Reagan mythbusting, productivity edition: Just to be clear: when I show that growth by every measure has been slower since 1980 than before, I’m not claiming that this shows that Reagan/finance caused the slowdown. The upper hand, in this case, is actually on the other foot: it’s the Reagan/finance enthusiasts who use the alleged fact of faster growth to make their case, so I’m just showing that it never happened. What’s funny — almost touching, really — is the way the enthusiasts respond to each refutation by claiming that there must be another number which justifies their triumphalism. Real GDP grew faster! No? OK, real GDP per capita grew faster! No? Well, productivity grew faster! Actually, no....

But there’s more to the story. Postwar productivity growth had three eras: a period of rapid growth from the late 40s to the early 70s, then a big slowdown that lasted until the mid 90s, then an acceleration that continues to this day.... [T]he Reaganauts... in addition to doing a disappearing act on the growth during the postwar generation... have retroactively attributed the post-95 productivity surge to Reagan. Because, you see, a surge that began midway through Bill Clinton’s administration was obviously caused by Reagan’s 1981 tax cut.Oh, and never mind the almost universal prediction on the right that the 1993 tax increase would lead to economic disaster.

Why did productivity stagnate for 20 years, then revive? The truth is that it probably had very little to do with anyone’s economic policies; the best guess is that businesses spent two decades figuring out what to do with information technology, then found the answer: big box stores! But that’s a subject for another post.

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/11/how-much-of-it-was-reagans-fault.html

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/reagan-mythbusting-productivity-edition/

Oh wait, we made war on Iraq because Sadaam WMD's were an imminent threat! No. We made war on Iraq because Sadaam was killing all his people and was a bad man! Actually No. We made war on Iraq because the poor Iraqis weren't having any luck sprinkling their own freedom and liberty on their own heads! Uhm No again. We made war on Iraq because all our Texas Tea somehow got misplaced under their soil and it needed liberating! Ruh Oh, getting warmer.

But hey we got a bunch of big box stores that went bankrupt selling crap nobody actually needed that temporarily employed a bunch of part-time minimum wager types, recessions/depressions, jobless recoveries, banking meltdown, housing meltdown, mass unemployment . . . and a couple of nifty wars on a big stack of borrowed dimes one of which is just starting to hit its stride before the halftime gun goes off. Then we're going to see some real smash mouth ball in the second half.

We're so screwed, and I can't stop laughing.

America barely ranks higher than Barbados, Chile, Uruguay and Slovenia in international perceptions concerning corruption in business/government.

http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2008

And as near as I can tell we won't even allow ourselves to be ranked in terms of a "national integrity system assessment".

http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/nis/nis_reports_by_country/americas

Probably because we're so incredibly "exceptional".

hahahahahahhaahhah . . . I can't stop laughing.

. . . opposed (as you are) to U.S. and Israeli foreign economic interests.

Only thing anyone around here is "opposed to" is killing and warring on behalf of US and Israeli "foreign economic interests".

"Oh wait . . . how did all my oil get under your land."

hahahahahahahahahahah . . . this is what you get when corporations enjoy more rights than living breathing human beings.

And no I don't mean numerically more rights I mean the financial power to enforce and expand their entity rights with little or no moral boundaries or consequences.

I can't wait for live bloodsports like Rollerball and Death Race 2012 to start being televised. Because that'll be some seriously entertaining bread and circuses for the masses.

I still can't stop laughing.

It is used to wrap kebabs, chips and glistening jalebi sweets, but rarely is Nato’s flagship propaganda newspaper read in Afghanistan.

Bundles of Sada-e Azadi — The Voice of Freedom — are sold by the kilogram as scrap in Kabul’s black market bazaars.

The fortnightly free sheet is packed full of pro-Nato stories about school openings and new wells, printed in full colour, in three languages, and distributed across the country. But it rarely reaches its key target audience.

Ahmad Farid, who runs a hamburger stall in Kabul, needs at least 3kg a day to wrap his takeaway meals. “It costs me 20 afghanis [25p] a kilogram and it’s the best-quality paper,” he said.

Sada-e Azadi is particularly favoured by restaurateurs because the premium white paper is more absorbent than ordinary Afghan newsprint.

I can't stop laughing. That's hilarious. American newspapers are barely good enough for wrapping fish, and NATO's Afghan paper is superbly designed for kebabs.

That's some beautiful symetrical irony there.

America is one corporate media little more than a propoganda arm of the government. Pravda but with slicker advertising.