Al Hunt & Co. Follow Their Marching Orders...and Look Foolish

While the NY Times is doing its duty with a partisan hatchet job of John Boehner, Al Hunt over at Bloomberg News has been given the tax cut issue and so tasks a minion with reporting a strange tidbit about how the rich would react to a tax cut. Basically, Hunt & Co. say, the miserly rich will sock the money away rather than buy stuff so that the rest of us can get a job. This is preposterous on its face, but let's wait on that for a second. What the article doesn't tell you is that the study is from the shop of Mark Zandi, Moody's Analytics, one of last few economists around who thinks the stimulus worked (because he helped design it). Zandi's name has become a bit of a red flag given his constant pimping of Obamanomics and resulting loss of credibility, so I guess Bloomberg just figures it shouldn't even mention anything that he has a hand in hoping that no one is paying attention.

Anywho...on to the substance. First, remember that saving used to be good. Remember when George W. Bush was in office, we didn't save enough and it was going to be our economic Achilles' heel? Well, they couldn't even get the numbers right, never mind interpret them properly. But now that the government needs your money to bail out its staggering profligacy, saving money is bad bad bad, so the government will deny you more of your own money lest you save it. Morever, as that penultimate link points out, the rich in America don't save, we invest. If allowed to keep more of our hard-earned money by the good grace of our betters in Congress, we don't stick it in the mattress, we invest in businesses whether it be through stocks and bonds or your smart, hard-working brother-in-law's great new business idea. Taxing that money away means taking away seed capital for small business as well as taking away public market capital that keeps our world-leading companies well-funded.

I understand Al Hunt has no choice but to print this drivel - orders are orders - but this one is a double flop.

Al Hunt's Boys Still Good for a Laugh After All This Time

Al Hunt's minions aren't missing a beat as the new Republican majority takes the helm in the House of Representatives. Apparently these putative deficit hawks got right on easing those critical anti-deficit rules, known as "pay-go" in order to grease the skids for tax cuts. Reporter Brian Faler comes at this subject with the expository acumen of a sixteen year old. Just read the almost never-ending series banal lefty tropes. It reads like a game of word association played over beers in some Columbia students' lounge. Corporations! Tax cuts! Government shortfall! Democrats close loopholes! George W. Bush!

Beyond the adolescent tone and structure the key offense of this exercise in "journalism" is a stunning level of political unsophistication. Faler has bought the paygo scam hook, line and sinker. Paygo was, by admission, not an anti-deficit mechanism. It was design to make tax cuts hard and spending easy. The rules were routinely waived or just outright ignored. In an even more stunning display of political ignorance, Faler perpetuates the laughable and now officially repudiated claim that ObamaCare cuts the budget deficit. No one believed that from the get go and the CBO's original projections were for big deficits. The CBO then said that their ultimate analysis was phony because of the way Congress gamed the process (like by sticking in an equally phony student loan bill). Finally, CBO revised their view after the fact and now say that the healthcare bill won't save any money but will cost...well...alot (which any reasonable person would have expected). Nevertheless Faler, presumably with a straight face, tells us that those profligate Republicans are intent on denying the nation this critical money-saving program (which, btw, has it's fiscal linchpin - the individual mandate - hanging by a thread under judicial scrutiny).

Just a note, I am now in my sixth year of chronicling the biased inanity of Al Hunt & Co. over at Bloomberg News. Keep it up Al, I'd miss ya' if you didn't.

UPDATE: Here is my favorite stroll down Memory Lane with Al.

Al Hunt & Co. Go For "Shock and Awe" ??

I told you that as the 2012 campaign starts Al Hunt & Co. over at Bloomberg News would kick it into gear attacking any and all opponents of the President and the Democrats. I didn't think it would get going this early, but Al & Co. out of first gear, shifting into second. Today's target it Paul Ryan's budget plan. It earns the attention of not one, but two attacks - 1) it won't save much, and it goes too easy on the wealthy, and 2) (they're really bringing out the big guns here) it hurts women.

Frankly, I'm a little befuddled by this last attack. The Ryan plan hasn't exactly caused a groundswell, it's support is tepid at best and yet the MSM/Democrat complex is leveling the charge of charges, the bazooka of all right-bashing criticisms - the charge that something hurts women. It would seem that they are laying it on too thick, trying to swat the fly with a sledgehammer. This tells me that the Ryan plan actually has more support inside the Beltway than the media are letting on, or that Al Hunt & Co. have adopted a "shock and awe' approach to their 2012 supporting bombing campaign. If it is the later, I predict Al & Co. will break their record of 7/14/05 during this cycle.

Looking Back in Laughter: In 2010, Al Hunt Is Lovin' Obama's Foreign Policy Team

Hey, I just unearthed this from the NBfPB archives.  What a find.

In 2010, Al Hunt, an in the tank Obama sycophant Journolist if there ever was one, admitted that Obama's economic policy team was performing badly.  But not to worry, his foreign policy team was crackerjack awesome.  That was a perfectly fine-tuned message because as Obama's domestic agenda sputtered and failed the press needed to turn elsewhere to chronicle "wins" and undergird the narrative of competency.  So as Obama turned to foreign policy, the press turned with him.  Well, here we are in 2014 and it is universally understood that the Lightworker's foreign policy lies in tatters.  In fact, it is so disastrous that his undistinguished economic record is starting to look good again by comparison.   That is not a high bar, but it is what it is.

What's my point?  Easy, it is this.  Don't listen to Al Hunt.

Welcome to the Party, Powerline!

Some of the bigger and more prominent conservative blogs are noticing something that we've been noting and chronicling for some here at NBfPB - that Bloomberg News, under the auspices of Al Hunt, is a carnival of leftist hackery. Just search on "Hunt" or "Bloomberg News" (or even "unexpectedly") on this blog and you will get copious examples of the "journolist"-style tripe that emanates from that putative "news" source.

Here are the guys at Powerline expressing amazement at a typical instance:

I know Michael Bloomberg is a clown and an aspiring tyrant. I didn’t realize his news service had decided to compete with MSNBC for the title as the most ludicrous news organization on the planet (after Al Jazeera, of course). Check out this headline from yesterday:

House Republicans Set to Defy Obama Are Mostly White Men The core group of Republicans who are pushing the House toward a showdown with the White House over the debt ceiling and government spending is made up of 41 members — all white men except for two.

Except for two? I’m sure if Bloomberg tries hard enough, they’ll find those two are white African-Americans, just as George Zimmerman was a heretofore unknown category of “white Hispanic.” And then there’s this graph:

And about half of them, 19 of 41, have already received campaign donations this year from the political action committee of Wichita-based Koch Industries Inc., controlled by billionaire energy executives Charles Koch and David Koch, who spent millions trying to defeat Obama in 2012.

Seriously? Did a Bloomberg editor really sign off on this?

Welcome to the party Powerline!

BTW, this wasn't the only ridiculous "white people doing it = rank illegitimacy and loathesomeness" theme that Bloomberg News has foisted on us this week. Minor Bloomberg hack Francis Wilkinson picked up a few gun magazines (magazines as in printed publications), saw mostly white people, and declared guns that much more frightening.

Everybody's white. That's the conclusion from a survey of gun magazines I bought the other day. The survey, I admit, was not conducted in accord with the best research practices: I asked the guy at the subway kiosk for as many gun magazines as he could give me before the #4 train pulled in. He handed me three for $17.

All the magazines have ads for, well, guns, and loads of accessories (love the "Sneaky Pete" concealment holster). Naturally, they have stories on guns -- whether "intimidating, big-muzzle looks" or a "Tank-tough Recon Tactical with added strength and reliability for patrol." In addition, there are features on gun life, such as columns in Guns Magazine called "Campfire Tales" and "Odd Angry Shot."

There are pictures of guys with guns, gals with guns, animals with guns, ammo with guns and guns with guns. Curiously absent are pictures of black people with guns, brown people with guns or Asian people with guns. The good guys are white. The bad guys are white. In the Gunworld depicted in these pages, pretty much everyone is white.

 Um, OK.  I guess I could say the same thing about magazines on log cabin homes, woodworking, Irish poetry, quilting, or the wines of France.  So what?  And that about sums up the only logical response to much of the drivel that Al Hunt's minions spew at Bloomberg News's relatively new social commentary apparatus...so what.

"Journolist" Has New Name

It can now be unveiled..."Journolist" is now called...Bloomberg News!

You would think that organizing an overtly partisan cabal of journalists and academics for the sole purpose of trying to get candidate Barack Obama elected would taint one's standing in the journalism profession - maybe not enough to get you fired in this day and age, but at least enough to keep you from getting additional career opportunities. You would think, but you would be wrong. Not with Al Hunt running Bloomberg News. As if Al didn't have enough lefty yo-yos on the roster, he's launched something called Bloomberg View to jam more lefty drivel down the throats of his captive financial professional audience; and Ezra Klein - of Journolist infamy - appears to be one of the marquee hires (along with a host of Al Gore acolytes and a castoff from that magazine that sold for $1).

I almost couldn't bring myself to read Klein's first column, wot with permanent scarring from the Thomas Frank/WSJ episode. But one has to try new things, even if one is 99.99% sure it's the same old thing. Well, I didn't get three short, taut sentences into it before I was hit with "He’s worried that [government] doesn’t fail often enough." What?!?!??! Government doesn't fail enough!? Off the top of my head, in 2.76 nanoseconds...from NYC's disgustingly botched, corrupt whizbang employee payment system, to Fannie Mae, to the DOJ's Mexican gun-running scandal, to Amtrak, to the British healthcare system, to everything goddamm thing that government touches - it doesn't fail enough!?!?!??!?!? Government fails at the small stuff, the medium stuff, the big stuff, and the super-sized jumbo stuff. What is this yahoo talking about?? Anyway, after I picked myself up off the floor, I completed reading the article and it is a mostly forgettable soup of ignorance of healthcare economics and naive cheerleading for ObamaCare, which I guess is the mission. Al Hunt has his eyes on the 2012 election and is looking to flood the zone with this drivel as he is wont to do.

Al Hunt & Co. Says All You Millennials Are Gonna DIE !!!!!!!!

Gun deaths.  The numbers are what they are, you can't really change the dimensions of the issue, but you can change the language that you use to describe them in order to suit your proposition.

Quick recap.  There are about 33,000 deaths related to firearms every year in America.  Take out suicides and we're looking at about 12,000 deaths by a firearm.  Of those, roughly 70-80% are gang or drug-related violence.

Both sides of the debate do their tricks with the numbers (although by far, more tricks and more dishonest tricks on the gun control side), but these are the roughly undeniable parameters for empirical analysis on the matter.

So, how does an enterprising editor/reporter deal with a vanishingly small "problem" that they want to conflate into a huge problem?  Language.  The typical rhetorical trick is to attribute the violence that a gun can do to the gun, thus "gun violence."  Not people violence or criminal violence, but "gun violence."  This is scary, because there are indeed alot of guns out there, more than there are people.  So if every gun could just spontaneously whack one of us, we're toast.

Another way to rhetorically draw attention away from the numbers is in rebranding the victims.  That is what one of Al Hunt's minions, named Zara Kessler, does is this piece.  Gangbangers and drug dealers, who represent the vast majority of deaths by firearm, are now "millennials."  I am not saying that all the young people who die by gunshot in America aren't millenials in the technical sense, they are, but calling them millennials sounds so much better than gangbangers or drug trade participants.  We use the word "millennial" to describe a prototypical person of a certain age.  It's an amalgam of commonality, a shorthand for a broad group.  Yet the preponderance of victims of gun-related homicides are a small segment of society that is anything but typical.

Kessler, through linguistic legerdemain, wants you to think that a typical young person is at great risk regardless of lifestyle choices and behavioral risk.  This is patently not the case, nor is the millennial generation at all different from past cohorts.  Every generation has a subset of individuals who engage in extremely risky behavior and suffer disproportionate death and misery as a result.

Kessler has penned a classic in the genre of FUD and all I can think about while reading it is the G n' R classic..."Know where you are?  You're in the jungle, Baby...your're gonna die!!!"

Josh Barro Is Doing Something Pathetic With His Life

The other day I read a story at Bloomberg News that was an assemblage of complete gibberish on which taxes should be raised (answer: many of them.  the column is here if you must).  My eyes caught a glimpse of the author, "Barro," and I was dumbfounded that the prominent economist Robert Barro could be spouting such inanities.  The stunned state lasted a minute or so until I realized the article was written by a Josh Barro.  After a big "whew!" I dismissed it as the "Journolist" tripe that Al Hunt's minions at Bloomberg News consistently churn out.  Not blogworthy, not even for my ongoing chronicling of Bloomberg News as the new Journolist.

Well, it turns out that Mr. Josh Barro, the not-at-all-prominent anything, factors smallishly into the "Other Race Speech" coverage by the MSM.

@JBarro: I don’t get how you can work somewhere like Breitbart or Drudge and not feel like you’re doing something pathetic with your life.

Hinderaker nails it.  Just another faux-objective Journolist hack.  Hardly a surprise from Al Hunt's Bloomberg "We Invented "Unexectedly'" News.

An Old Friend Makes It Big!!!

Check it out! Our old friend Ryan Donmoyer, the clueless-yet-arrogant Al Hunt minion, has made a cameo in Journolistgate. (I'm not going to call it a scandal, is it really a scandal to undercover yet more evidence that the media is a teeming hive of liberal deceitfulness?). He seems to think that a bunch of senior citizens who've read alot of David McCullough are akin to Nazi brownshirts. Did I say clueless and arrogant? (I bet he sees in Sarah Palin's bus tour similarities to Soviet tanks rolling into the capitals of Eastern Europe! Yes the dark night of fascism is always hoving over America in the form of ... those damned people...with their talk of The Constitution!)

Anyway, I am consoled by the knowledge that Mr. Donmoyer is almost completely irrelevant - a) he works at Bloomberg News, which is known by most of its readers as Al Hunt's hive of ridiculous NY Times wannabes (just a teensy sampling here), b) Mr. Donmoyer himself is a minor and anonymous cog on that ship...to the small extent that Bloomberg readers recognize or even seek out the scribblings of a particular writer, it is safe to say that Mr Donmoyer is not one of them. David Leonhardt he is not.

UPDATE: Little Ryan hits the jackpot with a mention by a blogger who probably has more loyal readers than all of Bloomberg News, although the mention is not a very flattering one. Still, publicity is publicity!

UPPDATE: Wow, Ryan D. was all over this Journolist deal...opining that choosing not to have an abortion is...heartwarming. Truly. I've encountered this weird reaction before, many if not all of my liberal New York friends think that having Trig was prima facie evidence of Sarah Palin's crackpottery, nuttiness and all around loathesomeness. "I guess they actually have those kind of babies out there. Ick!" After all, in NYC you're only likely to have one or two kids, so it just wouldn't do to not have a pristinely healthy child.

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.

Lesson from the Al Hunt School of Subtle Journalistic Bias

Here is a great example of what transparent partisan hacks some journalists are...no surprise, it's from one of Al Hunt's minions, some guy named David Voreacos (link here).

Mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus, Several Rabbis Arrested (Update2)
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By David Voreacos
July 23 (Bloomberg) -- The mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus, New Jersey, and several rabbis were among at least 30 people arrested today as part of a public corruption and money- laundering investigation by U.S. authorities.
Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano, 31, Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell, Jersey City Council President Mariano Vega Jr., and State Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt, a Republican from Ocean Township, were among those arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They are scheduled to appear in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, later today.
“Approximately 30 arrests have occurred this morning in a two-track federal investigation of public corruption and a high- volume, international money-laundering conspiracy,” Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for acting U.S. Attorney Ralph Marra, said in a statement.
The roundup of suspects is one of the largest ever in New Jersey, where more than 100 public officials have been convicted of corruption in the past few years.
Cammerano, Hoboken’s youngest mayor, was sworn in July 1. Leona Beldini, a deputy mayor of Jersey City, and several rabbis in New York and New Jersey were among those arrested.
Agents brought the suspects to FBI headquarters in Newark for processing before their appearance later today in federal court a mile away.
A press conference is scheduled for this afternoon.
To contact the reporter on this story: David Voreacos in Newark, New Jersey, at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net. Last Updated: July 23, 2009 09:02 EDT

I bolded the only instance where a politician has his party affiliation clarified helpfully for the readership. Wanna guess the party affiliation of Cammarano, Elwell, Beldini, and Vega???? Take a shot. I know, it's a stumper, but go ahead. On second thought, Voreacos probably didn't mention the affiliation of the other three because it would be like reporting that the sky is blue - if you know anything about Jersey City, Hoboken and pretty much any urban municipality in NJ, you know that they are one party towns, perennial hives of corruption controlled and run by...guess.

Francis Wilkinson (Me Neither) Is "Loopy"

Ugh.  More gibberish from the loons that Al Hunt has cobbled together into an editorial team over at Bloomberg News.  This time from a Francis Wilkinson (?) saying that we're going over the fiscal cliff, essentially because Michelle Bachmann is still in Congress.  Furthermore, he mocks economic growth as "magic" (in the bad sense, as in hocus-pocus).  Does this guy not realize that it is near universally accepted in the field of economics that growth, and usually growth alone, solves fiscal imbalances?  Doofus.  No more need be said.

Except this.  This is how this story's headline would appear on your Bloomberg terminal for those privileged enough to pay $2000 a month for one, "Loopy Republicans Will Send Us Over the Fiscal Cliff."  How's that for incisiveness?  Anyway, since we're operating on that plane, here's my retort:

"Loopy Democrats Will Bankrupt the Nation, Turn Us Into Greece."

UPDATE:  Last I checked Turbo Tax Timmy was a Democrat and courtesy of Wilkinson's boss, Al Hunt, we get word that Triple T advocates absolutely zero strictures, no limits whatsoever, on the amount of indebtedness that our government can rack up on our behalf.  If I didn't know any better, I'd think these characters have no intention to pay the debt back or are unaware that debts do indeed have to be paid back.  Both notions are downright "loopy".

Thomas Frank Is Not Worthy of WSJ's "Wednesday Liberal" Column

Ever since Al Hunt left the Wall Street Journal, its Op-Ed page has lacked the token voice of an unabashed liberal. The editors recently rectified this situation by hiring Thomas Frank to give us capitalist pigs our mid-week dose of wooly-mindedness. I've lost count, but we're about five or six columns into the Frank Era and I have to say the WSJ hired the wrong guy. His columns are easily picked apart for their glaringly silly theses and they are not the least bit informative or entertaining. Frank makes me yearn for Al Hunt.

Today's column is no exception. Frank takes the poster child in chief of what was wrong with the Republican congressional majority - Tom DeLay - and uses him as exhibit A to declare conservatism a failed doctrine. DeLay was exactly what conservatives loathed about the Republican majority that claimed to govern in their name; he embodied the abandonment of fealty to small government principles. Just to take a few examples, conservatives howled with disgust over the Medicare section D entitlement expansion and DeLay's key role in ramming it through, as well as cringed when DeLay declared, inexplicably, that congress had squeezed all the fat out of the federal budget. Frank missed all this. Conservatives might not have liked the dishonest hardball assault that Ronnie Earle employed to go after DeLay, but in no way did that sympathy extend to believing that DeLay was good for conservatism. Frank is obviously living in a bubble somewhere because he couldn't be more wrong. If Jeff Flake were the most powerful guy in the House and Don Young was a pariah, Republicans would likely still be in the majority. If Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn were not lone voices in the Senate, then Republican coffers would be full and their prospects for the upcoming election cycle would be rosy. True conservatives have abandoned the Republican party not because they have found their beliefs wanting, but because they have found their beliefs foresaken by those who claimed to uphold them. History and experience has taught us that bigger government is worse government, government solutions create problems not solve them, and that government expands at the expense of our liberty. Tom DeLay is a blip. A hundred Tom DeLay's couldn't unteach us what history has taught us and what experience teaches us every day. Whatever name you put on it - conservatism, libertarianism - smaller, less intrusive government has an enormous appeal and advantage that grows everyday as the global laboratory gives us disappointment, failure and disaster at the hands of powerful government. If Frank thinks his worldview has won the day because Tom DeLay was a typical, power hungry politician, I welcome his misdiagnosis and false confidence. In the meantime, the WSJ should find a decent liberal columnist, Frank is sullying its Champagne pages with beer budget commentary.

Welcome to MSM Jurassic Park: View the Albert Huntasaurus

Crackerjack veteran newsman Al Hunt is just now getting around to telling his readers that Obama's economic team is dysfunctional. I flagged this in February of last year (see point 4). Good thing the readers of Bloomberg News don't rely on timely news and analysis for anything important! Still, Al feels the need to coat this story to keep it just on the right side of the MSM's lese majeste standards by touting the splendiferousness of...brace yourself...Obama's foreign policy team (the "Smart Power Crew" as I like to refer to them, but you may prefer calling them the "The Fabulous Fist Unclenchers" ).

It would be too charitable to call Big Al a day late and a dollar short with this effort, but this day-lateness and dollar-shortness is a beautifully compressed analog of the sclerosis that is the cause of the slow, painful liberal MSM die-off.

Bloomberg News Is the New JournoList, Part IXX

I have long chronicled the raging left-wing bias that pervades everything emanating from Bloomberg News, which is an outcome foreordained by the hiring of Al Hunt many moons ago.

I have since welcomed other bloggers to the party, and I am happy to report that they seem to be taking up the cudgel with alacrity.  I like this tidbit particularly:

Hunt is of course a raving liberal and friend of the Obama administration.

Exactly.

WSJ Op-Ed Page Revives Liberal Wednesday

For the longest time, Wednesday used to be Token Liberal Day on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal.  The barely palatable Al Hunt held this post down for years before leaving to build Bloomberg News into the "Journolist" Hackfest that it is today.  Hunt ceded the Wednesday slot to the godawful Thomas Frank, who mercifully didn't last very long.  The slot seemed to go dormant for awhile with Gordon Crovitz filling in with no apparent ideological bent or real purpose.

So today I was surprised to see a new occupant of the Wednesday slot that appears to return the WSJ long tradition of subjecting giving its readers a liberal viewpoint in the middle of the week.  The New Republic's and The Brookings Institution's William A. Galston kicks off his ostensible new role with a fairly anodyne and harmless musing about the plight of the middle class.  The column opens up with what might have been a howler if it was not passed over so quickly and ends with a point worthy of much discussion that Galston fails to give it, and in between we get alot of economist-type on-the-one-hand-while-on-the-other-hand musing about the plight of the middle class.

The not quite howler is this.

President Obama is working hard to refocus attention on the middle class, and rightly so.

You will have a hard time convincing me that Obama is working hard on anything except maybe getting more Democrats elected in 2014 by poisoning the well of electoral politics with the most despicable brand of scorched Earth politics.  It is amazing to me that liberals still harbor the fantasy that Obama is hunkered down thinking of ways to advance policies that help people, when what he is doing is mostly just occupying the office and trying to make whatever part of government he can conform to hoary faculty lounge wet dreams.

Then we get four full columns of middle class yadayadayada, and then Galston ends with this.

If we cannot restore a vigorously growing economy whose fruits are widely shared, the struggles of the middle class will persist, and our democratic distemper will deepen.

In this little nugget is a truth that needs to be talked about as liberals are desperately purveying gibberish regarding income inequality.  What Galston's concluding sentence hints at is that income inequality is a political problem, it is not an economic problem.  Too large and too persistent gaps between rich and poor can destabilize society politically, but income inequality is not a brake on economic activity as liberals on down the line, including the President keep telling us.  There is no accepted economic theory that states that reducing income inequality spurs economic well-being.  A relatively free economy characterized by innovation grows and results in income mobility and reduces income inequality.  It is not the other way around.  If income inequality is your beef, then you should be advocating all manner of growth policies focused on experimentation, innovation, and deregulation rather than the typical liberal playbook of unionism, regulation and crony-laden central planning.  But I digress.

Galston's first effort in the revered Wednesday Token Liberal seat...?  Safe, uninspiring, competent.

Greatest Level of Denial Among Lefty Media Outlets...?

As highlighted by Drudge, various media outlets have differing, but fairly overwhelming prediction odds for a Republican takeover of the US Senate.  WashPost has 95%, CNN has 96%, the NY Times has 70%.

But all these guys are pikers compared to Al Hunt's Bloomberg News.  How does BN characterize the race?  "GOP has the edge."  Edge?  Really?  OK.

Pesek, Pulitzer of Pish, in Puerile Poke at Palin

Al Hunt's minions over at Bloomberg can't quite seem to realize how banal the Sarah Palin swipes are. This is no doubt because Sarah Palin is still highly ranked fodder for NYC cocktail party jokes. (Here in sophisticated New York, all we can seem to talk about is the embarassing attempts by the rubes in the hinterland to get involved in our government. I mean it just looks so bad when we are vacationing in Positano or skiing in Courchevel when one of the rubes is in high office.) Anyway, it's William Pesek's turn. (My previous thoughts on Pesek, and awesome alliterative adagio, here.) And it is all predictable. She's dumb. She's knows nothing. She hasn't travelled. Jejune. Banal. Insipid. Blahsville.

What seems to escape Billy "the Pulitzer of Pish" Pesek is that the Chinese are traversing the globe with fistfulls of billions looking to secure energy supplies. They are everywhere - Africa, Latin America, Canada, you name it - gobbling up rights to tap resources. They want to do the same here in the US. We have vast resources and world-leading expertise and technology, thus the Chinese want to invest here to gain access to both raw resources and know-how. The roadblock, however, has been political. For example, back in 2005, the Chinese's bid for Unocal was scuttled by our politicians. Canny and wise as the Chinese are, they probably thought to themselves, "how can we learn more about US politics and how energy development and politics mix?" They probably thought, "maybe we could learn by listening to an actual government official that has good experience with energy development. Yes, let us then invite to speak a politician who has worked at the intersection of successful commercial energy development and government approval and oversight. This would give us insight into how better to approach participating in US energy development."

Yes, very wise Comrade-san. Who would such an American be? Ah Comrade, Mr. Ken Salazar, Minister of Oil! No, Comrade-san, he has no track record and is actually anti-energy, think of another. Sarah Palin, Comrade-san, former Governor of energy-rich Alaska province! Aaaaaaaaahhhhh, Sarah Palin. She has indeed transacted with Exxon of Texas and the two-faced British firm. And think of it, Comrade-san...if the Party of Obama continues to anger the sleeping giant masses, Sarah Palin could be influential in a future American regime! Very wise Comrade-san! Very wise. You do yourself honor and bring honor on your family! It is resolved. Let us invite Sarah Palin to speak to us about American energy politics.

Bloomberg: Why Are Companies Complaining About Obama?

Remember how I told you that the Pelosicrats and Obamacrats have achieved an amazing feat of dissonance - a crappy economy for the lower and middle classes but a pretty decent one for upper classes.

Mark Perry has a post up today that perfectly illuminates what I (and others) have highlighted about this economy - it sucks for the lower skilled but isn't too bad for investors and owners. Perry notes a guy who laments the sad state of the manufacturing recovery using Census data, while Perry highlights, using Census data as well, that manufacturing profits are booming. That's what Washington has created for us, a modest recovery that is accruing to capital and not to labor.

Bloomberg touches on this phenomenon in an article titled "Corporate Profits Soar as Executives Attack Obama Policy".  

Such complaints, echoed by corporate executives throughout President Barack Obama’s first term, obscure one fact: American business has never had it so good.

U.S. corporations’ after-tax profits have grown by 171 percent under Obama, more than under any president since World War II, and are now at their highest level relative to the size of the economy since the government began keeping records in 1947, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Of course, leave it to Al Hunt & Co. to get the story entirely wrong, mistaking coincidence with causality.  Corporate profits are up for, more or less, four reasons:
1) Layoffs and Restrained Hiring - Companies laid alot of people off in the wake of the financial crisis.  They have not hired those people back because of intensive regulatory expansion from the Obama administration, uncertainty over Obamacare's rules, and outright hostility and attacks on business.  Companies have made the conscious decision to do more with less, which is translating to higher productivity and profits.
2) Restrained Capital Expenditures - The uncertainties and hostility that the Obama administration has inflicted on the economy is keeping companies from making major project commitments.  Capital not spent on undertaking new projects is an expense not incurred, an expense not incurred is a profit earned.
3) Cheap Dollar Drives Exports to Growing World - The rest of the world, barring Europe, is trying to get on with business and grow, so there has been very little of the anti-business sentiment like there has been in the US.  And they need US-made goods.  A dollar weakened by profligate spending and hyper-expanionary monetary policy makes those US-made goods cheap, so companies sell more abroad.  More sales helps profits.
4) Low Interest Rates - In a vain attempt to counter the economic malaise pervading the US economy, the Fed has held interest rates at historically low levels, which has enabled corporations to refinance their debts and reduce interest costs by hundreds of millions of dollars.  Lower interest costs are higher profits.

So it is Obama's policies that are driving US corporate profits up, but not in a good way.  Obama's policies are making companies defensive and tentative and reluctant to invest in the future.

Shocker: Bloomberg Distorts Election Non-Issue Issue

This headline annoys the crap out of me. No surprise it comes from Al Hunt & Co. at Bloomberg News, which is the new JournoList focused on re-electing Barack Obama.

Romney Gets Break for Taxes Less Wage-Earner

Romney does NOT get a "tax break." He pays the statutory (meaning passed by Congress) tax rate on investment income. Since he has no job currently, he does not earn any meaningful amount in wages, on which he would pay the statutory tax rate on wages. The man is living off of the investments he has accumulated over a lifetime of working, which is what we all do whether it is from the family home or other properties or stock or bonds. He is, in other words, doing nothing different from what most all retired people do. Furthermore, the taxation of investment income versus the taxation of wage income is different for a number of reasons grounded in sound economic logic. You may disagree for whatever reason - philosophical, economic or otherwise - but your beef is not with Mitt Romney, it is with the law and your elected representatives that passed and maintain current taxation policy.

This is the same dumb argument that Warren Buffett makes - he too makes most of his money from investments and he laments the fairness of his taxation rate versus that of his secretary. He never says why his rate is lower and he never makes a forceful argument against the well-established policy of taxing investment income differently from wage income. If you don't like the situation, fine, make a rational argument for equalizing the two, but don't lie and distort about who is getting breaks and all that garbage.

UPDATE: This is all to say nothing of the fact that Romney's 15% tax rate is too high, as Jimmy P. rightly points out. And John Cochrane puts a little extra meat on the bone.