Ah Snap! This is cool.

(HT: Coyote Blog)

For the Love of Manufacturing

Next time you hear someone complain about the decline of the manufacturing sector in the US send them here. Total manufacturing output in the US has not gone down. We make more stuff than we ever have. We just make more for less. That's usually considered progress but for some reason manufacturing is a hallowed profession that is considered different from others. That's not just on the Left either, as the linked article shows.

Here's one of the best graphs (among many) from the linked blog:

Credit Ratings of Each State

Gil sent me this:

It reminds of me of the AAA ratings that were on bundled mortgages even though when you looked inside at the individual mortgages there was a lot of junk. To me this is more evidence for why most spending (especially social programs like medicare, medicaid and social security) should be done at the state and not the federal level. States can't print money and hide bad debt as well as the federal government. If they make too many poor fiscal choices their citizens will just leave and the state will have to restructure through bankruptcy. At the federal level, inflation can just make our debts all "disappear" over time.

Aaron, Please Help!

Sorry to keep posting economics garbage. But that's the stuff I'm reading lately and I can't help myself. Just tune me out if I'm getting pedantic. Anyway, this one is for Aaron. Aaron, is there any reason we should keep (or start) taking guys like Krugman remotely seriously? Here we have Krugman with the broken windows fallacy writ large. His arguments just seem so intuitively wrong on every level that I've been suppressing guffaws in my office for the last ten minutes after watching this clip.



I know Krugman comes off as an ideologue, but lots of economists still think this way. Help!