Huntsman Joins GOP Field

AP at Denver Post:

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is joining the fast-growing pack of Republicans battling to take on President Barack Obama.
Huntsman, who was Obama's ambassador to China until a month ago, will make his formal announcement next Tuesday—with the Statue of Liberty as the backdrop, his campaign team said. Though he served in Washington for three Republican presidents, he faces a challenge in making himself known nationally and winning over GOP primary voters.
Still, the fact that he's entering the race shows the turmoil that still fills the Republican field as time ticks down to the first 2012 primaries and caucuses.

Unfortunately, Huntsman has joined in with the other GOP candidates who are fiscally crazy, as the Frum Forum highlights:

The same fate seems to be overtaking Jon Huntsman, alas. Having bucked the party on greenhouse gases and same-sex unions, Huntsman has signed up for 100 percent endorsement of the Ryan plan.
I can see the logic. Genuflecting at the Ryan altar is deemed inescapable and essential for credibility in 2012. A social conservative like a Mike Huckabee might (barely) evade the obligation, but a libertarian-stye candidate like Huntsman cannot and dare not. To the extent that Huntsman has his eye on a second run in 2016 — well by then the Ryan plan will be forgotten by the general electorate even as it pays dividend in continuing fiscal credibility with the party faithful. So: I get it.
The trouble is, however, that this solution defines the problem in purely party-political terms. The Ryan plan answers a narrow Republican concern: how do we push taxes even lower in the face of the impending retirement of the baby boom). It disregards the broader national concern: how can we sustain and enhance the standard of living of the American middle class against the downward trend in middle-class incomes of the past dozen years? The Ryan plan tragically abdicates this question. (emphasis mine)

This is exactly right.  The Ryan plan sacrifices the middle class and working class for the benefit of the ultra-wealthy.  This isn't responsible governance, it is idiotic cruelty toward the vast majority of Americans.  Some middle class people may welcome this freedom from "socialism," but I bet they won't be too excited when they find out what it actually costs them.

Corporations Win Again

Wal-Mart wins in sex-bias case:

The ruling was cheered by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce business group as the most important class action case in more than a decade but denounced by women's groups.
It represented a major victory for Wal-Mart, which also has faced legal battles including an attempt to unionize and to block the giant retailer from opening stores in New York and other places.
"We are pleased with today's ruling and believe the court made the right decision. Wal-Mart has had strong policies against discrimination for many years," the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company said in a statement.

While the justices rules unanimously against the class determination, the justices split 5-4 on whether to send the case back to the lower court.  The Roberts Court is going to make governing corporations impossible, and the middle class will be eliminated from this country.  Corporations win, humans lose. 

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: The commodity bubble, at MacroBusiness:

His analysis reads:

We really need to define our terms here. What are these “fundamentals”? We began the paper by describing how it is that markets that have inelastic supply have increased volatility. The reason for that is that as the supply shortage is recognised, regular buyers begin to hoard, and speculators move in to take advantage of higher prices. Buyers then hoard more and speculators buy more still. Prices rise until supply responds (usually over responds) and prices crash. Hence volatility. It’s is logically inconsistent for this paper to simultaneously claim that there is reason to the volatility but no speculation in that reason. If fundamentals are as strong as this paper supposes, then it is silly to not expect speculators to be jumping all over commodities.

I think this gets at the heart of it.  There are fundamental issues driving prices higher.  That leads to inflation concerns, which leads to speculators coming in to buy, which leads to higher prices, which leads to inflation concerns, etc.  Kind of what I was getting at here.

Are Taxes Too High?

Bruce Bartlett says no:

A typical middle-class family, on the other hand, is paying less in federal taxes than it has since 1967. Its marginal rate is also down substantially since it peaked in 1982 at 31.7 percent. The well-to-do family, too, has seen its average and marginal tax rates decline substantially.

Of course, these data do not prove that taxes are not too high. That is a subjective judgment related to issues of fairness and the value that people assign to the government benefits they receive in return. Many in the Tea Party talk as if the value of government is zero; consequently, they would probably complain about any tax level above zero.
Nevertheless, it is clear that federal taxes have not been rising and are, at least in historical terms, lower for most taxpayers than they have been since the 1960s. Those who assert that taxes are rising or are at confiscatory levels simply do not know what they are talking about.

I've got to agree that with tax cuts in the past thirty years, effective tax rates are lower.  The rich have inordinately benefitted from the Bush tax cuts, and taxes on unearned income are much lower.

Using CO2 to Make Geothermal Energy More Practical

via Ritholtz, Fast Company has the story:

The way geothermal energy is usually tapped for power generation is by drilling a couple of shafts deep into the earth, and pumping high-pressure water down one shaft. This makes its way through a hot rock layer (which gets its heat from the essentially inexhaustible energy of nearby plumes of hot lava) to the second shaft, picking up heat en route. The resulting steam is used to push a turbine, and generate power.
Except that two scientists pondered: What if the water in this equation was replaced with high-pressure carbon dioxide? Because it's a gas rather than a liquid, CO2 can ferret its way into more and tinier cracks in the sub-surface hot rocks than water--making the new system more feasible in areas water-based geothermal sources aren't deemed practical.

I wouldn't vouch for the practicality of this scheme.  It approaches the too-good-to-be-true criteria in my opinion, but it is something to think about.

Chart of the Day

From Paul Krugman, via the Dish:

We may have turned the corner on corporate profits, but employment just isn't there.  I mentioned in this post that people who are working are getting overtime, but people who aren't are screwed.  Somehow, our political class has forgotten this, intentionally, or not.

A History of the Corporation

via Ritholtz, Ribbon Farm highlights the highs and lows of the corporation as legal entity, from 1600 to 2100:

The EIC (East India Company) was the original too-big-to-fail corporation. The EIC was the beneficiary of the original Big Bailout. Before there was TARP, there was the Tea Act of 1773 and the Pitt India Act of 1783. The former was a failed attempt to rein in the EIC, which cost Britain the American Colonies.  The latter created the British Raj as Britain doubled down in the east to recover from its losses in the west. An invisible thread connects the histories of India and America at this point. Lord Cornwallis, the loser at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 during the revolutionary war, became the second Governor General of India in 1786. But these events were set in motion over 30 years earlier, in the 1750s. There was no need for backroom subterfuge.  It was all out in the open because the corporation was such a new beast, nobody really understood the dangers it represented. The EIC maintained an army. Its merchant ships often carried vastly more firepower than the naval ships of lesser nations. Its officers were not only not prevented from making money on the side, private trade was actually a perk of employment (it was exactly this perk that allowed William Jardine to start a rival business that took over the China trade in the EIC’s old age).  And finally — the cherry on the sundae — there was nothing preventing its officers like Clive from simultaneously holding political appointments that legitimized conflicts of interest. If you thought it was bad enough that Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton before he took office, imagine if he’d worked there while in office, with legitimate authority to use his government power to favor his corporate employer and make as much money on the side as he wanted, and call in the Army and Navy to enforce his will. That picture gives you an idea of the position Robert Clive found himself in, in 1757.
He made out like a bandit. A full 150 years before American corporate barons earned the appellation “robber.”

This is a subject I wanted to look at a little more.  This is a good opportunity to do so.  Now that the Supreme Court has granted corporations free speech rights, I figured I ought to know more about them as legal entities. 

Great Seal of the United States

Adopted by Congress, June 20, 1782.

Obverse

Reverse

The Great Seal Press, in use since 1904

How the Army Corps Manages the Missouri River

All Things Considered:

Farmer Don Diltz of Glenwood, Iowa, was one of the first to feel the effects earlier this week. "Flooding is a part of life down here; you take that and accept it and move on," he says. "But this is unique. Most floods come and they leave; this flood's coming and it's going to stay for six months."
Jody Farhat, the chief of the Missouri River Basin Water Management Office in Omaha, Neb., is in charge of water management for the area.
"It's difficult to see the impacts of these historic releases on individuals and communities," Farhat says. "My staff and I are making those release decisions based on the information coming in every day."
These decisions are also made according to the Missouri Water Control Manual, referred to as the "master manual." It's a handbook written by the Corps with input from Congress, and it dictates the Corps' priorities. Some are easy to follow, like flood control, but others are more difficult to navigate, like keeping reservoirs full even when there's heavy snowpack, so tourists can take boats out and power companies can use water flow.
The manual makes life tough for the Corps, which is bound by law to follow its recommendations, former Corps head Mike Parker says.
"It's a political document," he says. "Several years ago, Congress decided you have a lot of interests out there, and these interests got together and said, 'We're not getting represented.' So instead of having navigation and flood control as being the two primary things that the Corps was looking at, they had a list of eight things that they had to consider."
In addition to navigation and flood control, this list of priorities includes irrigation, water supply, hydropower, fish and wildlife, recreation and water quality. Parker says that some of these priorities run counter to one another.
"If the Corps only had to take care of navigation and flood control, I guarantee you those levels [in the Missouri River reservoirs] would have been much lower," he says.

I vaguely remember hearing that there were debates about the management of the Missouri River a few years back.  I guess this answers my post from a couple of weeks back.  While the Corps wasn't screwing up, they were following a plan which doesn't only focus on navigation and flood control.  This will make future debates very interesting.  In the end, I think folks are better off with reservoirs which are managed in a suboptimal manner than in a situation with no reservoirs.  Also, with the large snowpack and extreme rain events, there were likely to be pretty significant problems anyway.  Part of the reason the Corps kept the reservoirs closed until they were completely full was to allow time to prepare downstream. 

Tim Wakefield, Noted Author, Gets 197th Win

Yesterday, Tim Wakefield notched his 197th career win with an 8 inning outing in which he surrendered 3 runs.  I also finished his book, Knuckler: My Life with Baseball's Most Confounding Pitch. 

The book was kind of interesting to me as a knuckleball enthusiast, but it wasn't a work of tremendous literary achievement.  It was a reminder of Wakefield's brilliant appearance with the Pirates in 1992, his great season with the Red Sox in 1995, when he finished 3rd in Cy Young ballotting, his strong 1998, 2005 and 2007 seasons, and his all-star appearance in 2009.  The knuckleball is an amazing pitch, and as Dan Duquette mentions in the book, teams should start trying to train more knuckleball pitchers, because their versatility and longevity are tremendous assets to a team:

If you've thrown as many innings as Wakefield has (3,135) over the course of 19 big-league seasons, you're entitled to forget a few. And when you can still pitch the way Wakefield does at age 44, limiting the Brewers to three runs Sunday in a 12-3 win in the rubber game of a three-game set with Milwaukee, any discussion of age seems superfluous.

"He's pretty young for a knuckleballer," said Boston Red Sox first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, reflecting a knowledge of a knuckleballing fraternity that over the years has included Hall of Famers Hoyt Wilhelm (49) and Phil Niekro (46) as well as Charlie Hough (46).

On June 5, 1997, Wakefield lasted 8 2/3 innings against the Brewers in Milwaukee, striking out a career-high 10 batters while walking seven, before he was lifted with one out to go in a 2-1 win.

Newspaper reports the next day noted he threw 168 pitches, but evidently the official tally added one more pitch, as 169 is the number listed by baseball-reference.com.

Wakefield told reporters afterward that he didn't have his best knuckleball that day so he threw more curves and (ahem) fastballs than usual, throwing the knuckler only 75 percent of the time. According to the accounts of the game, Wakefield made little mention of his pitch count.

Jimy Williams, who was managing the Sox at the time, said, "I never asked what the pitch count was.''

That was only the second-most pitches Wakefield has thrown in an outing. On April 27, 1993, while with Pittsburgh, he threw 172 in 10 innings in a 6-2 win over the Braves. Those two games rank as most pitches thrown by any pitcher in a game since 1989, when Orel Hershiser threw 169 in 11 innings.

They have issues with consistency, but when they are hot, they are awesome.  In 2011, Wakefield and R.A. Dickey, starter for the Mets, are the only knuckleballers in the major leagues, although Charlie Haeger is currently struggling through pitching difficulties with the Tacoma Rainiers, the AAA affiliate of the Seattle Mariners.