Michael B. Duff

First, the state will pay a quarter of its public servants' salaries using the dinar. Second, all state companies will accept dinar payments. Lastly, some 600 commercial enterprises will also embrace this currency.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A Purdue University researcher has used "econophysics" to show that under ideal circumstances free markets promote fair salaries for workers and do not support CEO compensation practices common today.

Ka-ching for “security” companies all round, as every bit of information that can be vacuumed up is recorded eight times and then dumped into a dozen different computer systems that can’t talk to each other! The government’s secret intelligence-gathering has cratered into a bottomless pit of wasteful, pointless, expensive makework that is not making Americans any safer, but is instead reaping huge profits for the herds of greedy contractors who aid them in recording so much information that nobody will ever in a million years find the few bits that might ever have been of any use.

I'm not saying America has a ruling class, but if it did, it would behave a lot like this.

But the best part of this whole tempest is watching an old TPM fave, former Rep. Chris "The Count" Chocola (R-IN), rip Lott right back. Chocola, who is now president of Club for Growth, goes straight for the kill, referencing Lott's 2002 comments about Strom Thurmond that cost him his leadership post: "To paraphrase the former Leader himself, if recent Senates had had more Jim DeMints and fewer Trent Lotts making economic policy, 'we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years.'"

Krugman sees only the business investment that takes place when these buildings are rebuilt. He fails to see that the resources that are used to rebuild could be used to do other things if the World Trade Towers had not been attacked. We can never become richer by destroying resources and then replacing them. After the attack, the US economy is worse off in real terms, by two office buildings, about 12 million square feet of office space and thousands of productive people.

"There's a reason why it's dangerous for old farts to cross the street: if they don't die, their relatives can't claim their rent-controlled apartments."

"Private companies aren’t firing workers and hoarding cash because interest rates are too high. They’re doing so because there’s too much factory and labor capacity. Consumers aren’t cutting back on spending because loans are too expensive. They’re doing so because they just went on the wildest debt-fueled spending binge in U.S. history, and they’re trying to repair their balance sheets. Look, we’ve had twin bubbles in stocks and housing over the past decade and a half. They both popped. The fallout will be with us for a long, long time."

Since markets these days automatically expect that banks in trouble will be bailed out by their home governments, the effect of such news is nowadays immediately transmitted to the sovereign debt of the country concerned.

Apple defends itself by comparing iPhone 4 to other smartphones.

The survey also reveals to a surprising degree how those involved in the policymaking and the political process tend to have a much rosier view of the economy than does the rest of the nation — and, in some cases, dramatically different impressions of leading officeholders, political forces and priorities for governing.

Prominence was assessed by taking the four most frequently cited papers published in any field by each scientist—not just climate science publications—and tallying the number of times those papers were cited by other researchers. Papers by climate researchers convinced of human effects were cited approximately 64 percent more often than papers by the unconvinced.

From a neutral economic analysis, handing the $100 billion to the bureaucrats as their salaries would allow them to buy "$100 billion worth" of goods and services. But in their capacity as bureaucrats, purchasing items on behalf of the US government, the incentives are different. There is no longer a presumption that money is only spent on things that (to the purchaser) are worth more than the money being spent.