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!

Stimulating Government Employees

Umm, is this blog still on? Of late I've been reading Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson online. It's full of money quotes with which I will regale you repeatedly.

Even though the stimulus bill of 2009 was sold as a "shovel-ready jobs" bill, a lot (most?) of the money has gone to shore up existing federal agencies and programs or was sent to states to support state budgets. Here's Hazlitt on why using money to retain government employees (whether you think that's a good idea or not) is unlikely to "stimulate" the economy:

The country is not merely as well off without the superfluous officeholders as it would have been had it retained them. It is much better off. For the officeholders must now seek private jobs or set up private business. And the added purchasing power of the taxpayers, as we noted in the case of the soldiers, will encourage this. But the officeholders can take private jobs only by supplying equivalent services to those who provide the jobs—or, rather, to the customers of the employers who provide the jobs. Instead of being parasites, they become productive men and women.

Manbears

Here's a two-part action-packed miniseries made by my students.
Commie Terrorists - check.
Elite Freedom-loving Commando Unit - check.
Prelude to Buttkicking Montage - check.
Complete Disregard for Continuity - Let's rock.





And find more bizarre stuff here:

http://manbearpictures.blogspot.com/

Technorella

Jed and I were waiting in line to get free hot-dogs at RC Willies and our conversation lead us to the topic of techno music. I brought up the point that techno music can transcend all ages. Jed laughed at the thought and said he would give me a six pack of Welch's Grape soda if I could get his children into techno. Watch the videos all the way through. They are beautiful.

Here is the Pied-Piper of techno.


This is a newer Disney film, just in case your boys didn't like the last one.


This song almost brought me to tears.