And you are here why?

via David & Christina Romer, we have this Region:   You recently wrote a very intriguing paper about the interplay between tax changes and government spending. Would you give us a brief description? David Romer:   [...] In the context of the starve-the-beast theory, my favorite example of the issue of correlation versus causation is the fiscal history of the Korean War. The North invaded the South at the end of June 1950. A month later Truman took a few minutes out from planning the military response and wrote to Congress to say that we needed a massive tax increase because we were going to have to ramp up military spending. A big tax increase was passed and put into effect three months after the invasion. [...] So if you look just at the data, you see that taxes went up and spending went up afterwards. If you look at correlation, it looks like a great example of tax changes causing spending to change in the same direction. But if you listen to the history I just de...

Seriously. Not Social Security. Not Defense. Not the DMV. Not the EPA. Not whatever other thing your average Wingnut On the Street is busy raving about. Health care and only health care. How do I know this? Well, the CBO has a new white-paper out called Options for Deficit Reduction , and it has a bunch of cool stuff in it.  But, by far the coolest part is on page 23, on an extremely non-imaginatively titled chart called (I kid you not) " Components of Non-Interest Spending Under the Extended Alternative Fiscal Scenario ". I know, I know, gorgeous bureaucratise,  right? I'll let Ezra Klein translate it for you These graphs are built atop what’s called “the current policy” baseline. The current policy baseline assumes nothing changes. We don’t pass any new laws. We don’t follow through on the hard parts — like the cost controls in the Affordable Care Act — of any of the laws we’ve already passed. We don’t raise taxes. And the result?  The charts below ...

The NY Times has the brilliant and heartwarming story of Phoenix Products , which produces the leakproof drip pans that the Apache Helicopters need because, well, they have some oil drip issues. Being a helicopter, and one for the DoD at that, you'd expect stuff to be expensive.  And that it costs $17,000, well, its possible right? I mean, we're not talking about something like the Plews Lubrimatic ($9.80), or Cox ($4.56). These are military drip pans, and are quite probably gold-plated or something. So yeah, $17,000, I'd buy that.  Except, it turns out that there are peoples selling equivalent drip-pans to the DoD for $2,500 Bob Skillen [...] designs drip pans that his company sells to the military for a different helicopter, the UH-46, for about $2,500 per pan, or about one-eighth the price that his Kentucky competitor charges. The pans attach beneath the roof of the helicopter to catch leaking transmission fluid before it can seep into the cabin. “It’s no...

The NY Times has the scoop on a plan by Ricketts (TD Ameritrade founder) et al to mount " the most provocative campaign " yet.  Supposedly, it will " attack President Obama   in ways that Republicans have so far shied away from. " Its actually a pretty fascinating glimpse into the new, and quite uncharted territory that Citizens United has taken us, i.e., the impact of BigMoney on politics. Oh, by the way, BigMoney is to Big Money what BigData is to Big Data , i.e., Money at a wholly new scope, scale, and size. Anyhow, per the article, the plan is ... Timed to upend the Democratic National Convention in September, the plan would “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do,” the strategists wrote. [...]“Joe Ricketts is prepared to spend significant resources in the 2012 election in both the presidential race and Congressional races,” Mr. Baker said in an interview Wednesday. “He is very concerned about the future direction of the country and ...

Remember this post showing how Government spending goes up more under Republican Presidents as compared to Democrats ?  To refresh your memory, heres the key slide The chart shows, in a nutshell, that Clinton & Obama are - by a pretty huge margin - the presidents that have presided over the slowest growth in Gummint, with it actually shrinking under Obama . (I'll wait while you stop frothing and gibbering.  Then again, you've probably never looked at this anyhow, so lets just continue)  As it turns out, theres more! @TBPInvictus breaks the above out into three of the four major Gummint spending categories (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Not defense, because, who wants to cut defense in this country?), and the results, as expected, match the above chart.  The bottom lines are Regan was by pretty much all standards the worst offender of the lot Bush 1 keeps Regan from batting a 1000 by taking the Medicaid crown Obama is - almost everywhere ...