I regularly see brilliant intellectuals and highly knowledgeable experts on both sides of the aisle whose contributions to our understanding of how the world works are compromised by tribal partisan loyalties and emotional commitments to semi-coherent ideological narratives.

I need more here.  Can’t we simultaneously benefit from the (very) occasional insights of the Krugmans and the Limbaughs of the world without taking the vast majority of what say seriously?  Or without wasting time reading their straw man arguments, leaving their (again, very occasional) contributions to rise to the rarified air we inhabit, despite the weight of the pundit’s partisan baggage?  These contributions may be less likely to reach us given how comical most of the contributors’ thoughts are, but that’s their problem, not ours.

Stiglitz praised the President’s initiative. Investment in infrastructure, he said, offers the most bang for the buck.

[...]

“If we had spent a few billion dollars (repairing the levees around New Orleans before Katrina hit) we would have saved over $100 billion” in damage.

That’s clearly right, but entirely beside the point.  It’s not just that it’s a phenomenal example of hindsight bias.  It’s that it ignores tradeoffs.

Numbers may help make the point.  The real issue is that if infrastructure (levees) is going to be repaired, it’s not worth it–it offers no bang for the buck–if, in order to get that “few billion,” over $100 billion needs to be spent on useless crap.

Moore’s point should be that the “stimulus” is heavy on the useless crap, and therefore any bang its bucks deliver is eliminated to the extent the crap accompanies it.  Of course, big-government liberals (like both the Democrats and the George W. Bush wing of the Republican Party) hardly ever see useless crap in government budgets.  After all, they know best where our money should go.  They’re experts.

This failure to recognize useless spending brings up a whole other issue–identifying good “investments” ex ante.  Count me among those who say nobody has enough knowledge–nor could they–to be able to effectively direct billions of dollars toward any economic activity without doing more harm than good.  What’s funny about Stiglitz’s point that Dreier likes so much is that it should make him agree with me.  But I don’t think he does.

That is, Stiglitz blasts the Dow as an insufficient metric for measuring the economy; he rightly says that the information it provides is limited.  Why those who realize the shortcomings of the Dow–a metric incorporating millions of decision makers’ judgments–for overall measurement purposes insist that Congressional legislation–reflecting the judgments of a few hundred politicians and bureaucrats–somehow gets our economy’s needs right is dumbfounding.

But the interesting part of the story was that our capitalist hero/nut (take your pick) described himself as a “big-time Republican,” who would also have been upset had it been “W” blocking the street.  Cool–he’s consistent.

The thing is, he was asked about whether he’d have been okay with Cheney blocking the street.  Perhaps this reveals a deeper tension: while he probably intended to just convey something like the most important thing is to continue with commerce regardless of whether I personally agree with the politico impeding it, one could take his mild evasion as revealing what Republicans are thinking about “W.”  (And sometimes it’s more fun to needlessly analyze statements.)

Specifically, that “W” was–just as they presumably think Biden is–a statist.  What one inclined to such a thought could see in our capitalist’s statement is thus something like: the most important thing is commerce, and both Biden and Bush are destroying it, for which I’m pissed (and I have no comment on Cheney).

[HT: Andy Roth]

I worked through a form to lower the withholding (they wouldn’t zero it out), but that only resulted in a slight adjustment.  What a pain.

Filling out my 1040 et al on the other hand?  A breeze.  Since I knew a lot was coming back to me, I wanted to file immediately.  TurboTax’s (free!) online program–the first time I didn’t use paper–let me efile, and saved so much time.  I think of my time as my most valuable asset, and I knew the software would save some, but looking back on how much it cut down my tax form workload blows my mind.