Almanac: At the Capitol

My friend Diana, who lived in Alaska for many years, commented this morning:Sarah Palin has already demonstrated the steely toughness that could make her a Margaret Thatcher for the US.

In the middle of its editorial on the Obama nomination, the Wall Street Journal brings back an old classic: the Demogrant.
He is proposing a steeper tax increase than any recent candidate, yet he is selling it as a net tax cut. He justifies this by asserting that his eight "refundable" tax credit proposals for people who pay no income tax are "tax cuts." But such tax credits are really a government cash transfer from one taxpayer to a nontaxpayer. Mr. Obama is disguising the kind of pure income distribution that Mr. McGovern failed to sell as a $1,000 "Demogrant." Mr. Obama's packaging is post-ideological but his package is from the Great Society.Interestingly, Hillary Clinton proposed the same thing with her baby grant last year, panned by John Hinderaker. Obama's comes through one of refundable tax credits in his plan:
Provide a Tax Cut for Working Families: Obama will restore fairness to the tax code and provide 150 million workers the tax relief they need. Obama will create a new "Making Work Pay" tax credit of up to $500 per person, or $1,000 per working family. The "Making Work Pay" tax credit will completely eliminate income taxes for 10 million Americans.Because he calls for it to "offset the payroll tax they pay", Obama intends that to be a refundable credit. It's worth remembering that the Demogrant proposals of McGovern were intended to replace welfare programs; he eventually shelved the proposal and was hit again for vacillating on economic policy. (h/t: Extreme Mortman):
By talking during the primary campaign of giving what his advisers called a $1,000 "demogrant" to everybody—even though the proposal was meant to replace some existing welfare programs— McGovern excited the social reformers, who are a minority in America, while deeply offending multitudes who thought it contradictory to the work ethic (see THE ESSAY, page 96). As economist Arthur Okun, a McGovern adviser , puts it. "The things that helped him win the division pennant have hurt him in in the World Series." When McGovern belatedly buried the demogrant idea in August, he alienated many more people, who decided that in the realm of economics he simply does not know what he is talking about. Obama also supports expanding the earned income tax credit and the dependent and child care tax credit, and a new universal mortgage credit. It's a dizzying array; one wonders, as did the Tax Foundation a year ago, why he doesn't just make it one big program. It leads to some of the funny marginal tax rates we discussed last week.

Buiter and Sibert have already written on the problems of the one tax credit Obama has co-authored in Congress (which did not pass). Note the one thing they approve of, the neutrality of companies in union organizing, is actually an attempt to bring card-check through the back door. What other kinds of mischief await in these other tax credits?

YAHOO!!!!!!!

We've got out of town guests all day, more tonight but this is terrific news!

She's got it all!!!!

YES!!!

KING ADDS: I had mused on this possibility last weekend as an appeal to the PUMAs. Howard Wolfson is saying the same thing this morning.
If the pick is indeed Sarah Palin you are going to have a lot of women voters wondering why Senator Obama didn't tap Senator Clinton as his running mate.In this morning's Political Diary from the WSJ, Colorado state party chair Dick Wadhams is quoted as saying that state's electoral college votes would depend on suburban female voters. Maybe that's the thinking. Powerline is very disappointed; Michael's taking it pretty well given what he's said for weeks.

Update by Janet: Some of us have hoped for this for over a year. True, she is young but she has more executive experience that any of the other 3 top candidates; she is feisty; she has integrity; she's quick - you don't achieve what she's achieved b/c you're short on gray matter. It's not that she's female, it's that she's got guts. She's not bound by the standard network; she thinks for herself yet has conservative values. I would have supported any VP candidate and had my preference in addition to Palin. But this presidential race is crucial. If McCain uses her and does not put her aside, this could be a terrific team! Put Romney in as SoS or Treasury - maybe they will learn from him; Lieberman for SoS or Dept. of Defense; Giuliani for Homeland Security.

The Republicans have a bench, a deep bench; the Dems do not - they had to rely on another leftist liberal Nor' easter. They simply do not understand there are more than seven or eight states in the USA. They are stuck in the 1930's and 1960's mindsets. The world has moved on, they have not. Palin will bring excitement to our party; who knows, we may get back the House. I know, I'm being optimistic here but energy and excitement go a long way. We might even get the Gang of 16 to reconsider. Palin sure knows energy!

After some quiet elation over yesterday's vastly improved second-quarter GDP figures, today's report on July income and spending should cool your jets just a titch.
Spending by U.S. consumers slowed in July as the impact of the tax rebates faded and a pickup in inflation eroded Americans' buying power. Purchases rose 0.2 percent, one-third the pace in June, the Commerce Department said today in Washington, while prices surged the most in 17 years. ...

The increase in spending matched the median forecast of 75 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.

Incomes dropped 0.7 percent, the first decrease since August 2005, reflecting the end of the rebates, after a 0.1 percent gain the prior month. The median projection was a decline of 0.2 percent.

Final sales were revised up from 3.9% to 4.8% growth, so the remainder of that increase comes from an inventory reduction that was less than anticipated. An inventory rebuild will therefore not be as large as we thought (though July production looks like it was pretty strong.) The July figures seem to indicate a much smaller increase in consumption to start us out; the rebate checks appear to have run their course. It appears that credit allows many to have spent their rebates either in advance or at the moment they received their rebates; carry-on retail sales to the third quarter might not be as large as we thought.

Add to this, as spencer notes, that we are getting a good deal of growth in the second quarter from strong exports to a world economy that appears to be slowing, and you have the makings of what could be a very soft second half.

There were reports (Mitch has one) that a booth that has mini-donuts at the State Fair is run by a DFL party unit. Oh no! Don't buy your donuts there! I've been meaning to ask Mitch about this, since he's cool with musicians being into the DFL...
But dammit, I like to rock. And it doesn’t bother me that some of my favorite artists - Springsteen, Pete Townsend) have some of the dumbest politics - because I’ll care about what musicians think about politics about the time I care what John Kline or Michele Bachmann think about music; interesting trivia, perhaps, but not why I hired any of them....and I assume he buys their albums, and I assume some of that money gets contributed back to Democrats. (Hang on, Michael MacDonald is singing now for "people who want their country back" at the Barackopolis. I'm sure there's some Doobie Brothers vinyl in my closet.)

I was prodded a few minutes ago to write by an ad featuring T. Boone Pickens: In the video a graphic comes on referring to our purchase of oil "no matter how much we drill" as "the largest transfer of wealth in history". And I think to myself, what does this mean?

Begin with something small. Michael rushes onto the Minnesota State Fairgrounds to do our radio show. It's the Fair, he's hungry. The Poncho Pup is his quarry. So he buys. He takes out his $4, hands it over to the vendor, who hands him his first (of many!) meals of the day. He says "thank you", the vendor says "thank you". Think about that: It's so automatic. Seldom do you hear "you're welcome" because neither thinks they got a transfer of wealth. Each actually thinks they got the deal. Each got something they valued more than they gave up. (If you ever have seen John Stossel's Greed, you know the scene I'm referring to in this example.) Think Michael checks the vendor's party ID before he hands over his $4?

So when we send money to an international vendor for a Pronto Pup -- if you can imagine that possible -- are we "transferring our wealth overseas"? Or are we fulfilling our wants with the best of all possible options?

If it costs $200 to pull a barrel of oil out of the ground in the U.S. and $100 to pull it out of Nigeria and send it to the U.S., is it a transfer of wealth to buy from Nigeria? Or did we just buy to give ourselves a better deal?

In all cases, we don't transfer wealth -- we didn't just hand the money over and got nothing back. We got back in fact something we value very much, more than what we gave up. That's not a transfer, that's a purchase. It's a voluntary transaction. Don't want to participate? Buy a bike. And buy one for each of your kids, and bike them to school and bike them home.

Perhaps the message behind Pickens is the same one used about the mini-donuts at the Fair: we can't give money to them. They might use the money to do us harm.

But that doesn't work either, because boycotts seldom do. If the Republicans all crowd the mini-donuts sold by the non-DFL vendors, the lines at the DFL vendor are shorter. That has value; some independents will go to the DFL booth to get shorter lines. A GOP boycott of the DFL donut booth is, in short, ineffective. You just put yourself in a more crowded line.

If you don't buy the oil from overseas, it cheapens it for someone else to buy. Unless the oil you drill is cheaper -- unless its high cost is the product of bad US government regulation -- forcing people to buy high-cost energy is damaging to the US as well. The "transfer of wealth" language is that of a demagogue.

We will produce efficient energy from solar when it is lower-cost; what are the barriers to it being lower cost? Are they technological or policy-created barriers? That will determine whether we should add solar. And so it is with Pickens' wind farms, or natural gas for powering cars, or other fossil fuels, etc.

Be it music, or donuts, or oil, it's not who you pay, it's how much you pay that matters.

The other member of the Final Word gets his just reward.
The 2008 Conservative Leadership Conference announced today that blogger Michael Brodkorb of ‘Minnesota Democrats Exposed’ has been chosen to receive the annual Blogger of the Year Award. The award will be presented at the CLC luncheon on Friday.He says "It's tough for me to write about myself." Glad I didn't have a swig of Coke just then, Michael.

Congratulations to MDE! Pronto Pups on me Saturday.

The NARN is at the Minnesota State Fair each night from 5-7pm. Tonight it's Michael and me, as Ed and Mitch get a breather from their week-long stint here. If you're not here, you can hear us on AM1280 the Patriot. (Streaming available there.)

UPDATE: Senator Norm Coleman will be with us at 5:20. We will ask about his new support for the expanded "Gang of 16". We also expect Zack Stephenson from MnPublius at 6pm to talk with us as the countdown to the coronation of Obama reaches its climax in Denver.

The morning newspaper up here blares "Almost 25% in poverty locally":

The percentage of people living below the poverty line in St. Cloud in the previous 12 months was 23.2 percent in 2007. St. Cloud’s percentage was the highest of all large Minnesota cities, including Minneapolis and St. Paul. The rate is up slightly from 22.7 percent in 2006, and is more than double the statewide poverty rate of 9.5 percent.

St. Cloud-area social service providers say the numbers correspond to what they’re seeing locally: increased demand at food shelves, emergency shelters and financial assistance programs.

“I think a lot of the volume is up just because it’s tougher for people to make their dollars stretch,” said Steve Bresnahan, executive director of Catholic Charities.

You need to go down ten paragraphs in the article to find out that Stearns County real median family income rose 5.9% in 2007.

The graphic is from data in the American Housing Survey. It shows the percentage of poor families that own these items. Compare these to 1970. What do you think matters more: what income you earn, or what goods and assets you have access to? Here's one view from the guys who point out that income is not the standard of living.

The editorial page of the Minneapolis StarTribune weighs in on the debate over "card check":
That pitched national battle is why the issue is at the forefront of Minnesota’s Senate race. The Senate holds the key to EFCA’s future. Democratic contender Al Franken supports EFCA; Republican Norm Coleman does not. Both labor and business have pledged millions for their cause, with some of that well-funded battle resulting in the local ads. ...

But the EFCA has the potential to do more harm than good. Its provision allowing unions to bypass a secret ballot with something called a card check is a serious problem. Under the proposed law, unions could bypass a secret ballot if 50 percent of eligible employees signed an authorization form to form a union. It doesn’t make sense: Would you pass a school levy or elect a mayor this way? The proposed card-check system also would invite peer-pressure from union sympathizers and, by making a supporter’s name public, it has the potential to heighten the risk of employer retaliation.

The bill’s stiffer penalties for employers who retaliate illegally are welcome. But backers need to rethink the proposed card check. Even if you agree there’s an imbalance of power, doing away with the secret ballot isn’t the solution. Unions exert a great deal of influence over members. They have the ability to tax through dues. They negotiate workplace rules that govern a big chunk of members’ lives. The organizing process should be as democratic as possible. That means honoring the secret ballot, not doing away with it.

Don't expect that, though, for the Wall Street Journal has shown that Big Labor is staking millions on getting it passed. Democrats believe that more union workers means more Democratic votes (as if correlation is causation). The editorial board at WSJ asks a broader question:

The question for Americans more broadly is whether a return to widespread unionization is really the way to raise middle-class incomes. The case for card check is that, amid global competition, the balance of organizing power has shifted to business. Giving unions more power will redress this imbalance and let workers grab a higher share of corporate profits.

But this claim is highly suspect, given the record in autos, steel and the rest of unionized American manufacturing. The only sector of the U.S. auto industry that is prospering is the part not organized by the United Auto Workers. Likewise, Europe, with its high jobless rates and slow growth, argues against unionization as a way to lift middle-class incomes. To the extent a country like Germany has modestly reversed some of this, it has been the result of recent labor-law reforms and labor concessions.

I pointed out in a letter to the editorial board at the StarTribune, in response to a request for comments, that its belief that the pendulum has swung to employers was not really accurate in a world where unions continue to win a majority of certification votes (sources here and here.) What win percentage for unions would you think is correct, if 55% is too few?

Like a sports team owner trying to buy a championship, the unions are trying to buy 100%.

Vets for Freedom is a non-partisan organisation established to support vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. They have done a superb job keeping the positive efforts of our soldiers in the public eye (far better than our so-called mainstream media). We are fighting a belief system that wants all of us gone - these guys get it.

Now they have released a video with the comments of three Iraqi vets. (My friend, David, is the one with the mustache.) Please take a minute to view the video here. It is so very important that our soldiers who are the ones who really protect our freedom, be heard, acknowledged, appreciated and thanked. Feel free to spread the word far and wide.

These lines measure cumulative job loss from the peak of each recession, assuming that the current recession -- if it is one -- began on December 2007. (I started saying in late January that if there was one, December was a pretty good guess for the peak.) We're now at the end of month eight of the recession, and these typically last ten. The only one that got a positive bounce was the January 1980 peak, and since that one was followed by another peak in just 18 months, I don't suppose that's the one you want to follow.

Let's put it another way: On average, at seven months cumulative job loss for the last four recessions is 1,034,500 jobs; for this one, it's 463,000. There is no more than 500,000 more jobs on average lost in those last four recessions, most of which happens in the next four months. So we may have a recession in which cumulative job loss ends up around 0.5% of payroll employment. And then there'll be data revisions; very possibly they'll end up making that number larger, but suppose they find additional jobs in unmeasured areas?

If you have been following the Mark Steyn trials in Canada -- where Steyn has faced legal sanctions for writing about demographic trends in the West and relative birth rates of Muslim immigrants versus native and other immigrant groups, in Steyn's witty and biting style -- you may be interested to read that some political scientists are asking the American Political Science Association to protect the free speech of its conventioneers when they meet in Toronto next year. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

The political-science petition, whose initial signers include Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, and Harvey C. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard University, warns that scholars visiting Toronto might face legal jeopardy if they made controversial statements. Scholars should be able to speak about “public policy concerning homosexuality or the character of and proper response to terrorist elements acting in the name of Islam, without fear of legal repercussions of any kind,” the petition reads.

The campaign has the flavor of a boycott. According to a report in the National Post, the petition’s authors plan to distribute buttons at this week’s conference that say “Toronto 2009? Non!”

But the petition itself makes a milder demand. It asks the association to solicit legal advice and to consult with the Canadian government to ensure that scholars’ civil liberties will be protected. “Our petition is simply asking for clarification,” said one of its authors, James R. Stoner, a professor of political science at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, in an interview with The Chronicle today. “We’re asking the APSA to acknowledge that there’s some issue concerning this, and that we can presume that the customary standards of academic freedom will be assured.”

Aside the usual reaoons of low attendance, there are very good reasons to not hold an academic conference in a place like Venezuela -- the regime there might not like, say, a Latin Americanist who researches Hugo Chavez's crimes and discusses them from the podium in Caracas. It would be irresponsible for an organization to invite a speaker into that situation. Likewise, if the APSA cannot assure the academic freedom of speakers to an academic conference, it should make arrangements to either move the conference elsewhere or to make a public statement declaring it cannot provide protection. I would hope it could do the former.

Americans for Limited Government is running a petition protesting a four-day work week for Federal government employees. They only work four days and get paid for five, we're told. Well, no, not really. They still work 40 hours, just over four days. School districts have been proposing this around the country, including here in MN.

But suppose they did cut back to a 32-hour work week? What would be the loss in output? It would be a lot less 20%. The last ten percent of the time we produce just barely enough to cover the wage we receive. It's pretty reflexive to think every hour those workers put in is a waste. Waste is something that occurs at the margin -- we use too many workers. There's no incentive to get the right number of workers. If we asked them all to produce the same output and just removed every fifth worker, they might make it and they might not, but diminishing returns would have to imply the lost work is not one-fifth.

I'm not signing the petition; we might end up with a good experiment.

The August 24th issue of Parade Magazine carried a delightful article by Janet Evanovich, A Day at the Races, NASCAR races. What is it about NASCAR that has attracted her interest? Two ideas stood out from the article.

First, it's a rush. "It's speed and spectacle and raw power and family and the flag. It's hard to explain what produces the rush, but it's deep inside me when I'm at the track. It's about the people and the cars and the competitive spirit of America." A second reason: "....we're all impatient for the race to start. The color guard takes to the track, and everyone stands for the national anthem - 96,000 people have their hats off and hands over their hearts. A roar toes up when the phrase "the land of the free" rings out, .."

She lists four things not known about NASCAR. One caught my interest: Racing is only a small part of a driver's job. ..the off-track duties - test sessions, interviews, and sponsor appearances - eat up more hours than racing, even on race days. "I have a lot of friends in major league baseball," says Jimmie Johnson."They can't believe everything I have to do before a race. Can you imagine Derek Jeter doing meet-and-greets right before a World Series game?"

No, I can't and maybe the patriotism and the connection between NASCAR drivers and their fans are the reasons NASCAR racing is a top spectator sport in America. Gotta love it! I may have to try it myself.

Democrat Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, a lifelong Catholic apparently paid little attention to her religious instruction. On Sunday's Meet the Press Ms. Pelosi was asked by Tom Brokaw when life begins. Her waffling answer was a pathetic attempt to pacify the abortion rights arm of the Democrat Party and her religion. She failed, miserably.

Anyone who has any amount of Catholic education knows that the Catholic Church has been an opponent of abortion since the beginning. I was raised Catholic, attended Catholic school for five years and practiced the religion for a number of years. At no time did I ever hear that abortion was sort of, well you know, uh, maybe.... Ms. Pelosi's excuse that church leaders have not been able to determine when life begins is just bogus.

What I was waiting for was someone of authority in the Catholic Church to say something. Well, someone finally did. The Archbishop of Denver, Father Charles J. Chaput and Father James D. Conley, Auxiliary Bishop of Denver, released a clarification document today, the 25th of August.
It clearly states: "...we now know with biological certainty exactly when human life begins. Thus, today's religious alibis for abortion and a so-called "right to choose" are nothing more than that - alibis that break radically with historic Christian and Catholic belief. Abortion kills an unborn, developing human life. It is always gravely evil and so are the evasions employed to justify it. Catholics who make excuses for it - whether they're famous or not - fool not only themselves and abuse the fidelity of those Catholics who do sincerely seek to follow the Gospel and live their Catholic faith." Translated, abortion is wrong, period.

In addition, Cardinal Rigoli and Bishop Lori added their comments to Pelosi's misrepresentations of Catholic teachings.

You, Speaker Pelosi, are being dishonest with yourself, your constituents, and members of your faith when you try to skirt the issue with your incoherent babble.

When I teach grad macro, I use a very old schematic on the first night of class showing three sectors -- household, firms, and government -- and a flow of income to each sector, including transfers between them. The last five lines of the schematic are savings, capital expenditures, budget constraints, financing constraints, and a private balance sheet identity:

W = M + V + K

where W is private sector wealth, M and V are public sector debt in non-interest-bearing (money) and interest-bearing (bond) form, and K is private sector capital. The = represents this as an identity. (The source is a textbook I liked in graduate school, Monetary Macroeconomics by Havrilesky and Boorman.)

I'm thinking with that model in mind as I read Tyler Cowen yesterday:

The fundamental problem in the American economy is that, for years, people treated rising asset prices as a substitute for personal savings. The thinking went something like this: As long as your home’s value rose every year, you didn’t have to set aside so much from your paycheck. If your stocks went up, too, so much the better; don’t forget that the Dow Jones industrial average stood in the 800 range in 1982 and seemed to rise almost nonstop for many years.

Of course, asset prices haven’t been rising much lately, so many people will need more savings for their retirement or for possible emergencies.

And I think, well, why wouldn't they? We model them to think in just that way: A rise in private wealth through a change in the value of K (via a rise in the relative price of capital goods Pk to consumer goods P, with capital broadly considered) should produce the same effect as an increase in money -- assuming you consider money to be "outside". The only difficulty with this story is that we don't think the wealth effect is altogether that large, though if the shock to Pk/P is sufficiently large you might not need a large wealth effect. (Read this interview with Martin Feldstein, particularly at the subhead "The Return on Savings".) I am not sure why Cowen thinks that is a "fundamental" problem. It may just be that rising capital goods prices have driven up consumption and masked more serious weaknesses, but then you'd have to explain why rising productivity doesn't lead to higher living standards.

The broader point is that stock adjustments -- in this case an adjustment of current wealth to one's optimized lifetime path -- can lead to changes in flows of consumption and savings, just as we have always thought, and always taught.

Our friends at Labor Pains went to the Minnesota State Fair and asked some attendees if they would prefer to use an authorization card to vote for Al Franken in lieu of voting. The results are as you might expect, unless you are a union organizer.

I had seen reference to UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley's valedictory in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and read it, but when Charlie Quimby referred to it I decided to respond to it. Charlie's title, "Competing for (and Investing in) High-Paying Jobs" is provocative insofar as he neatly encapsulates Chancellor Wiley's message. But Wiley is also complaining that his goals were frustrated by Wisconsin's business leadership. He begins...
Wisconsin has lost its way. We've lost touch with our traditions and values. Our politics has become a poisonous swill, and the most influential voice for the business community has been taken hostage by partisan ideologues....and goes on to single out a business group as the source of the problem:
According to WMC's website, the organization boasts nearly four thousand member companies and a goal of making Wisconsin "the most competitive state in the nation." Over the years, I've had the opportunity to closely examine the strategies--both the public rhetoric and actions--WMC employs to pursue that goal. Apparently, the organization's definition of being competitive is being among those states with the lowest taxes, lowest wages, and least regulation in the nation.Here's the funny part of that list -- two of those three things are in the control of government. The third is a response to the other two, along with the attractiveness of the state to people with high-paying skills.

The value of a university (public or private) to its community or state is only in part its ability to create high-skilled workers. It creates educated citizens as well. It creates citizens that desire a good life for their families, with an understanding of what that good life is. As those families grow, parents impress upon their children the value of an education; they look for opportunities to add to their child's appreciation of the world and civilization.

As I listened to our own president's convocation speech last week, I was struck by the amount of marketing his administration engages in. Part of it is with government, and part with business leaders. And to do so means being accountable for what you use public and donated monies for, a point that was driven home for President Potter:

Recently after hearing me talk about my vision and goals for elevating the reputation of St. Cloud State, a local business leader asked me: “How will you know when you get there?” When I offered a detailed, “academic” response, he offered his own ideas….which I like much better.

In order to succeed we must build a reputation as a place that cares about our students. If we do this, our students will come here because we care about them and help them achieve their dreams. Faculty and staff will come because they know it’s a great place to work. Donors will give because they want to be part of supporting a great university.

Students and business leaders will "pull" from universities those things they want, when it is offered to them in forms they can connect to. Chancellor Wiley's model is an attempt to push Madison onto the business community. It's not as if any of those Wisconsin business leaders are stupid regarding the value of high-skill labor. It is that he and his institutional leadership are pushing solutions without listening to the problems. And one of those problems is a tax system that leaves your high-skilled workers with a lower after-tax real wage, using those tax dollars to be invested in unaccountable public K-12 education systems or in wasteful transfer programs or even the odd public sports stadium or two (including our own National Hockey Center -- a discussion for another time, and one that will make our administration less happy than my approval of the quote above.)

High income families may wish to enlist others to help pay for goods they want and thus call them "public", but when push comes to shove, the thing they want most is a higher after-tax real wage. The one best suited to invest in any asset is the one who receives the return on it. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, the least efficient education is other people's money spent on the education of other people.

What are the two first words you say to your new class of students the first day?

"Thank you."

I was at a party earlier tonight as my sister-in-law and her husband send a son off to college. Another guest is a music professor at another school nearby. SCSU's semester starts today (Monday), a week earlier than in the past due to consolidation of the MnSCU schedules. It really feels wrong: The State Fair is supposed to bring the curtain down on summer, not open the fall. Labor Day is always the barbecue that says goodbye to your kids' summer vacations. It's a little more poignant for us this year as Littlest enters high school (she starts today as well.) You just don't want all these transitions quite so soon.

So this is the conversation with the other professor, and in the middle of this we sort of stop and catch ourselves. "I get no sympathy from my wife about this," he says. And he's right. We get three glorious months to self-indulge, or teach a summer class to make that tuition check for the school in fall, or travel, or what have you. In the fall he gets new studio students to work with. He looks forward to it. And so do I. Does anyone else get to do this? We like to call athletes lucky to play a child's game for money, but my luck is as good as theirs even if the money isn't.

I ran into a former student of mine, one of my first students here from more than 20 years ago, who now teaches at a school in the Cities on Saturday. He's just helped one of my graduate students find some teaching at his school; he sends some of his students up to St. Cloud to become my students. I ran into the grad student later to retrieve some books I had lent him. He is now being helped by my older student. I gave a couple prayers of thanks driving home and thought maybe August isn't so bad.

Putting a monkey wrench into this mistiming is that I'm also on jury duty the next two weeks. I already put this off once when it threatened the conference in Waikiki, so I felt I couldn't ask again. You probably won't notice, as I'll be forward-dating posts. But I'm not so concerned about missing the blog, or the Fair or the RNC next week (where I will be on the air a couple of nights -- details as we finalize them). I hate missing that first time to see students, and thank them for being there, for signing up to have me as their teacher, for wanting to learn economics ("I only took it because it was required for my major" is a challenge I accept; "I didn't think I was going to like this course but I did" is the prize), for coming to SCSU, for allowing a 50-something to feel a little younger (and a little older) every September.

Or August, as it now turns out. I'll get used to it. My lucky day just comes a bit earlier now.

Now that Joe Biden has been selected as Barack Obama's Vice Presidential candidate, one can only wonder at the wisdom (?) of Obama's advisers. We keep hearing how the Democrat Party is the party of inclusion. So many Democrats pride themselves saying they include all these people from all these different groups then they totally ignore the strongest female candidate to appear in the political arena, Hillary Clinton.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton's socialist vision but her supporters have a legitimate gripe/concern/etc. While Obama out maneuvered her to get more delegate votes, Hillary won the popular vote among Democrats but did not get the nomination. (Does this sound a bit familiar?)

Snubbing Hillary indicates a team of petty, immature, and insecure people. As this short article by Bill Kristol indicates, Democrats do have a glass ceiling.

This behavior from a guy who says we should negotiate with our enemies with no preconditions? Heck, if he can't negotiate with Hillary, why does anyone think he can use his glib tongue to sit down and talk with Chavez, etc. ?

HT - Hot Air