Monday: So sleepy

Telecons = my sleep nemesis.  I even tried to pre-emptively bribe myself to get up early this morning by having doughnuts in the fridge.  Not great doughnuts, but one was a jelly doughnut.  Safeway makes reasonably decent jelly doughnuts. Raspberry filling.  The Platonic ideal of the jelly doughnut, made flesh.
Well, made into a suitable facsimile of that Ideal Jelly Doughnut.

In any case, today we get to play a fun game. What time is it? Adventure Question Time!

Why doesn't Obama go over the fiscal cliff and then make his own tax cuts?

Short answer:

Yes.  That's exactly what he's going to do.

Long answer:

Assuming Obama doesn't start bidding against himself (see every major policy debate run by Democrats since, like, 1312), he has a nearly unbeatable hand.  All tax cuts expire in January, so by doing nothing, he immediately can propose his own tax cuts, and cast the debate as "Congressional Republicans are holding tax cuts for middle class families unless the rich get their cut."  That's a strong argument, and will probably force enough Republicans to sign on board for a reasonable set of cuts.  

This then leaves the sequestration issue to deal with.  If we lived in a sane world, Congress would note that we can borrow money from people, and in doing so, make them pay us to do so (note that the interest rate on these bonds is negative).  This suggests that there's little market based pressure to "reign in spending."  Then, based on the principle that no law made by Congress can not be equally repealed by a subsequent Congress, they could just turn off that part of the old law.  It's dumb, and isn't actually economically a good idea.  This is basically Krugman's Barney Frank's theory of Weaponized Keynesianism, where all government spending is bad and detrimental to the economy, unless that spending is through the military, in which case it only creates jobs and supports the economy.  Since this is obviously contradictory, the logical solution would be to increase government spending (noting that we're effectively being paid to do this) in a way to support the economy by buying things.  It's like going to war, except instead of blowing shit up, we build a thousand bridges.

The final issue that needs to be resolved at this point is the counter-point to the "God/boulder too heavy" analogy above.  All appropriations must be done by Congress in a finance bill that the president signs.  However, some jackass came up with the idea that we should have a debt-ceiling, under the assumption that government borrowing is somehow always bad (see above re: inflation adjusted treasuries illustrating that this is a lie).  The debt-ceiling is a way for the current Congress to inhibit the appropriations already decided by Congress.  This is so fundamentally stupid, I can't come up with an analogy.  Abandoning this would solve lots of issues, and would probably restore the credit ratings that we had four years ago.  Credit ratings are largely based not on how much you owe, but on the likelihood you'll pay the money back.  The debt-ceiling makes this repayment unclear, as if Congress prevents the issuance of debt to fund some current operations, it may be forced to not may a scheduled repayment.  Since like the entire world economy is based on the fundamental concept that US Treasury bonds are safer than any other investment vehicle, disrupting this fact once would basically fuck everything up.

However, this again assumes that we haven't elected lunatics and morons to vote on issues they simply don't (and actively won't in some cases) understand.

Cute red pandas to clear your head.

Calm path: four seasons.

I don't even know what this was supposed to be.

And no stromboli tonight either. I was too tired to spend an hour or two making one.  And then I spent an hour and a half writing a post on economics that is likely to not be read.  Go me.

• This is what I miss most at Christmas.
• Everyone misses Team Rocket. And Misty. She's better than all Alternate Mistys.
• I am less excited about the Hobbit than I was for LotR.  Three movies is really long, and the book isn't really that long at all.  It just didn't sit right with me.
• Natasha posted a pile of awesome this evening, and I'm linking to my favorite of the set.
• Did you not get enough economics today? This one is about robots (in a fashion).
• Finally, HuffPo fundamentally misunderstands how to show a recipe.  When the text describing the step vanishes randomly, and the slideshow pictures are at the lowest resolution available for 1994, you should stop trying. Or start.  Whatever. Your recipe presentation is bad, and you should feel bad.