Prairie Weather

Reducing income inequality will hurt the nation's economy, right?

No.  It ain't necessarily so.

The research paper, “Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth,” has been posted on the I.M.F.’s Web site and authorized for distribution by Olivier Blanchard, the I.M.F.’s chief economist. ... Its authors—Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Charalambos G. Tsanarides—begin by pointing to previous empirical findings that sustained economic growth seems, on average, to be associated with more equal income distribution. ...JohnCassidy,NewYorker

Cassidy is quick to point out there's no guarantee that dollar for dollar income redistribution will promote growth.  Just that inequality doesn't correlate with growth and prosperity.

But this might not, in itself, make the case for using distribution to attain that equality, they explain: “In particular, inequality may impede growth, at least in part, because it calls forth efforts to redistribute that themselves undercut growth. In such a situation…taxes and transfers may be precisely the wrong remedy.” ...JohnCassidy,NewYorker

Republicans who have a history of shooting themselves in the foot are now experiencing knee-capping.  They deserve the pain.

Republicans: the "almost" party

Jonathan Chait's headline tells us everything we need to know about Republicans and health care:

Republican Health-Care Plan Is Almost Here, and Always Will Be

... Lots of people treat the Republican Party’s inability to unify around an alternative health-care plan, four years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, as some kind of homework assignment they keep procrastinating on. But the problem isn’t that Cantor and Boehner and Ryan would rather lay around on the sofa drinking beer and playing video games than write their health-care plan already. It’s that there’s no plan out there that is both ideologically acceptable to conservatives and politically defensible. ...Daily Intel

Mañana. 

Quizás, quizás, quizás...

An appreciation of, well, acting

This is a heads-up for fans of Philip Seymour Hoffman and of acting.  David Denby has a well-written, thoughtful piece on Hoffman at the New Yorker:

Like many actors, he worked from the outside, and then moved in. First the surface: the bulk and the big head were a constant, obviously, but he was able to do wonders with a slight lifting of the chin, or a canting of his head backward, or a shift in the register of his voice. Thinking of his performances, you realize he was a master of tempo.... Often he spoke very slowly, with long, spaced pauses. Much more than most actors, he controlled the flow of time in his movies, and directors must have realized that he knew what he was doing, because you see Hoffman’s command again and again.

... When we lose a dramatic actor like Heath Ledger, he’s not likely to be replaced. And the same is true for a man in his forties like Hoffman. His death leaves an enormous hole that big-studio Hollywood has no commercial reason to fill. It will take the independent cinema years to find his equal.

Fortunately, the influence of independent film on Hollywood has grown over in the past couple of decades.

I'm sorry, you turncoat. No redblooded American'll allow you to get away with this.

 

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel plans to shrink the United States Army to its smallest force since before the World War II buildup and eliminate an entire class of Air Force attack jets in a new spending proposal that officials describe as the first Pentagon budget to aggressively push the military off the war footing adopted after the terror attacks of 2001.

The proposal, described by several Pentagon officials on the condition of anonymity in advance of its release on Monday, takes into account the fiscal reality of government austerity and the political reality of a president who pledged to end two costly and exhausting land wars. A result, the officials argue, will be a military capable of defeating any adversary, but too small for protracted foreign occupations. ...NYT

Into every economy a little rain must fall

But the result of the 2013-14 winter weather is serious.

The newest headwind? Snow. The extraordinarily cold weather this winter is hitting a range of industries and holding down economic growth.

Economists at Goldman Sachs have tried to figure out exactly what’s been going on, writing up the findings in a recent report. They've found the cold, snowy weather to be a factor in slowing down housing growth, hiring and retail sales. Goldman estimates that the weather subtracted 0.2 percentage points of economic growth during the fourth quarter of 2013 and 0.5 percentage points of economic growth in the first quarter of this year. ...WaPo

Mitch McConnell finds himself up against Bill Clinton

Once Ashley Judd fell by the wayside, Mitch McConnell's main pain has come from his own party in the form of tea party candidate, Matt Bevin.  Now  the race for  the Kentucky senator's seat finds some new strength coming from a Democrat:  Bill Clinton.

Matt Bevin has been in trouble.  Very popular  and a real threat to Senator McConnell, Bevin "has fizzled," Chris Cillizza wrote the other day in the Washington Post.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's Republican primary challenger dealt with fallout from the revelation the he once backed a government program he uses as a punching bag. Then he stoked controversy with remarks about gay marriage. It all came as McConnell continued to avoid the pitfalls that have ensnared some of his Senate colleagues facing heat from the right.

 The result is that with three months until the primary, Bevin's bid to defeat McConnell faces increasingly long odds.

 "He's having some trouble," said veteran political observer Al Cross, a former Louisville Courier-Journal political writer. ...WaPo

Tarnation!  And we thought McConnell's downfall was dang near a sure thing.  Maybe it still is.

During Bill Clinton’s first-inaugural festivities, a 14-year-old girl from Kentucky presented the new president with an honorary bouquet of red roses at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.

Two decades later, that girl, Alison Lundergan Grimes, is a candidate to become Kentucky’s first female senator. And Clinton — an uncle figure whom Grimes counts as a friend, mentor and adviser — is playing a starring role in her campaign and will appear at a sold-out Grimes fundraiser Tuesday.

 As Grimes weighed whether to run for the Senate, Clinton took nearly an hour out of a visit last year to Owensboro, Ky., to huddle privately with her. ...WaPo

Huddle?  Clinton? 

Get your mind out  of the gutter.  Hillary was there, too.  And the Clintons are very, very popular in Kentucky.