Comments by LexHumana

So in a backhanded sort of way you are saying that Romney is a perfect fit to be President?

All sarcasm aside, I think you are portraying and overly simplistic and overly idealistic notion of what a businessperson does versus a private equity company. There are plenty of CEOs in history that have taken very short term views of their company all in the name of boosting short term share value.

Also, there is little credence to your demonization of private equity. It takes two to tango, and private equity doesn't even get its foot in the door unless there is a seller willing to fork over their shares. Needless to say, if it is a perfectly healthy, growing company, those shares won't go cheaply, which drives a stake into your main premise.

Private equity buys cheaply, but they can only do so if the company is wounded or hurting in some way. Damaged goods are what go for a discount. So don't go singing a lament about perfectly good companies ruined by private equity. Nine times out of ten those companies have one foot in the grave already.

How about an Obama add that says "Vote for me, my father was a deadbeat dad"

Or how about "Vote for me, my mom concieved me out of wedlock, got married out of necessity, and was abandoned by the father after only a couple of years"

Or maybe, just maybe, nobody gives a damn about any of the whose-dad-did-what BS, and maybe, just maybe, serious commenters can focus on actual policies and accomplishments OF THE CANDIDATES.

Mr. Carrapa,
Thanks for your input -- I was particularly struck by your statement "What this means is that we lived on bubbles - short term growth supported by huge long term debt. We borrowed from the future, heavily, and used that money to make non-reproductive infrastructure."

The sad part is that there are economists and pudits (Paul Krugman is a glaring example) who are dead convinced that we have to do this exact same thing in the U.S. to recover from our recession. Basically, the same type of profligate spending that got us into this mess needs to be repeated to get us out. If it doesn't get us in deeper first.

It is like listening to an alcoholic the day after, dealing with a hangover by claiming he needs a few Bloody Mary's. Hair of the dog for everyone!

"You disgruntle me."

The real question is whether the converse exists: can you "gruntle" someone?

Faedrus,
I'll let the academics over at Siena College enjoy their silly exercise, but I leave you and all the other commenters with a quote from the much beloved liberal icon, John F. Kennedy:

"No one has a right to grade a President — even poor James Buchanan — who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made his decisions."
-- John F. Kennedy (quoted in David H. Donald's "Lincoln", 1995, p. 13).

By your reasoning, EVERY incumbent President should be re-elected. This is silly. The real issue is not "did you hold this job" but "how did you perform in this job". By that metric, Obama fails. This is exactly why Obama is trying to campaign on the argument that Romney is somehow unqualified to replace him: he doesn't want anyone to focus on his own job performance.

His campaign is basically a concession that "I know I haven't been performing well, but the replacement you are thinking about hiring is not qualified." This argument, of course, is bunk. You may agree or disagree with Romney's positions, but it is clear that he is amply qualified to be President. The focus should be on evaluating Obama's performance, and deciding whether or not it is up to snuff and whether he should be replaced.

But the real question is not what jobs are on the applicant's resume, it is whether his performance level was up to snuff. I know a lot of people that would be marking Obama's year-end performance evaluation as "needs improvement".

I recall that European Court of Justice decision was focused on auto insurance -- young men were being charged more for insurance than young women. If I recall correctly, the oddity was that there were actual statistics showing that young men tend to get into more accidents and more tickets (indicating aggressive driving) than comparable women drivers. However, the ECJ says you have to charge everyone the same and cannot discriminate on gender.

But what happens when gender is correlated with risk? As you point out in the post, why should people overpay a risk premium? At some point it becomes cheaper to absorb the risk and self-insure against loss. Of course, this reduces the pool of low-risk people, making the cost for the remaining high-risk people even higher.

This Utah plan was showcased in the news while Huntsman was still alive and kicking as a potential candidate, and I loved the idea then. I still love the idea now. I think the nation as a whole needs to migrate to defined contribution style benefit schemes in all of its public benefits.

Typingmonkey,
Do you read what others post, or do you just reflexively rush to the defense of incorrect bloggers?

You state: "The post says reauthorization was based upon 'substantial evidence of contemporary voting discrimination.' Please let me know if that wasn't perfectly clear."

That was perfectly clear. It is also perfectly wrong, as I point out in my post. There was no "substantial evidence of contemporary voting discrimination", as the Committee Report plainly shows. Read the Committee report yourself and see.

As far as giving me permission to question the preclearance clause, that WAS the whole point of the original post and my comment. The VRA is not being repealed, and is going never going away. The only thing that is subject to sunsetting are the preclearance procedures, and that is the only thing that was being reauthorized.

As far as your claim that my post makes no sense, it probably makes no sense to those who cannot read it properly or are ignorant of what is actually in the law and in the Committee report. However, for those that bother to actually educate themselves, my posts should be pretty clear: the VRA provisions at issue do not need to be reauthorized, because there is NO contemporary statistical evidence of discrimination in those covered jurisdictions. A handful of out-of-date anecdotal war stories from a couple of dozen witnesses does not a national crisis make.

And yet the question still does unanswered: how does Obama's background in... well, nothing really... prepare him in 20008 for making a national economy more efficient? He didn't even have any experience in sloughing costs, let alone increasing return to shareholders OR workers.

I also question your basic premise as unfounded nonsense: that knowing how to make a firm more efficient is dissimilar to knowing how to make an economy more efficient. I'm not sure how you justify this distinction that somehow a national economy is not affected by or concerned about excess costs, waste, inefficient allocation of resources, or other unnecessary expenditures.

I see you and every other liberal blogger jigging madly on the head of a pin to try and explain why Romney is ill suited to be President, and none of it passes the straight face test.

Ashbird,
You raise a fascinating question, albeit one that is not directly related to the original post. Bear in mind that the attack on Romney and Bain is predicated on the assumption that the mere existence of a winner and a loser in a free market transaction somehow means that Romney and Bain are vampires. I was simply noting that this is hogwash, because no one was claiming that Bain did anything underhanded or illegal. This was simply a case of entrepreneurs taking a risk and failing, which happens every day across America. The fact that some people survived the failure and made money and others did not is the way capitalism works (Romney did not go into work that day thinking "Mwuahahaha! I am going to kill off 1000 workers and steal their life savings!"). There are, of course, folks in the world who do lie, cheat, and steal in order to get ahead, and no one is claiming that these folks should be off the hook for their sins. But it is clear that Romney and Bain do not fall in this category, and it is disengenuous for Obama and the Democrats to insinuate that they do.

That said, your interest in what constitutes "merit" is an interesting sidebar.

In one sense, "merit" is often only recognized in hindsight. Like the old adage "the proof of a pudding is in the tasting", the mere fact that you succeeded in an area where others have failed is indirect proof that you must have some sort of "merit" that the others may not have had. Of course, hindsight is not crystal clear either -- a person may get extraordinarily lucky or unlucky, stumble upon the perfect timing, or some other confluence of the stars that makes the difference between success and failure. Nevertheless, a blatantly incompetent person is very unlikely to succeed regardless of how many lucky breaks they may catch, so the mere fact of success often shows that you have some modicum of talent/merit.

When we talk about meritocracy, in reality we are describing a world that is geared to weed out most of the incompetents, and not so much reward the most meritorius. I learned a long time ago from my parents a valuable saying: "You can do everything right, and still lose". Nothing is guarranteed just because you play your cards right; some days your opponent is a little faster, a little stronger, or simply a little luckier than you are. This understanding helped soften the losses in little league, and that wisdom is good for business as well. In a free market capitalist society, those with merit tend to at least survive to fight another day, and some of those (but not all) will actually flourish. The wide wide world tends to run roughshod over everyone else.

Since picking actual winners and losers before they even play the game is not something that the government is competent to do, the best we can hope for is a government that lets everyone compete "fairly" and let the competition itself sort out the winners and losers. Of couse, this begs the question of what is "fair", and since no one can adequately come up with a definition that everyone can agree upon, I will simply posit the only objective understanding of "fair" that I have: a transaction is "fair" when everyone has full information and voluntarily makes their decisions based on this full information. If you are given a voluntary choice, and go into something fully informed with your eyes wide open, you can never claim that your choice was "unfair" to you. Those with merit will tend to make wise choices, those without merit will tend to make foolish choices -- this doesn't automatically guarantee either success or failure of course, but it tends to make the meritorious winners over the long term, and the unmeritorius tend to be losers over the long term.

"Is it acceptable, he asks, that Spain must borrow at 6% while Germany can raise money almost for free? This week Germany sold two-year bonds with a 0% coupon."

Is Hollande serious? Is he completely ignorant of global finance to even be asking this question?

Why in the hell should a fiscally prudent borrower (Germany) pay the exact same risk premium that a profligate, irresponsible borrower (Spain, Greece, Portugal, etc.) pay? By making everyone pay the same risk premium, you are basically incentivizing all Eurozone borrowers to be irresponsible, because there is no benefit to being responsible. If Germany can't enjoy lower interest rates on its bonds because it is a low-risk borrower, why should it bother remaining a low-risk borrower.

Hollande seems to want to turn the entire Eurozone into a giant version of Greece.

"You can make a lot of money dumping toxic waste into the woods but it would be bad for the larger community"

What you are referring to is not a difference in interest -- both the company and the surrounding community are fully congnizant that toxic waste is bad. What this shows is an attempt at cost-shifting: the company does not want to bear the cost of proper disposal, and wants to push those costs/losses on to the surrounding community. I am all for people (and companies) internalizing their actual costs of their business and not sloughing it off on others. This is not what the Obama attack on Bain is arguing, however.

Obama's attack on Bain is that private equity has victims, even when it does things perfectly legally and above-board, and therefore private equity interest in making a profit turns them into a "vampire" making money off the misery of others.

Part of being in America is the opportunity to succeed OR fail. Success is not guarranteed anywhere except in the rhetoric of the Democratic party. And Faedrus is wrong -- this in not an ad-hominem attack on the Democrats, it is a gospel truth: the Democratic mantra is to prevent individuals from feeling the impact of losses and failures by socializing the cost of those losses and failures. In other words, they are promising a world in which no individual actually loses (the rest of us pay to make that person whole).

You obviously don't pay much attention to historical documents. The Gettysburg Address is a prime example -- there are 5 known manuscripts, all different, and the different paper and even the corresponding folds in the different pages all are evidence that people rely upon to decide which version is the "real thing" as it was delivered at the Gettysburg Battlefield.

Why do you think scholars want to examine original documents? If it wasn't important, they would just have someone email a transcribed version of the text.

YOU may only be concerned about the words, but for others the original document (warts and all) is just as important. I find it stunning that presumably educated readers could be this obtuse. This article is about digitally preserving original documents of historical significance (i.e. ancient or historically relevant texts). We are not talking about digitizing pulp fiction for your Kindle.

"Did you know the private sector has grown faster since Jan. 2009 than it had grown in the first three years of either of W's terms?"

Be cautious about throwing around percentages if you are not careful. You need to recognize the relative starting points for the national economy were for W and for Obama. W took office in 2000, there was no recession, and the GDP was growing smoothly and steadily. Obama took office in January 2009, in the middle of the Great Recession, with the economy at its lowest point. GDP in the second quarter of 2008 had reached a peak of around $13.3 trillion, and by the time Obama was sworn in had actually SHRUNK to $12.6 trillion. It has taken a full term to get back to where we were before the crash. When you try and compare growth RATES, where you start from is important -- if a boy who is 3 feet tall grows 6 inches, he has grown at an amazing 16.7% clip. When a man who is 6 feet tall grows the same 6 inches, you have a less inspiring 8.3% growth rate. You are not comparing apples to apples here.

Nonsense -- if you have ever had to run a business with even just a handful of employees, you know that if you underpay them and abuse them, they quit. Turnover is a cost that also needs to be controled, just like salaries and benefits have to be controlled. You also need to control staffing levels -- if you only have work to keep 3 people fully occupied, why should you hire 4 or 5? A company that neglects its human capital will fail just as easily as a factory that fails to properly maintain its heavy equipment.

A true capitalist is out to maximize the profitability of a company, and they do this by not only being lean and efficient, but also by retaining good workers, limiting turnover, and keeping worker happy enough to want to keep working for you, but not too fat and happy that they get lazy and unproductive (we have a phrase "retired in place" to describe such workers where I work). This is a careful balancing act, and I am convinced that Romney knows exactly how to walk that tightrope.

Obama and the Democrats, on the other hand, don't seem to understand this basic concept -- they haven't met a labor problem that couldn't be solved by throwing money at it hand over fist, regardless of the actual outcome.

I am so glad to see that at least some vestiges of religious bigotry still exist in the U.S. Without you, what would the tolerant, rational people have to compare themselves against?

I agree -- Truman turned out to be a pretty darn good President. Much like Chester Arthur, not much was expected of him, and he was not well respected by his contemporaries, but he rose to the occassion and turned out to be a pretty competent and productive Chief Executive.

Uh, in case you forgot, Romney WAS a governor. AND headed the Olympic Organizing Committee for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. He clearly has more political executive experience than Obama did when he ran in 2008.

Again, someone tell me (seriously) why Obama's complete lack of any executive level experience of any kind somehow made him qualified to be President in 2008, but Romney's executive experience somehow makes him unqualfied?