Over at the Right Coast, Tom Smith writes:

Or is it the New Green Deal? Whatever it is, I think it is remarkable and my bet is it is going to be a big fiasco. I think all of the VC money going into it, and I think it is a lot, is spurred on more by the hope of government subsidies in one form or another than by real economics. It strikes me as a strange sort of mania. It looks like we are pouring a lot of money we don’t have into technologies that very well may not work to solve a problem we are not sure we have. It’s very hard to make money even with technologies you already have to solve problems that you are sure you have. VCs are said to be herding creatures and this proves it.

I can’t help but agree with that.

Ilya Somin writes in reference to Obama’s likely efforts to deal with the economic recession:

Interest group pressure has already played a key role in the congressional vote on the finance industry bailout, and it is likely to be equally important in structuring the massive future bailouts to come. Once Obama takes office, we are likely to see some $500 billion to 1 trillion in additional bailout spending - and that may be just for starters. Interest groups will play a major role in allocating this money, and they are already ramping up their lobbying efforts.

The end result will probably be an enormous transfer of resources from taxpayers and wealth-producing industries to interest groups with political leverage. That is likely to serve the interests of those groups and of the political leaders in charge of doling out the government largesse. But it will also impede economic growth by transferring resources away from productive firms to those that are failing.

According to John Tierney:

On the morning of Election Day, I printed out the expectations from the Dublin-based Intrade market as well as a roundup of predictions from nearly two dozen political consultants, journalists and academics that appeared at the Huffington Post.

The Intrade bettors expected Mr. Obama to end up with 364 votes in the Electoral College — one less than he actually got. None of the pundits came so close. Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, came closest with prediction of 361; all the rest were off by at least 12 votes. Nate Silver, the much-talked-about statistician at FiveThirtyEight.com, underestimated Mr. Obama’s tally by 18 votes. Many of the pundits underestimated Mr. Obama’s total by more than 25 votes, like Chris Matthews, Arianna Huffington, and the strategists Paul Begala, James Carville and Alex Castellanos.

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

At least some Democrats understand the importance of deregulation for economic prosperity.

Namely, the Obama campaign’s twin messages of bashing deregulation and embracing the Clinton years were inherently contradictory. Bill Clinton signed nearly every deregulatory measure that John McCain backed—the same measures that are now being blamed (wrongly) for helping cause the current crisis. What’s more, Clinton administration officials have credited these policies for contributing to the ‘90s economic boom—the very “shared prosperity” that Obama says he wants to go back to.

Hopefully Obama will do a roundabout on this issue.

This is what crosses my mind:

There’s been a lot of talk about how the mainstream media failed the country during this last election cycle, and that because of that failure their days are numbered.

I have to disagree. I think the media performed flawlessly during the two year election cycle. They managed the story, shielded their candidate, attacked the opposition, sat on damaging stories, and in short did everything a good state run media should do during an election cycle.

From CNN:

American workers will rebuild the nation’s roads and bridges, modernize its schools and create more sources of alternative energy, creating 2.5 million jobs by 2011, Obama said in the weekly Democratic address, posted on his Web site.

And so it begins.

Mitt Romney explains what to do about American auto makers, and it isn’t a bailout.

First, their huge disadvantage in costs relative to foreign brands must be eliminated. That means new labor agreements to align pay and benefits to match those of workers at competitors like BMW, Honda, Nissan and Toyota. Furthermore, retiree benefits must be reduced so that the total burden per auto for domestic makers is not higher than that of foreign producers.

That extra burden is estimated to be more than $2,000 per car. Think what that means: Ford, for example, needs to cut $2,000 worth of features and quality out of its Taurus to compete with Toyota’s Avalon. Of course the Avalon feels like a better product — it has $2,000 more put into it. Considering this disadvantage, Detroit has done a remarkable job of designing and engineering its cars. But if this cost penalty persists, any bailout will only delay the inevitable.

Republicans would have been wise to nominate this guy for president. I might have voted for him.

While driving through the mountains of Colorado I was listening to National Liberal Radio. They were broadcasting a call in show with a host that would challenge the caller’s position on hot political topics. The topic for this show was whether the federal government should offer a bailout to the auto manufacturers.

Many different callers offered their explanations for how the auto makers have gotten themselves into this bind and whether they were thought the federal government should bail them out. Given that NPR is a de facto liberal station, most of the callers supported the bail out on grounds of protecting the auto worker. This included the host, who not only supported the bail out, but took it one step further arguing that such a bail presented an opportunity for the state to impose additional regulations on the car companies to produce more environmentally friendly automobiles.

Half way through listening to this discussion, the host took a call from caller who offered an alternative explanation for why the auto industry is in this mess. He claimed he was a design engineer for one of the big three and he refuted the idea that car sales were down for domestic produces because they ugly or unreliable. He supported this claim by pointing to the fact that even foreign dealerships are currently having trouble moving automobiles off their lot in the current economic climate.

He advanced the idea that the actual problem was the cost of unionized labor. Apparently, American workers cost upwards of twenty dollars more per hour than non-unionized labor. This has a rather dramatic effect on the stick price driving down demand for domestic cars. He argued that the big three are crippled by luxurious pensions and other perks that the unions have collected from the auto industry over the years and that this was making it impossible for them to compete. If these auto manufactures could somehow get out of these onerous obligations they would no longer need federal assistance.

After giving a perfectly cogent explanation for the big three’s situation, the host simply acknowledged the problem, thanked him, and politely dismissed the caller. He then repeated the same question he has been asking since I first started listening.

If the federal government bails out the auto manufacturers does the government have the right to more heavily regulate them to produce more environmentally friendly cars?

That question says it all. This host favors taking tax payer money, further regulating an already ailing industry, and forcing his environmental values on consumers over allowing these companies find ways to remove the onerous burden of union perks. When faced with an explanation that might solve the current problem without costing the tax payers billions of dollars the host for the most part ignores the suggestion. For him, the idea of using the state to regulate the auto industry to be more consistent with his environmental values, even with a dramatic cost to the taxpayer, is so appealing that it blinds him from actually being able to see a more perfectly reasonable solution.

And since he was the moderator, he directed the discussion away from the more free market solution back to the more liberal solution. This should serve as a particular salient example of the liberal bias in National Public Radio. When faced with reasonable solution that is not consistent with the underlying ideological dispositions of the host, they host simply ignores that solution and redirects back to the solution he favors.

In the aggregate, actions similar to this reveals a bias at NPR that justifies my moniker ‘National Liberal Radio’.

Just listen to liberal rhetoric on the war in Iraq. Had Kerry one the election liberal’s would of cost us our victory in Iraq.