Obama learns about a lot of his scandals from the news

5/25/2014

In case you were wondering how anybody could really be so stupid...



 Washington Free Beacon·



The President finds out a lot of things going wrong in his government from news reports.


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Mariel Hemmingway Admits to Showing Up to Lunch Meeting With Middle East Funder of Anit-Fracking Movie

5/26/2014




 jim hoft·

Published on May 25, 2014

Wasn't this the whole point of the sting? Mariel Hemmingway told Howard Kurtz on Media Buzz today that she went to a luncheon by Middle Eastern funders of an anti-fracking project.

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Piketty Fudged His Wealth Data But Progressives Still Support His 'Compelling Theoretical Predictions'

5/25/2014

Submitted by Robert Murphy via Mises Canada,

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a moving target.The book contains foundational theoretical problems, a misreading of the empirical literature that blows up his whole case, sloppy and absurd factual errors concerningtax rates and minimum wage hikes, and shocking quotations that reveal he has no desire to actually raise government revenue with his massive soak-the-super-rich schemes, but instead merely wants to prevent the formation of fortunes in the first place.

I am now beginning to suspect that this is the Frenchman’s rope-a-dope strategy.By this point, after I (and others) have been harping on one problem after another, the poor blogosphere reader is too fatigued to take it seriously when Chris Giles at the FT alleges that Piketty’s most important scholarship–the thing that supposedly warrants Piketty a Nobel Prize,according to Larry Summers–is not only wrong, but contains deliberately fudged data. Uh oh.

You can click the FT link to read the big-picture (ungated) story, and this (gated) link to see the specific allegations about Piketty’s data errors. Giles explains what led him to start questioning Piketty’s historical figures on wealth and income concentration, which most other reviewers (including me!) had simply assumed were in the ballpark:

[W]hen writing an article on the distribution of wealth in the UK, I noticed a serious discrepancy between the contemporary concentration of wealth described in Capital in the 21st Century and that reported in the official UK statistics. Professor Piketty cited a figure showing the top 10 per cent of British people held 71 per cent of total national wealth. The Office for National Statistics latest Wealth and Assets Survey put the figure at only 44 per cent.

Whoa! Piketty’s figure for wealth concentration in the present–so we’re not quibbling over 1810 here–was off by 27 percentage points. Like Will Ferrell, that’s kind of a big deal.

Yet more amazing than Piketty’s apparent errors–and his rather odd reply amounting to “prove me wrong, kids, prove me wrong”–is the response that his defenders are mounting. For example,Danny Vinik at the New Republic tries to blow it off as the FT making a big deal about nothing. Let’s walk through Vinik’s apology for Piketty.

First, Vinik argues that the only significant changes have to do with Britain and the US; Giles’ reconstructed time series for France and Sweden match up almost identically with Piketty’s original figures in the book. OK so let’s look then at Britain and the US:

In the figure above (which Vinik reproduced from Giles’ FT post), the top lines refer to the total amount of wealth (“capital” in Piketty’s broad definition, which includes land) owned by the top 10% of wealth owners. The bottom lines show the amount owned by the top 1% (obviously it’s lower). The blue lines show the estimates as Piketty charted them in his book, while the red lines show the FT analysis (which has different options for the year 2010, based on whether one includes the “ONS Wealth and Assets survey or not”).

As the figure shows, there is an enormous discrepancy in Piketty’s figures and those that the FT computed. In addition to the figure for the top 10% being off by up to 27 percentage points–the discrepancy that originally caught Giles’ attention–we also see that, depending on which data point one uses for 2010, Piketty’s figure for the wealth held by the top 1% is off by around 9 to 18 percentage points, in the worst case with Piketty reporting a figure that is almost triple the actual value (about 29% instead of 11%, just eyeballing the bottom lines).

Yet beyond the discrepancy in values for given years, step back and look at the overall historical trend if the red lines are correct (as opposed to Piketty’s blue lines): We see that wealth inequality continued its downward trend even throughout the Thatcher years, and after a spike upward during the 1990s, is now (if we use the lower data points for 2010) at the lowest level in recorded UK history.

Let’s now look at the US:

Here things are trickier, because (apparently) there are no good long-term estimates for these data. The top lines (according to Giles) have a huge gap in them, because there are no estimates of the concentration of US wealth ownership by the top 10% between 1870 and 1960. So how, you ask, does Piketty generate that nice blue line, which zooms up to about 80% in 1910, then gradually falls through 1940, etc.? According to Giles, Piketty literally just made that blue line up (presumably guided by the trends in the other countries, and in the US 1%, for which there were better data).

For the bottom rows (showing the concentration of wealth held by the top 1%), there are better estimates, and Giles has shown some of them, along with Piketty’s reported line (in blue). Now notice: Piketty’s blue line shows a gradual trend upward in the ownership by the 1% from 1970 onward. This, after all, is the whole warning of the book: The rich are getting richer, and if governments around the world don’t start taxing the heck out of them, soon we’ll be back to the Gilded Age.

Yet the funny thing is, if you look at either of the longer data sets (the bottom red lines) upon which Piketty presumably based his blue composition, you’ll see that neither shows an upward trend in recent decades. In particular, if you look at the longest red series, it shows that the U.S. is currently hovering near the lowest level of wealth concentration in the hands of the 1% in recorded history.

But I’ve saved the best for last. Here is how Vinik handles the awkward fact that Giles has arguably just shown that when you correct Piketty’s factual mistakes, then the trend in both the UK and the US is the exact opposite of what everyone took away from the book:

Even if you believe that Giles’s findings dramatically change Piketty’s results, they have little bearing on his economic theory. Giles makes a passing comparison to economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff (R&R), who drove a significant part of Republican austerity agenda, but saw their findings disproven in 2013. Liberals celebrated when Thomas Herndon, a graduate student from UMass Amherst, discovered a spreadsheet error in R&R’s results that invalidated their main finding. But unlike Piketty, Reinhart and Rogoff largely had no economic theory to ground their argument that national debt crises occur when a country’s debt level surpasses 90 percent of GDP. Once their data fell apart, their theory had no legs to stand on. On the other hand, Piketty fits data to this theory, but does not depend on it. Piketty’s theory—right or wrong—is largely unaffected by these results.

Everyone got that? Vinik realizes he has to walk a tightrope here–progressives were quite pleased to pounce on R&R when their Excel errors came to light. So Vinik is trying to avoid charges of hypocrisy by saying that R&R had no theory to back up their warnings about government debt, whereas Piketty doesn’t need no stinking historical analysis of inequality in order to push through his theories (and consequent policy recommendations).

This should sound oddly familiar for those of you have been following my Piketty posts here at Mises Canada. For in his own review of Piketty–the one where he said Piketty should get the Nobel Prize for his historical work on wealth inequality–Larry Summers wrote:

I have serious reservations about Piketty’s theorizing as a guide to understanding the evolution of American inequality.

…

But if it is not at all clear that there is any kind of iron law of capitalism that leads to rising wealth and income inequality, the question of how to account for rising inequality remains. After Piketty and his colleagues’ work, there can never again be a question about the phenomenon or its pervasiveness. The share of the top 1 percent of American income recipients has risen from below 10 percent to above 20 percent in some recent years.

…

Even where capital accumulation is concerned, I am not sure that Piketty’s theory emphasizes the right aspects. Looking to the future, my guess is that the main story connecting capital accumulation and inequality will not be Piketty’s tale of amassing fortunes.

…

By focusing attention on what has happened to a fortunate few among us, and by opening up for debate issues around the long-run functioning of our market system, Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a profoundly important contribution.

In the interest of brevity, I had to limit my quotations from Summers’ review. But I hope the limited excerpts above show my point: Summers was absolutely devastating in his critique of the theory underlying Piketty’s book. Yet Summers overall kept coming back to praise it, because Piketty gosh darn it had done “meticulous” work documenting the disturbing accumulation of wealth among the super rich over the last few decades. Except, as it turns out, that maybe a big chunk of those results were due to stupid mistakes or worse. (Be careful not to conflate wealth and income; that’s part of the confusion behind the various volleys of statistics from one camp to another in this debate.)

So that’s where we now stand: Plenty of progressives up till literally yesterday were saying yes yes, Piketty’s theoretical framework leaves much to be desired, but he’s a top scholar when it comes to the trends he’s documented. And now that much of that empirical work might be totally bunk, the defense is to argue that yes yes, the historical data might be the exact opposite of what Piketty claimed, but boy he offers some compelling theoretical predictions with which we must grapple.

Until this sorry episode, I had no idea just how much progressives hated rich people, and how little regard they had for intellectual integrity. Live and learn.

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‘We’re not broke, we’ve been robbed’: Five claims of the New Populism Conference and what they missed

5/25/2014

AP file photo

OH, REALLY: U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is among those leading the ‘new populism’ charge. Think classier version of Occupy Wall Street.

By Kathryn Watson | Watchdog.org

WASHINGTON, D.C. — From the tea party movement to Occupy Wall Street, there’s no denying a general state of discontent with the way Washington is handling the economy.

That discontent was the fuel to the fire that drew scores of progressives to the New Populism Conference in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.

“This is not the land of economic opportunity,” U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, told the audience. “It’s growing to be the land of economic stagnation.”

Gallup suggests a majority of Americans agree with Ellison, but Americans are divided on how the country ended up here and how it can once again become an economically prosperous nation.

“When conservatives talk about opportunities, they’re talking about opportunities for the rich to get richer and the powerful to get more powerful,” U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told the audience.

While Ellison and Warren, among others, shared some moving messages and well-taken points about things such as income inequality and providing a “living wage,” their claims missed a few realities.

Here are some of them.

1. “For too long the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that we’re broke. Well, we’re not broke. We’ve been robbed.” — Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness

It only takes a quick Google search to know America is in debt — $17.5 trillion and counting. Of course, what Clemente meant is corporations and wealthy Americans could pay off that debt.

But, ethical arguments about forcing the wealthy and corporations to pay off the debt aside, they couldn’t cover it.

If the IRS took 100 percent of income over $1 million, that revenue would amount to just $616 billion, according to the Tax Foundation. That’s nowhere near the national debt.

Even if America put all of its GDP toward paying off the debt, if that was a plausible option, it would only roughly equal the national debt.

2. “The real problem of this economy is not debt. The real problem of this economy is that we don’t have jobs.” —  Ellison.

The Minnesota Democrat, Ellison, hit on a very important point — the top priority for Americans in nearly every opinion poll is job creation. Liberals and conservatives, alike, agree.

He, however, dismissed the very real economic dangers of the nation’s ever-growing national debt, which stands about $55,000 per person — more than the median income in the country.

For future generations who have to pay off that debt, on top of massive student loans for many, it’s a real economic issue. Plus, interest on debt alone accounts for 6 percent of federal receipts. That money can’t be used for other things — such as job-creation programs.

3. Warren and others emphasized that America isn’t broke — corporations just aren’t paying their fair share.

In a sense, that’s true. Politicians on both sides of the aisle dole out tax breaks to corporations, picking and choosing who wins and who loses. Economists agree — corporate welfare and all that comes with it is a huge problem.

“When cronyism becomes institutionalized, it threatens the overall economy,” reads a summary of a new study on government subsidies by economists at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “Private, productive entrepreneurship is increasingly replaced by unproductive entrepreneurship in the form of rent-seeking and political favoritism.”

Unfortunately, government fuels this bad behavior.

For example, Mercatus says Walmart has received at least 260 special benefits from the government worth $1.3 billion. Eliminating government subsidies would, some economists say, naturally diminish much cronyism.

Still, the United States already has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world at 39 percent, and other countries’ economies are passing it by because of it.

“The U.S. shouldn’t be looking to increase the tax burden on corporations further,” said Kyle Pomerleau, an economist with the Tax Foundation.” The U.S. is already at a competitive disadvantage. High taxes on corporations drive investment overseas and slow the economy.”

4. America isn’t broke — the rich just aren’t paying their fair share.

Corporations aside, what about wealthy people? Well, they’re actually paying farmore proportionally than the poorest in the America, who are getting back more in benefits than they pay in taxes.

The top 1 percent of earners pay more than two-thirds of all federal income tax revenue, according to IRS data analyzed by the National Taxpayers Union. The top 5 percent of earners in America account for far more than 50 percent of everything paid in taxes.

Or, to look at it a different way, the top 1 percent of taxpayers — with adjusted gross incomes of $388,905 or more — accounted for 18.7 percent of all income but paid 37 percent of all income taxes, according to the Tax Foundation.

The bottom 50 percent of earners, on the other hand, account for just 2.2 percent of all federal income tax revenue.

In fact, America’s lowest-income families receive $5.28 worth of government spending — federal, state and local — for every $1 they pay in taxes, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation. America’s highest-income families, however, receive 25 cents in spending for every dollar of taxes paid.

5. “Policy research suggests raising the minimum wage,” said Valerie Ervin, executive director with the Center for Working Families, who went on to cite cities and states that have raised the minimum wage rather than what research suggests raising the minimum wage helps the economy. 

Unfortunately, as Watchdog.org has reported, the economic indicators aren’t so persuasive.

While increasing the minimum wage could be good for good workers employed at minimum wage, economists say those wage increases tend to hurt the young and unskilled — people who most need the jobs.

“The correct statement is, ‘Everyone who is working benefits from a living wage,’” Antony Davies, an economist with George Mason University’s Mercatus Center in Virginia, told Watchdog.org. “Those who lose their jobs are worse off. For example, raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10 would put an extra $5,500 in a full-time minimum wage worker’s pocket — provided the worker kept his job. The worker who loses his job has $14,500 removed from his pocket.”

During the past 45 years, each 10 percentage-point increase in the minimum wage has led to 0.5 percentage point to 2-percentage point increases in unemployment among the high school educated adults, adults without a high school diploma and young people without a high school diploma, Davies’ research found.

Young people, those most negatively impacted by minimum wage hikes, make up the vast majority of minimum-wage earners.

Just 3.6 million Americans earn at or below minimum wage. Within that group, 31 percent are teenagers and 55 percent are 25 or younger. That means less than 1 percent of all Americans, according to Forbes, older than 25 are earning minimum wage. Plus, the average family income of a minimum-wage earner is $53,000 a year, meaning more than one person in the family is working.

“On average, a more educated, more skilled, more experienced worker can do everything a less educated, less skilled, less experienced worker can do – plus more,” Davies said.

So, as the minimum wage forces employers to cut back on labor, the least advantaged are the first to go.

“Sadly, those are exactly the workers who are most in need of our help,” Davies said.

Kathryn Watson is an investigative reporter for Watchdog.org’s Virginia Bureau and can be reached at kwatson@watchdog.org. Watchdog.org intern Kaitlyn Speer contributed to this report.

Please, feel free to "steal our stuff"! Just remember to credit Watchdog.org. Find out more

Kathryn Watson

Kathryn Watson is an investigative reporter for Watchdog.org's Virginia Bureau. Her work has appeared in places like Drudge Report, the Washington Examiner, Reason and Human Events. She has made appearances on shows like Fox News and the NRA's Cam and Company. An alumna of the National Journalism Center, Katie is also a member of Investigative Reporters Editors. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in journalism and highest honors from Biola University in Los Angeles, where she was in charge of a team of 60-plus staff members and freelancers as the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. Before joining Watchdog.org, Katie worked as a reporter at the Santa Barbara News-Press in California. Her work has earned her the "Best of Show" award and two first-place awards from the Virginia Press Association.

• kwatson@watchdog.org

Liberals Organize To Help Uninsured After Realizing Obamacare Promises Were Lies

5/25/2014

Conscious Party: Have a heart — and some fun too

Posted on May 22, 2014 by Carrie Eidson

Photo courtesy of the Western Carolina Medical Society

What: Western Carolina Medical Society’s Heartstrings Family Fun Challenge

Where: Mountain Sports Festival, held at Carrier Park

When: Sunday, May 25, from 1-4 p.m.

Why: In addition to all the music, sporting activities and fun events planned for the Mountain Sports Festival, kids and adults also have the chance to help their uninsured neighbors gain access to health care — by simply playing a game.

During the second day of the festival, The Western Carolina Medical Society will hold its annual Heartstrings fundraiser, an athletic challenge that combines health and fun. Heartstrings raises funds for WCMS Project Access Program, which provides health care to more than 3,000 individuals in Buncombe County whose annual income is too low to qualify for the Affordable Care Act.

“This is the 12th year of Heartstrings,” says Julia Lockamy, lead fundraiser for WCMS. “Before it was more of an athletic event for individuals, but we thought it would be good to include families. We wanted it to be more accessible to the community at large.”

The Heartstrings Family Fun Challenge allows families to pass through a series of 10 stations, including a pool-noodle javelin throw, an obstacle course and a dress-up relay, while making their way to the finish line to receive their medal. The event is open to ages 5 and older. A prize basket valued over $1,000 will also be raffled at the event.

“The whole idea is for families to come out and have a good time,” Lockamy says.

Project Access draws on a network of over 500 Buncombe County physicians as well as Mission Hospital, area pharmacies and other volunteers who donate time, resources and expertise without reimbursement to provide health care to those not covered by Medicaid or insurance.

Lockamy says volunteers will be on hand to provide more information about Project Access. The entry fee for the event is $5, which can be made at the event or in advance via the website. Additional donations are also welcome.

For more information about the Heartstrings Family Fun Challenge, visit

http://www.mywcms.org/HeartStrings2014/

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The Mystery Continues: Yet Another Desease Discovered In A Mexican Border State

5/25/2014

Dog tests positive for plague in New Mexico

SANTA FE (AP) — State health officials are reporting significant plague activity in the East Mountain area which includes parts of Bernalillo, Torrance and Santa Fe counties.

They say a dog from the Edgewood area was confirmed positive for plague this week.

So far this year, there have been three dogs from the Edgewood area and a cat from Torrance County with confirmed plague.

Health officials say a Torrance County man was diagnosed with plague last month, but is expected to recover.

Plague is a bacterial disease of rodents and is generally transmitted to humans through the bites of infected fleas. But it can also be transmitted by direct contact with infected animals, including rodents, wildlife and pets.

There were four human plague cases in New Mexico last year with one fatality.

(Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

PREDICTIBLE: Federal government gets involved in NM special education funding

5/25/2014

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) -- The largest school district in New Mexico is asking the federal government to take action to make the state follow federal laws governing special education.
 
In a letter, Albuquerque Public Schools to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan also suggests annual audits and stricter monitoring of New Mexico's special-education budget. The action revolves around guidelines that require the state to maintain the same level of special-education funding from year to year or increase funding. New Mexico failed to meet the funding requirement in 2010 and 2011 by decreasing the amount it spent on special education.

As a penalty, the federal government can decrease the amount of support it gives the state by the same amount that the state underspent.

(Copyright ©2014 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Woman jailed after two immigrants found in trunk of her car. No mention of punishment for the two illegal immigrants

5/25/2014

A woman is behind bars after she allegedly tried to smuggle two illegal immigrants from Mexico in the trunk of her car.

U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested 35-year-old Rita Muñoz on federal human smuggling charges on Tuesday night.

Federal court records show that Muñoz was headed north at the Sarita checkpoint when a K-9 officer detected something suspicious in her trunk.

Border Patrol agents found two illegal immigrants from Mexico in the trunk of her car.

Muñoz allegedly told agents that she was supposed to get paid to deliver the immigrants up north.

The 35-year-old woman appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald Morgan in Brownsville on Thursday morning.

Judge Morgan denied bond for Muñoz until a Tuesday afternoon hearing.

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