The Only Republican in San Francisco

A sly mistress named "Projection"

How ironic. Three lefty bloggers all talk about the same story at the same time, using the same language, talking about the same people, embedding the same video, and linking back to one another -- and the story is about the right-wing echo chamber.

Matt Yglesias (whom I generally enjoy):

Ali Frick:

Steve Benen:

Here's a quick and helpful chart, click to enlarge:

Pitchforks and ignorance

It's amazing to me how quickly, when people are told to "get angry!", they ask "how high?".

Normally thoughtful people seem to believe that the recipients of retention bonuses at AIG should be punished. After all, they caused this mess! Grr!

But ignorance is bliss, or in this case, fury. The people who caused this mess left AIG a year ago. The people who are there are the ones brought in to clean it up.

You show up at a house. It's mostly smoldering cinders. There are firemen hosing it down. Do you demonize the firemen? Are you pissed that they are compensated for dangerous work?

Do you blame emergency room workers for all the injured people around them? If we cut their pay, do we expect the ER to operate better?

The whole episode of the House voting specifically to punish AIG, based purely on public outrage, is governance by angry mob -- led by Democrats, and supported by too many Republicans.

Nothing new under the sun

Via Instapundit, this post over at the Corner points out something I've noted in my mind for a while: those who advocate greater government involvement in industries such as finance and health care speak as if these are ideas which need to be tried. In fact, they've been tried for a long time in many diverse places. So we have lots of experimental evidence to point to.

One example: the idea that greater regulation would have prevented our current crisis. Yet the source of the crisis -- mortgages -- is one of the most heavily regulated parts of finance. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been attempting to control prices for a long time. And yet the industry imploded. (One might consider the previous sentence without the "yet" and reconsider the causality.)

Many countries around the world have much more regulation, and were not spared. It's like saying that a crime involving an illegal gun is the result of lax gun laws. Hint: the gun was already illegal, as was the assault, and yet the tragedy happened. Making it "more illegal" makes us feel better but elides the cause.

The president has said that "solving" our health care "problem" is necessary for solving our economic problems. Most of the world has socialized medicine. So if countries with socialized medicine are in the same economic straits as we, and perhaps worse, how does it follow that it's a cure?

“The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories”

Would that our own leaders could be so clear-headed. Second money quote:

“We are very disappointed in G.M., but we are not prepared to risk taxpayers’ money. This is not a game of Monopoly.”

Who isn't disappointed at G.M. failure? Bailouts don't mitigate the failure, however. They simply prolong it.

Would that I could be as sexy as Penn...

Drug legalization seems to be one issue that the adamant left and the adamant right can agree on.

I don't have any personal interest in using illegal drugs. I don't even get exercised about the idea that a person is being deprived if they aren't allowed to legally use drugs.

What I do get exercised about is the idea that we put people in jail for such things. And that we pay enormous sums of money to do so. And that the "war of drugs" empowers government and invites corruption. And perhaps most of all, that drug prohibition empowers thugs and ends lives (think Al Capone).

I don't disagree that drugs are often damaging. Their illegality simply adds a layer of damage on top of that.

So I'm watching John Adams...

...the miniseries from HBO, which I got on the Netflix. And it's great. (Just occured to me that John's wild-eyed revolutionary cousin "Sam" is, um, Samuel Adams.)

It turns out that John Tyler, our 10th president, born in 1790, has two living grandsons. Not great-great-anything. Grandsons. Can this be? I am trying to imagine.

For perspective: my grandmother was born in 1904, had children relatively late in life, and passed several years ago at age 92.

$1 billion an hour -- hell, I'd work for half of that

Since Obama was inaugurated, Congress has voted to spend around $1,000,000,000 per hour. Let's have some fun with the math.

There are around 300,000,000 people in this country. Let's say that every man, woman, child, infant, and octogenarian works an 8 hour day.

Congress is allocating $24,000,000,000 of new spending per day. That means Obama and Congress are taking around $80/day or $10/hour from working people.

(That's if every single human in the country worked. Due to age and other considerations, only around half do. So that's $20/hour of effective taxation for those that actually work.)

Since inauguration day, you've been sending $10-20/hour of your earnings to government. Feel like you're walking up a down escalator?

Now. Add to that a $3,600,000,000,000 proposed budget for 2010. That scales back the rate of spending to only around $10,000,000,000 per day, which works out to around $33/day per person, or $4/hour if we include the baby and the geezer.

Among actual working people, $8 of every hour you work goes to Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi.

Obama and entrepreneurship

I am an engineer in Silicon Valley, and am starting a start-up. I am doing it because a) it's challenging and fun, and b) I might make a good chunk of money someday.

Lately, I have been very disheartened by Obama's spending plans. He (and Congress) are taking massive amounts of money out the innovation economy and re-routing it through government, where it will largely be funneled to politically-connected organizations or destroyed outright.

From my biased perspective, I see this as money that would otherwise be used to fund our next generation of companies.

I feel this on a personal level. I see a future where fortunes are seized from successful people, and I see myself as one of those people. Right now I am in financial free-fall, by choice, with the hope of a future payoff that makes it worthwhile. The idea that future success will be taken away makes me wonder if it's worth it -- and I don't imagine I am the only one.

So I read with interest a new piece that attempts to quantify the disheartening effects of Obama's policies on entrepreneurs:

By my figuring, if you use Obama’s campaign proposals for long-run capital-gains, income, and FICA tax rates as a (probably conservative) guide to where rates may go, the prospective entrepreneur would have to increase her estimated odds of success at the moment of funding from 20 percent today to about 30 percent under the new tax regime in order to have the same financial incentive to start the company. That’s a huge difference; in fact, it’s about the same as the margin of difference between the odds of success for a new venture-backed company started by a first-time entrepreneur and the odds of success for a new venture-backed company started by a founder who has already done at least one successful start-up. Any venture capitalist can tell you how much likelier the second guy is to get funded than the first. 

Silicon Valley is a place where we only need 20% of companies to succeed to sustain an extraordinary culture of invention. If Obama's plans come to pass, the threshold will be closer to 30%. If we consider risk to be a cost, which it is, the effective cost of creating a Silicon Valley start-up increases by half.

So even putting my own emotional instincts aside, a person that does the math will realize that a lot of companies will now fall below the threshold of "fundable". In a high-risk, high-return industry such as ours, there is a tipping point between a good bet and a bad bet. Obama's spending plans send a lot of companies over that tipping point.

This is why I despair that in 20 years, we will wonder why we haven't lately created a Google or an Apple.

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An aside: what's happening at a national level is also playing out at the state level here in Cali. We have a $41 billion deficit despite the gov't taking in more money than any other state. I can only anticipate that California will have to raise taxes to more absurd levels in the future. My business won't be incorporated here.

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Update: Some good ideas from Reid Hoffman.