Election Year = Total Lameness from Bloomberg News

I haven't gone after one of Al Hunt's liberal minions over at Bloomberg News in awhile, so why not give it a whirl on this lazy Friday. Up today is one of my favorite columnists actually, Caroline Baum. (I generally like her columns, but I really became a fan when I saw her, at a panel discussion, refer to a bunch of economists using the names of the seven dwarfs, specifically referring to Stephen Roach as Grumpy. The scowl he shot back was priceless.) Unfortunately, this otherwise good columnist can't resist a tawdry, elitist New York sneer at Bristol Palin (Note to non-New Yorkers: we have no teenage pregnancy here, none. No teen drug use either. We wrote the book on involved parenting.) More galling however is that Ms. Baum lumps herself into the legions of commentating ignorami who still talk about the "savings rate" as if it were meaningful or indicative of anything. I know that here in the backwater of New York City, people still have cash in the mattress or their little passbook savings accounts, but in most of America people invest is homes, businesses and stocks and bonds. And the labor participation rate too? How lame. C'mon Caroline, this is soooooo done. Why do putatively knowledgable people take the two thinnest reeds of all the data out there to bash supply-side tax cutting? Don't talk about how much tax revenue is actually collected. Don't talk about whether people are getting richer because they've kept more of their money. Talk about how discouraged people feel.

Not the first time that Bloomberg pimps the anti-tax-cut meme during an election season. On the bright side however, Al Hunt, who was the WSJ's token liberal columnist for so many years, knows the value of having a token around, so he does give us an actual economist to read every so often.