viscount is an interesting character. He once worked in the policy unit at Number Ten under Lady Thatcher and is now deputy leader of the anti-European UK Independence Party. More recently he has become famous as a vociferous climate-change sceptic and for fighting a Quixotic campaign to gain entrance into the House of Lords. I was seated opposite him at the pre-debate dinner, and initially I found his conversation rather unsettling: a blizzard of statistics and anecdotes on everything from climate to Europe, all delivered with supreme confidence and a slight gleam in the eye. I began to think that Viscount Monckton might be a formidable opponent during the debate. Then he told me that he has discovered a new drug that is a complete cure for two-thirds of known diseases – and that he expects it to go into clinical trials soon. I asked him whether his miracle cure was chiefly effective against viruses or bacterial diseases? “Both”, he said, “and prions”. At this point I felt a little more relaxed about the forthcoming debate.

According to this Nielsen study, American teens between 13-17 years old are sending or receiving, on average, 3,339 texts per month, and teen girls send or receive 4,050 per month. (Obviously, this is among teens with cell phones.) It’s hard to believe that the average is distorted by a minority of massive users – that’s already a text every 7 to 9 minutes across the whole waking day. Of course, I could be wrong about how much they sleep. On the other hand, the study was conducted between April and June, 2010, so at least some of them were presumably in school – not that this necessarily eliminates all opportunities to text, I know, but it must cut down on them somewhat, right? I mean, we’re talking about high school, not college, here.

Thanks to some FB comments by Marc Mulholland, I see that there’s an interesting bit of rhetorical back-and-forth going on in British politics today. Labour claims that ConDem plans to cap housing (and other) benefit payments will have the effect of forcing poor people out of London and therefore amount to “social cleansing”. Useful idiot Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg “pretends to be outraged”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_9125000/9125499.stm :

bq. To refer to cleansing would be deeply offensive to people who have witnessed ethnic cleansing in other parts of the world.

Unfortunately, for him, in a flanking manoeuvre from the right, London mayor Boris Johnson (Tory) then “repeats the charge”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/28/boris-johnson-kosovo-style-cleansing-housing-benefit , making it more explicit and destroying its metaphorical character:

bq. What we will not see, and will not accept, is any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London.

None of this, including the faux-outrage from Clegg, would surprise anyone who has hung around the blogosphere since 2001, since charges of “moral relativism”, “moral equivalence” and “you are implicitly comparing X to Y how dare you!” are the common currency of wingnuts and “decents” alike. This one is mildly interesting, though, because it is a complaint about the adaptation of what was originally a piece of “unspeak”: a euphemism. The complaint depends for its force entirely on the euphemism being understood non-euphemistically, if you see what I mean. I see from some discussion at the Unspeak site, that Steven Pinker has a name for this: the “euphemism treadmill”.

bq. People invent new words for emotionally charged referents, but soon the euphemism becomes tainted by association, and a new word must be found, which soon acquires its own connotations. ( _Blank Slate_ p.212).

I’m pleased that the NLRB looks to be “reversing its position on graduate student unionization”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/28/nlrb

bq. The National Labor Relations Board, in a 2-to-1 decision, has edged away from its recent history of rejecting unionization rights for graduate teaching assistants at private universities.

In the decision, the NLRB found that the graduate students at New York University who are currently trying to unionize with the United Auto Workers deserve a full hearing on the merits of their organizing drive. In so doing, the majority of the NLRB reversed a regional director’s decision that the UAW could not organize graduate students at NYU because of a 2004 NLRB ruling in a case involving Brown University graduate students.

The decision is particularly piquant because it cites to NYU’s own policies as evidence supporting the grad students’ position.

bq. In its new ruling, the NLRB cites differences in NYU’s relationship with its graduate students now as compared with the past and with other universities today to suggest that they may be entitled to a union. For instance, the NLRB ruling notes that NYU has said that its graduate students who teach do so voluntarily and are free to join the adjunct union at the university for representation in their role as instructors. The NLRB ruling says that this is significant because it means that graduate students are being paid as employees, not simply as graduate students.

Public health warning: much much more McArdle-blogging beneath the fold. But take heart – this may possibly be my last and most definitive statement on the topic. I certainly can’t imagine that I will want to write at length about this any more.

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More on McGarble later – Lemuel Pitkin and norbizness are hereby _strongly advised_ to avert their eyes from my next post. But in the meantime, I wanted to point to “Scott’s great column”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee311 today (which is quite apropos in any event).

bq. The Stewart-Colbert rally is bound to draw young people filled with unhappiness about how the world is going, and I’m not about to begrudge them the right to an interesting weekend. But the anti-ideological spirit of the event is a dead end. The attitude that it’s better to stay cool and amused than to risk making arguments or expressing too much ardor — this is not civility. It’s timidity.

bq. “Here we are now, entertain us” was a great lyric for a song. As a political slogan, it is decidedly wanting. If someone onstage wants to make Saturday’s rally meaningful, perhaps it would be worth quoting the old Wobbly humorist T-Bone Slim: “Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack.”

Having written a series of hit pieces on people who perform the traditional journalistic function of revealing facts that those in power would like to keep secret, NYT “reporter” John Burns copped a hit in return from Glenn Greenwald, and then got some hostile emails. Water off a duck’s back, you might expect, except that

his email inbox has been full of denunciations from readers and a number of academics at top-tier schools such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Some, he said, used “language that I don’t think they would use at their own dinner table.”

So there you have it. “Reporters” who are happy to act as propagandists and stenographers for the Pentagon, can still be shocked by coarse language from academics at top-tier schools. Sad to say, uq.edu.au doesn’t pack quite the same punch, but it’s nice to know that academic prestige is still of some use. CT readers with appropriately prestigious affilations should take note.

One reason I’m thinking a fair bit about the long term future is that immediate prospects look grim, particularly in the US.

According to this piece from the NY Times on Obama’s post-election plan

After two years of operating at loggerheads with Republicans, Mr. Obama and his aides are planning a post-election agenda for a very different political climate. They see potential for bipartisan cooperation on reducing the deficit, passing stalled free-trade pacts and revamping the education bill known as No Child Left Behind — work that Arne Duncan, Mr. Obama’s education secretary, says could go a long way toward repairing “the current state of anger and animosity.”

Translation: Mr Obama and his aides plan a series of pre-emptive capitulations, after which the Republicans will demand the repeal of the healthcare act (or maybe abolition of Social Security). When/if that is refused, the Repugs will shut down the government, and this time they will hold their nerve until Obama folds.

BTW, the only thing I knew about Arne Duncan before this was that he was a fair country (ie Australian NBL) basketball player. But reading his bio (corporate-style charter school booster, fan of incentives based on standardised tests etc) along with the fact that he’s in close with Obama is indicative of why things have gone so badly in this administration.