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In Division of Labour, Frank Stephenson has a good quip.
“The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings Wednesday on the “Potty Parity Act,” a bill that seeks to address the unequal number of restroom facilities for women in federal buildings.”
This is a much better way for the honorables to spend their time rather than mucking around in health care or passing cap and tax.
In WSJ, Amy Jaffe writes about the new technology in natural gas that will have positive effects on many nations’ economies.
Over the past decade, a wave of drilling around the world has uncovered giant supplies of natural gas in shale rock. By some estimates, there’s 1,000 trillion cubic feet recoverable in North America alone—enough to supply the nation’s natural-gas needs for the next 45 years. Europe may have nearly 200 trillion cubic feet of its own.
We’ve always known the potential of shale; we just didn’t have the technology to get to it at a low enough cost. Now new techniques have driven down the price tag—and set the stage for shale gas to become what will be the game-changing resource of the decade.
I have been studying the energy markets for 30 years, and I am convinced that shale gas will revolutionize the industry—and change the world—in the coming decades. It will prevent the rise of any new cartels. It will alter geopolitics. And it will slow the transition to renewable energy. …
…Russia made no secret about its desire to leverage its position and create a cartel of gas producers—a kind of latter-day OPEC. That seemed to set the stage for a repeat of the oil issues that have worried the world over the past 40 years.
As far as I’m concerned, you can now forget all that. Shale gas will breed competition among energy companies and exporting countries—which in turn will help economic stability in industrial countries, and thwart petro-suppliers that try to empower themselves at our expense. Market competition is the best kryptonite for cartel power. …
…The trade deficit has crippled our economy and shows no signs of abating as long as we remain tethered to imported energy. Why ship dollars abroad where they can destabilize global financial markets—and then hit us back in lost jobs and savings—when we can develop the resources we have here in our own country? Shall we pay Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to develop our natural gas—or the citizens of Pennsylvania and Louisiana?
The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s comments on the Kagan nomination.
If you look at this on an ideological scale, it’s Obama going [from] left to center. He starts with Sotomayor at a time — in ’09 — when he’s strong, he’s riding high, he has control of the Senate. She’s pretty left, [as in] the “wise Latina” comment. He’s in a position where he can risk it [with Sotomayor].
Now he’s a lot weaker — 41 Republicans in the Senate. So he goes with a more mainline liberal. He knows that after next year, if he gets another pick, he’s going to get really weakened in this [election], especially in the Senate. He could even lose the Senate — unlikely, but possible. But he’ll certainly have a much smaller majority. He’s going to have to [then] go to a fairly centrist liberal like a Merrick Garland whom he overlooked now.
I think he’s planned it politically very well. You go more ideological when you’re strong — and you go to the center when you’re weaker. …
And we have more commentary from Jennifer Rubin on the Kagan nomination.
This report repeats the idea that Elena Kagan was nominated primarily to sway Justice Kennedy to the liberal side of those tricky 5-4 decisions. But if so, does this make any sense? That notion assumes that the Court operates like the Harvard Law School faculty, where nice words, dinner parties, back-slapping, and not revealing her own views served Kagan well. But that’s not how the Court operates:
Tom Goldstein, a Supreme Court lawyer at Akin Gump and author of the widely read SCOTUS Blog, says she has exhibited an “extraordinarily — almost artistically — careful” avoidance of public positions on any matters she might face as a Justice. “I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade,” Goldstein wrote.
And even if she did have well-established positions, they’d be nothing compared to Kennedy’s. “Justice Kennedy has been on the bench for 40-some years now, including his time on the Ninth Circuit,” says the former clerk. “It’s particularly unlikely that he’s going to fall under the sway of a new judge who’s never been on the court.” …
Jennifer Rubin follows up from her last post.
…Well, she did some things on her own:
[Charles Fried] also credits her with arranging a faculty lounge so it offered free lunch and large tables, where faculty could sit and get to know one another. “It was an absolute stroke of genius,” Mr. Fried said.
Genius? I think most employers have figured out that free food usually is a winner with employees. But maybe Justice Kennedy can be swayed by sandwiches and soda. …
…This is all very commendable for a dean but utterly irrelevant to the job of being a Supreme Court justice. More revealing will be what she accomplished as solicitor general, and we should begin to focus on that — the number and quality of her arguments. Then we might learn whether she is really up for the job. …
Spengler discusses what he sees on the global economic landscape.
…Paul Samuelson’s most gifted doctoral student is the Canadian Robert Mundell, who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in economics. Mundell’s theory is not as simple as Keynes, for it is a global model that casts a weather eye on the long run. The trouble, Mundell observed in a 1965 essay in the Journal of Political Economy, is that markets are not very good at seeing into the future. …
…Reality has a way of impinging. The Greeks know very well that their situation cannot be fixed by a dose of austerity, and have staged a national tantrum that Aristophanes would have enjoyed staging. The Germans know that they need every penny of their own tax revenues to pay for their own elderly dependents, who will comprise 61% of all Germans in 2040 (again assuming constant fertility). The vehemence of the political response in both countries is a signal to the market that something is very, very wrong. So is the British inability to elect a government.
Once the long term casts its chill shadow on present expectations, investors are shocked – shocked – to encounter financial scams that they previously had ignored. Estimates are now circulating in the press that the United Kingdom actually has public debt equal to 150% of its GDP, rather than the 53% figure usually reported, if unfunded pension fund liabilities are taken into account.
That is the future cost of caring for at least part of the United Kingdom’s aging population valued in present pounds. The same could be said for California, whose unfunded pension liability might be $450 billion rather than the $50 billion reported, depending on whether one expects the funds to earn 8% a year, as the pension funds claim, or only earn the government bond yield. That is just a complicated way of saying that if the bubble continues forever, everything will be fine, but if it doesn’t, everything will go pear-shaped.
And that becomes a self-referential question: if you believe in the bubble, it will continue, and if you don’t, it won’t. That, I surmise, explains a 10% price drop in US stock market indices in a matter of minutes last Thursday. A slight change in attitude can dry up the vast reserves of liquidity of the US stock market. …
Yesterday we had the dismal projection of $85 billion for an April deficit at treasury. Reuters has the actual number.
The United States posted an $82.69 billion deficit in April, nearly four times the $20.91 billion shortfall registered in April 2009 and the largest on record for that month, the Treasury Department said on Wednesday.
It was more than twice the $40-billion deficit that Wall Street economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast and was striking since April marks the filing deadline for individual income taxes that are the main source of government revenue. …
In the Weekly Standard Blog, John McCormack posts on an Obamacare congressman who just lost the Democrat Party primary.
Of course, if he were a Republican, I would write that West Virginia congressman Alan Mollohan was “purged” instead of “defeated.” Per the Wall Street Journal: “With 82% of precincts reporting, Democratic state Sen. Mike Oliverio was already leading by 12 points, 56%-44%.”
Oliviero opposed Mollohan’s vote for Obamacare, and the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza writes that this was a key factor in the race: “it’s important to remember two factors unique to this race: Mollohan had been damaged by ethics allegations over the last few years and Oliverio actually ran to the incumbent’s ideological right — castigating him for his vote in favor of President Obama’s health care bill.”
If a vote for Obamacare can help sink a “Blue Dog” in the Democratic primary, what does this portend for the general election? …
Walter Williams sets the record straight on free markets.
Listening to America’s liberals, who now prefer to call themselves progressives, one would think that free markets benefit the rich and harm the poor, but little can be further from the truth. First, let’s first say what free markets are. Free markets, or laissez-faire capitalism, refer to an economic system where there is no government interference except to outlaw and prosecute fraud and coercion. It ought to be apparent that our economy cannot be described as free market because there is extensive government interference. We have what might be called a mixed economy, one with both free market and socialistic attributes. If one is poor or of modest means, where does he fare better: in the freer and more open sector of our economy or in the controlled and highly regulated sector? Let’s look at it.
Did Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller and Guggenheim start out rich? Andrew Carnegie worked as a bobbin boy, changing spools of thread in a cotton mill 12 hours a day, six days a week, earning $1.20 a week. A young John D. Rockefeller worked as a clerk. Meyer Guggenheim started out as a peddler. Andrew Mellon did have a leg up; his father was a lawyer and banker. Sam Walton milked the family’s cows, bottled the milk and delivered it and newspapers to customers. Richard Sears was a railroad station agent. Alvah Roebuck began work as a watchmaker. Together, they founded Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1893. John Cash Penney (founder of JCPenny department stores) worked for a local dry goods merchant.
…The market is a friend in another unappreciated way. In poor black neighborhoods, one might see some nice clothing, some nice food, some nice cars but no nice schools. Why not at least some nice schools? Clothing, food and cars are distributed by the market mechanism while schools are distributed by the political mechanism.
The Economist has an interesting piece on the evolution of gender differences in navigation.
…Previous work has shown that men tend to navigate by creating mental maps of a territory and then imagining their position on the maps. Women are more likely to remember their routes using landmarks. The study lends support to the idea that male and female navigational skills were honed differently by evolution for different tasks. Modern-day hunter-gatherers divide labour, so that men tend to do more hunting and women more gathering. It seems likely that early humans did much the same thing.
The theory is that the male strategy is the most useful for hunting prey; chasing an antelope, say, would mean running a long way over a winding route. But having killed his prey, the hunter would want to make a beeline for home rather than retrace his steps exactly. Women, by contrast, would be better off remembering landmarks and retracing the paths to the most productive patches of plants. ..