If you build it, then you will go out of business

I couldn’t help but laugh at this post on a liberal blog by someone, I guess, trying to show how smart they were by arguing why supply-side economics is so great:

If you know economics, you know demand driven growth is short-lived and it is inflationary. Only supply driven growth, which lowers price and provide jobs, is long-term sustainable. With no capital investment, no long term growth. Who invest your money better? the government or the private sector? Government spends; private sector invests

Where do I start? I’m not even an economist, and I think I can take this apart pretty good:

1. It’s called supply and demand for a reason
2. How do you “drive growth” on the supply side?  “If you build it, they will come” is a bunk theory.  Creating a supply of something does not guarantee demand for that item.  If I suddenly started producing blue bananas which taste like sewage, I doubt I’ll be able to sell very many, no matter how much supply I have of it.  If you create an item which no on wants, it’s more like “If you build it, then you will go out of business.”
3. On the other hand, having demand for an item should, in theory, create a supply for it since people can earn a profit of selling items for which there is a demand.  If there is suddenly a demand for blue bananas which taste like sewage, then I have an incentive to create such a product to sell to people. (this assumes that the cost of creating such a product is low enough that people are willing to pay that price for it, of course).  Of course, creating a large stockpile of said bananas doesn’t necessarily mean that more people will now be willing to buy them (going back to supply doesn’t influence demand).
4. I guess the poster is thinkin that if we produce things that people aren’t buying, then we can give people jobs and pay them with the money people don’t pay us for the things they’re not buying, then those people can take the salries they’re not being paid from the money the company isn’t earning so they can go out and not buy the products of the company that people aren’t buying to begin with.  OK yes, if you produce more of something, then the price will lower, making it so that you will sell more of that item.  But if the demand was there to make such action more profitble, why wasn’t the company doing it to begin with?
5. While long-term investment by companies is important, I’m doubting your salary is paid with the money that a company is investing somewhere.  It comes from, you guessed it, people buying things (or if you work for the state, then from sales taxes from people buying things, or from income taxes on salries which are paid from the money of people buying things).

Now, I should note.  In strict economic theory, “demand” is really the number of people willing to buy an item at it’s market price.  If you’re not willing to buy a product at $X dollars, then you’re not counted as having that product in demand in the strictest sense.

Of course, in practice there are many things which I demand and which I would buy if I had the money for it, and this demand must exist (and be at a sufficient level to be profitable for the company) for the creation of any new supply to make sense.  But as I said, just creating supply doesn’t mean that people will suddenly desire your product when they didn’t before.

This is the heart of the problem with supply-side economics.  It assumes “if you build it, they will come” which isn’t true at all.  Hell, the American automakers pumping out hordes of SUVs that no one is buying, no matter how much of a discount is on them, should be enough evidence of that.

Catholics admit to mass cannibalism?

If Catholics are so obsessed with some guy taking a Eucharist home with him because it is “literally the flesh of Christ,” and that he is literally disrespecting the body of Christ, then aren’t they basically admitting that they are literally eating the flesh of another human being?  Isn’t that generally defined as cannibalism?

If you’re willing to define it as symbol of Jesus’ flesh, then OK, but then again one shouldn’t feel the need armed guards to ensure that they’re treated properly either and have the entire Catholic world on the verge of rioting because someone didn’t eat the friggen thing.

Of course, I’m sure someone will come up with the argument that Jesus isn’t really human and so it isn’t really “cannibalism.”

And yes, I’m joking.  I don’t really think Catholics partake in mass cannibalism (mainly because I think the idea of transubstantiation is silly as best).  I’m just making this point just to show how stupid this whole exercise by the Catholic League and others is.

A different reality

I just had to laugh at the blog-which-shall-not-be-named for having a blog post about “Obama’s Shrinking Map” on the day that a poll came out showing North Dakota tied and only a few days after a poll showed Obama ahead in Montana.

They go on to say that “Obama is in serious trouble in Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and, particularly, Florida.”  While Missouri would be nice to have, it’s not exactly a keystone state in the campaign (with apologies to Pennsylvania). Even so, Obama is within 5% in both Missouri and Florida – hardly a bad place to me.  In the meantime, he’s leading in Ohio (within 5%) and ahead by over 5% in Pennsylvania.  I’m not sure how leading by over 5% in Pennsylvania – a state which Kerry only won by 2% and Gore only won by 4% is “being in serious trouble.”

Secondly, even if you take out those four states, Obama is still looking at having about 240 to 245 Electoral votes wrapped up or well in his hands.  Winning any two of those states would be enough to put him over – or doing things like winning Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada/Alaska/Montana/North Dakota/enter your favorite battleground state here.

Obama isn’t “consequently” going after other red states because he doesn’t feel like he can win Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, or Florida, but because Obama already has other swing states such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, New Hampshire, and New Jersey already all but sown up.  He’s widening the playing field not because he’s desperate, but because he’s in about the best position any Democratic candidate has been in since Johnson.

Yes, they make a good point about Dukakis’ “17 point lead” and such as to why no one can take Obama’s election for granted, and I definitely agree with that.  However, one has to learn why that 17 point lead went away.

Part of it was due to Republican attacks, for sure, but Dukakis himself also noted this:

Dukakis himself blames his defeat on the time he spent doing gubernatorial work in Massachusetts during the few weeks following the Democratic Convention. Many believed he should have been campaigning across the country. During this time, his 17-point lead in opinion polls completely disappeared as his lack of visibility allowed Bush to define the issues of the campaign.

Yes, not campainging for a while in the key time that people are paying attention will do that to you.  Dukakis was also hurt by the fact that he was fairly aloof and wasn’t necessarily a great speaker and was very analytical in nature – none of which seem to be issues with Obama.

One should also note that the 17 point lead was an 11 point post-convention bounce – a bounce which generally goes away after about two weeks anyway.  I think one could argue that using the 17 point lead example is kind of disengenuous to start with since it wasn’t really a “true” lead to begin with.

Also, I find it kind of funny how Obama’s 5 or 6 point national lead somehow proves that he’s in trouble.  Perhaps it’s the inner “it’s better to lose than to win” in them. “Oh my god! We’re winning! Quick! We have to mess up somehow to correct this error!”

Of course, given the “17 point lead example,” they would still argue that Obama was in trouble, even if he had, well, a 17 point lead.

Results of a Liberal Rebellion

There seems to be an increasing thing on some of the more liberal blogs that they should withhold financial support (though not their vote) from Obama until he stops his supposed move to the center. (I would maintain that he is in fact not moving to the center, and that he was already there, and he either didn’t address those issues in the primary, or his supporters either ignored or explained those positions away in the primary.)

The theory behind this is that Obama “needs” them and so once they turn off the money flow, he’ll be “forced” to swing “back” to the left to make them happy and get their money again.  There are many issues with this, however:

The first problem is that this strategy almost always has the opposite effect.  Democrats don’t really think they can win with the left alone, especially nationally.  While having the left is nice and pads the numbers, they don’t see liberals as a keystone of their success, especially given the past disastrous campaigns of past liberal hopefuls such as Mondale, Humphrey, and Dukakis and the past success of more moderate candidates such as Clinton and Carter. As a result, while Democrats surely wouldn’t be happy with losing the left, out of all the core groups that make up the democratic coalition, they are probably one of the most expendable.

As a result, if Democrats lose the left, their reaction isn’t going to be to try to get it back, but to make up for it by going even more towards the center.  As a result, withholding liberal support from democratic candidates actually is likely to accelerate the move towards the centers which causes the withdrawing of support to begin with.  Besides, why should democrats listen to a group which 1) isn’t supporting them to begin with and 2) has a very bad habit of splintering away at the drop of a hat?

The second problem is that such a strategy has rarely, if ever, worked before.  Remember Nader in 2000?  That whole movement was partially motivated by a disgust by some on the left that Gore wasn’t liberal enough, and so they either wanted him to move left or “they would show him.”

Well, that experiment worked well didn’t it?  Not only did we get George Bush for 4, and eventually 8, years, but Democrats as a whole moved even more towards the center in 2002 and largely stayed there in 2004.  Even in 2006, it could be argued that it was more of an effect of the center shifting left due to Bush’s unpopularity and the democrats moving with it than an actual shift away from the center.

Third, the entire strategy seems to be schitzophrenic to being with.  You’ll vote for the candidate and hopes he wins, but you’re withholding the primary thing he needs to win: money.  It’s kind of like someone saying they support the music industry, but then won’t buy any CDs because you’re mad at the RIAA.

To me, you either support them or you don’t.  It seems rather two faced to say you support a candidate, and then actively take steps to make it signficantly harder for them to win.  Unless all of these people are willing to say “it’s Obama’s fault” for losing due to lack of funding if he does lose in November – a lack of funding caused by them having a hissy fit – I don’t see how this is a coherent line of thought at all.  And what if they do this and Obama just raises gobs of money anyway?  Wouldn’t that just show how impotent the left is (or perhaps that the drive to do this didn’t go much beyond blog readers)?

I know that Obama’s fundraising has slowed down recently and that McCain is closer to Obama in numbers, but I think that’s more of a function of the primary having winded down and the general not really in full swing yet + Bush doing fundraisers all over the place to help McCain.  I don’t necessarily expect that to last after the Olympics finish.

While blogs are definitely good for looking up news that many in the MSM miss, I do think that many people on the blogs greatly overinflate their importance in regards to exactly how influential they are in actual politics.