So what you're saying is that people are better off when their government is borrowing less than when they have more of their own money to spend?

Let's hear it for GRIDLOCK!

"That's likely because Keynes was right and Milton was wrong."

It's just that easy is it?

Friedman argued that government could not micromanage the economy because people would realize what the government was doing and shift their behavior to neutralize the impact of policies.

The people have done exactly that when it comes to taxes.

People will go into "tax avoidance overdrive" if Obama becomes president and raises taxes, as he's said he would, in the name of fairness.

Money is rarely "hidden away" in investments. When you invest money you put that money into productive use, which grows the economy, typically to the benefit of society in general.

I suspect people "hide" their money in offshore accounts because your government discourages them from keeping it more local.

As far as the leasing of additional space, there may have been a few more hundred acres leased, in a region with many millions of acres of uninhabited land. However, that land is privately owned by a native corporation anyway, and not therefore available for the public.

Posted by: Ak Mike

Yeah I saw Red Dog Mine. Indeed its fairly local and supposedly a state of the art facility that minimizes local contamination. The biggest problem now is the haul road is contaminated from the pulverized dust containing heavy metal and other contaminants.

On the Wulik we drank the water right out of the streams with no filters and no problems. I wouldn't do so for the streams and the Noatak river that drain Red Dog. They have proposed a "pipe-line" to transfer the pulverized ore even more safely.

The big point is had there been NO regulation this would not be the case and the whole area would be a total disaster. There are too many cases in the past that we are ALL paying for where un-regulated mining made their profits and left everyone else with the clean up cost.

Finally, even though the mine site is relatively small as we learned talking to the represntaives of the Tecomo (? sp) mine the acerage that is leased is much larger and not available to the public to travel across for liability reasons.

A needle in the eye of fiscal conservatism.

Bottom line we have 2 choices. Republicans or Democrats. the economy consistently does better with Democrats by just about any measure I can see. That's likely because Keynes was right and Milton was wrong. An economy simply can't flourish when all the wealth is pooled at the top and hidden away in offshore accounts and investments.

Seems like the closest thing to a gridlock study, unfortunately, I don't remember the authors or paper title, just NBER in 2004 or 2005.

You see it must have been my partisan spelling corrector! You see they are everywhere seeding suspicions!

Wicked hahd pahtisans….

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2006/08/30/in-defense-of-gridlock

It is Boston Red Sox, not Boston red socks.

Word, do not go to Boston and be caught demeaning or profaning their beloved Sox with such a label. Boston is highly partisan country, my friend, very highly partisan.

The problem I have is that our dear tenured Professor assumes that with bickering comes only honest-to-goodness-congressional gridlock but living the polarized divisiveness in Venezuela and that has clearly established divisiveness as the real weapon of mass destruction of a country, I am not sure that I would sign up on proposal of paralyzing government if that meant paying the prize of having a wildly partisan country… Of course it is quite different if it is about completely united country paying off the congressmen for a fun show of bickering.

Alternatively what would happen if these congressmen in Washington were forced to do some hugging over the aisles, 3×5 minutes each day, broadcasted in HDTV by C-Span?

As a foreigner in this country I marvel at your intent of fighting discrimination anyhow, anyway and anywhere, except when that discrimination is based on political affiliation; having a PhD from those universities that serve as an excuse even when human resources completely fail in their pick; and of course the credit scores.

By the way, come to think about it, an interesting hypothesis to analyze, would be that there is always the same amount of discrimination in a society no matter how it shows or hides itself. If proved right that means we need to find ways of divert discrimination to those outlets that create least societal damage… perhaps sports… no republican would be allowed to cheer for the Boston red socks.

I have suspected such a "gridlock" effect for many years. It would be great to have a scholarly verification of it!

You noticed that too, eh. Politicians are politicians. The differences are just target marketing.

God, damn it. I was hoping he'd pull a Timothy Treadwell and really become a part of the environment.

Thank God for that!

Someone finally explored Alaska! [Note to self: email Seward.]

That must be a major bitch running a third world surgical energy hedge fund now…

Cross-nationally, you could look at the number of partisan veto-players to get at this (Heinsz and Keefer both have datasets that get at this).

Of course, Cox & McCubbins argued that gridlock leads to more side-payments and thus pork-barrel spending. So rather than providing more public goods, the state might actually distort more when there is gridlock. But that's an empirical question.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1009999