Category Archives: Economics

How much 55 mph could save us

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Ran into Samuel this morning and he gave me a break — he didn’t ask me if I had read the book yet. But he did, of course, get onto 55 mph, and he started throwing a bunch of numbers at me, and I meant to ask him to e-mail his numbers to me, but forgot, but that’s OK because when I got to the office I found that he had already sent me the numbers, over the weekend. To wit:

If we had a 55mph which Chevron says we save 22 Billion Gallons of Gas which is 524 million barrels of oil on an annual basis, here is what you get  a drop in the price of oil of at least $ 15 to $20 dollars a barrel, the dollar’s value improves and the price fall further and then the speculators see that this is not there ballgame anymore  and it falls further and so the thugocracies start seeing their boondoggles shrink and Putin , Ahmadinajad and others find out they are no longer awash in petrodollars and remember Europe is facing a slow down now and even in China  it is slowing down so now we need to go for efficiency and energy security so we can make the jump to other fuels for transportation. Now the other big factor here is inflation and if we did this we would hit it with a big bat  and slow it down significantly which then brings all  things down. Now we  cannot let out domestic retail price slip below $ 2.50 a gallon so we  need to set a floor that if the prices dips , it is taxed to fund alternative fuels , low-carbon , non-carbon, wind , solar. There are answers , but not from Washington. Are you the one ? Will you lead ? Are you related to Thomas Paine ,Thomas Jefferson, & Abigal Adams It is time for the ONES to emerge. We need new Founding Leadership.This country needs action ! Are you the ONE ?????????

As Samuel said to me this morning, "That’s the word, ‘Thugocracy.’" And he’s right. Why does Putin think he can get away with this stuff in Georgia? Because he can. And why can he? Because of the oil and gas.

Anyway, before he got away, I got Samuel to agree with me that we should do 55 AND drill, thereby reasserting the essential Energy Party organizing principle: Do Everything. Only then can we make the thugs feel it.

Note that at the end of his missive Samuel was expressing his frustration at the lack of leadership. Amen to that. He says he’s about had it with all of ’em — Democrats as well as Republicans. Of course, I’ve been there for some time.

DeMint right about Fannie and Freddie, too

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Speaking of Sen. DeMint — which I just did — I meant to say something last week about his proposal that, now that we’re bailing them out, it’s a good time to ban Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from "lobbying and political activities."

I may not understand why we’re bailing out Bear Stearns, but I sorta kinda understand it with Fannie and Freddie, them being quasi-governmental. But if they ARE quasi-governmental, they shouldn’t enjoy the lobbying privileges of the private sector. As I’ve often said in the past about state agencies, taxpayers should not have to pay for gummint entities to lobby the gummint.

The advisability of what DeMint is recommending is underlined by a lengthy lament from the WSJ‘s editorial page editor today, about the network of influence Fannie already enjoys (including, interestingly according to him, Paul Krugman).

Sanford and McCain: How many times must a horse be beaten to death?

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Since yesterday, I’ve seen the question posed several different ways, both mockingly and in dead seriousness: Does Mark Sanford’s blank-out on CNN (now being compared unfavorably to the Miss Teen USA contestant from SC), hurt his chances to be John McCain’s running mate?

Let me pause now and count to ten before answering that. In fact, let’s discuss an unrelated point, which is that I wouldn’t be able to answer the question either. It’s not the sort of question I think about. If you asked me to say what was different in the economic policies of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, or John Kerry, or Alfred E. Neuman, I wouldn’t be able to answer you on the spur of the moment, and in fact would probably spurn the question as unimportant to me. Sanford’s problem is that he lacked the cool or presence of mind to do that. Perhaps he didn’t think he could get away with it. That’s too bad for him, because insouciance is what he does best, and once you take it off the table, he’s got a problem.

Now, as to our main point? Who out there still thinks Mark Sanford’s got a snowball’s chance on a Columbia sidewalk of being asked to carry John McCain’s freaking luggage, much less be his running mate? Didn’t we beat this horse to death some time back? And then beat it again? And again? What’s it doing clop-clopping down the street in the middle of summer?

I’m beginning to lose patience on this point, the whole concept is so offensively stupid.

Here’s a corollary to that: The presumption in Wolf Blitzer’s question is that Mark Sanford is somehow well situated to speak as an apologist for Sen. McCain. This is almost, but not quite, as idiotic as the idea of his being a running mate. There is probably no Republican in South Carolina LESS invested in the McCain campaign than Mark Sanford. This is the guy who expressed his "support" in the most insulting way possible, AFTER it no longer mattered — and after the other two most prominent Republican officeholders in the state had put their reps on the line for their chosen candidates.

I wouldn’t ask Mr. Sanford if he knew how to SPELL "McCain," much less ask him to defend his policy positions. Maybe that’s why I’m not in TV news…

I’m not alone in seeing Bistromathic principles at work in modern finance

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Did you think I was being a tad hyperbolic (just to throw another mathematical concept at you) when I cited Bistromathics in explaining my confusion over the nation’s economic problems?

Well, I had to laugh just now reading tomorrow’s op-ed page, which contains this Paul Krugman column.

Paul Krugman is, according to his billing, an actual economist. Most of his columns might read as though they were written by a summer intern at the National Democratic Party — he is my nominee for Most Partisan Writer Currently Published in Major Newspapers. In fact, I had to double-check to make sure this column was actually written by Paul Krugman, since it did not blame anything whatsoever on George W. Bush. But it actually is a Krugman column. And he actually is an economist.

Anyway, the part of his column that grabbed me was this part:

    The most important of these privileges is implicit: it’s the belief
of investors that if Fannie and Freddie are threatened with failure,
the federal government will come to their rescue.

    This implicit
guarantee means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized.
If Fannie and Freddie do well, their stockholders reap the benefits,
but if things go badly, Washington picks up the tab. Heads they win,
tails we lose.

    Such one-way bets can encourage the taking of bad
risks, because the downside is someone else’s problem. The classic
example of how this can happen is the savings-and-loan crisis of the
1980s: S.& L. owners offered high interest rates to attract lots of
federally insured deposits, then essentially gambled with the money.
When many of their bets went bad, the feds ended up holding the bag.
The eventual cleanup cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

Did you get that? "Someone else’s problem…" As you and I and Zaphod and Ford all know, there is a concept involved in the understanding of Bistromathics called "recipriversexclusons," and recipriversexclusons are essential in the generation of an SEP field, or "Somebody Else’s Problem" field. What’s that? Must I explain everything? Oh, all right:

"An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t
let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem…. The
brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it
directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your
only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."

So there you have it. And if you can’t see what I’m saying, just blame it on the recipriversexclusons.

Do YOU feel sufficiently stimulated? ’Cause I don’t…

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
WHAT DID you do with your “economic stimulus” check from the government? Did you spend it in a suitably patriotic manner, doing your bit to kick-start the good ol’ U.S. economy?
    You did? Are you sure? I just ask because, as a member of the U.S. economy, I’m feeling a little understimulated.
    But then, I always had doubts about the whole scheme.
    Sort of like with the government’s bailout of Bear Stearns. I’m not a libertarian, not by a long shot, but sometimes I break out with little itchy spots of libertarianism, and one of those itchy spots causes me to ask, Why am I, as a taxpaying member of the U.S. economy, bailing out something called Bear Stearns? I didn’t even know what it was. Even after I’d read about it in The Wall Street Journal, I still could not answer the fundamental question, “If you work at Bear Stearns, what is it that you do all day?” I understand what a fireman does, and if the fire department were about to go under, I’d be one of the first to step forward and say let’s bail it out. Of course, if the fire department wanted me to lend it $29 billion, with a “B,” I might have further questions. Yet that’s what we’ve done for Bear Stearns.
    Apparently Bear Stearns is a financial institution that the federal government considers “too big to fail,” which makes me wonder, if it’s too big to fail, then why does it need to be bailed out?
    But things like this always perplex me. I am not an economist, nor a financial expert, which I’m told is different. Nor am I any kind of a businessman. At my house, I am not allowed to try to balance the checkbook.
    Anyway, while I’m still pondering why you and I and the guy down the street lent $29 billion to bail out this Bear Stearns, along comes Congress and the president wanting to send somewhat more modest checks to you and me and that same guy.
    I’m all for Democrats and Republicans setting aside pointless bickering to do something for the good of the country, but when the economy’s going into the tank, and the Democratic Congress and the Republican president are racing to see which of them can send us the biggest check, sort of like the Three Stooges all trying to get through a door at the same time, I begin to have doubts.
    I start to think, “With the national debt at — wait a sec while I go check the Internet — 9 trillion dollars, and climbing at a rate of more than a Bear Stearns bailout every month, the government is going to send several hundred dollars to every household in the country?”
    It seems that everybody in Washington was acting along the same lines of reasoning as when, in response to attacks upon this country more deadly than Pearl Harbor, we were told to go out and shop, instead of buying bonds or rationing gas or something that would have made sense to an earlier generation. And now, six-and a half years into the War on Terror, some of us weren’t shopping hard enough. So to help us get back into the fight, the government decided to send us all some more ammunition.
    As it got closer to time for me to get my ammo, my martial spirits rose, and I started thinking this was a better and better idea. If my country needed me to shop, I was going to make sure every shot counted. So I did some research.
    Finally, a suitable target presented itself. Week before last, we all went to Memphis for a wedding. The wife and I stayed with Mary, one of her best friends from high school.
    My wife has always held Mary up as one of the smartest in her class — not only a scholar, but a woman of great good sense and practicality. Mary had recently earned some extra money, and had spent it on a 42-inch, 1080-resolution flat-panel HDTV set. It had cost her $800 at Sam’s Club. I studied this item very closely while we were there, flicking back and forth between ball games on the HD channels and the same ball games on mere mortal channels, and came to the inescapable conclusion that Mary was indeed the smartest in her class, and had made an excellent investment — way better than the Bear Stearns thing.
    So by the time we got back from Memphis, I was all in a sweat to get that stimulus check, which would amount to $1,200.
    But when it came, do you know what we spent it on? A hospital bill. Not a hospital bill for major surgery or life-saving emergency treatment, because none of us had needed that, thank God. No, this was for a few X-rays for my daughter’s sprained ankle — for my baby, who was temporarily off my insurance but was covered by a separate policy that we were paying $117 a month for, which seemed like a really good deal until she needed some actual routine medical care.
    When you have five kids between the ages of 19 and 31 in the United States of America, you spend a lot of time holding your breath until they get safe jobs with their own group medical insurance. Two of mine have achieved that status, and both know they’d better not try to actually stimulate the economy by starting their own businesses or anything, because their Dad would have a stroke.
    All of this gets me to thinking… If Congress really and truly wants to help the U.S. economy, maybe, just maybe, it should pass a National Health Plan along the lines of practically every other developed nation on the planet, instead of sending me a check that would barely cover two months worth of premiums on health insurance for my wife and me and only one of my children.
    So Congress, I appreciate the thought, but I’ve got to tell you: Sending me $1,200 to throw into a debt hole that I wouldn’t have if I lived in any other industrialized country just doesn’t cut it.

Get stimulated at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Preview of Sunday page

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Kidding aside, I’ll put on my oh-so-serious editorial page editor’s hat for a moment (I don’t really have such a thing as an "editorial page editor’s" hat; that’s just a figure of speech — although I do have a very impressive Medallion of Office I wear on special occasions), and do something I haven’t done lately: Give you a preview of Sunday’s editorial page.

This is from the lead editorial, about the USC president decision:

    … Harris Pastides was the one candidate named in recent months who not only understood and believed in these initiatives, but already had his sleeves up working to make them happen. As The State’s Wayne Washington reported Friday, in recent years, “Sorensen thought the big thoughts, and Pastides got the ball rolling.”
    He may have been the comparative “insider” candidate, but he is not a “South Carolina as usual” choice. The Greek Orthodox New Yorker made his mark at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Athens in Greece and with the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, before coming here in 1998. He is comfortable in Washington’s corridors of power and among the bustling new technology spheres of India.
    The challenge that now faces him as president is to bring the university’s promise from potential to tangible reality. To say that’s a daunting task is gross understatement, but obviously USC’s trustees believe he’s the one to get it done….

See? I told you it was serious. Then there’s my column, which analyzes the government’s decision to send us "stimulus" checks, and other questionable recent calls with regard to the economy:

    … But then, I always had doubts about the whole scheme.
    Sort of like with the government’s bailout of Bear Stearns. I’m not a libertarian, not by a long shot, but sometimes I break out with little itchy spots of libertarianism, and one of those itchy spots causes me to ask, Why am I, as a taxpaying member of the U.S. economy, bailing out something called Bear Stearns? I didn’t even know what it was. Even after I’d read about it in The Wall Street Journal, I still could not answer the fundamental question, “If you work at Bear Stearns, what is it that you do all day?” I understand what a fireman does, and if the fire department were about to go under, I’d be one of the first to step forward and say let’s bail it out. Of course, if the fire department wanted me to lend it $29 billion, with a “B,” I might have further questions. Yet that’s what we’ve done for Bear Stearns….

Be sure to read the paper Sunday.

T. Boone Pickens’ plan for energy independence

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Pickenstboone

Assuming the link works for you, I invite you to go read T. Boone Pickens’ piece in the WSJ today, headlined, "My Plan to Escape the Grip of Foreign Oil."

Now I know what you’re thinking: Mr. Pickens being an oil man from way back, his plan for independence is likely to be as simple and monolithic as Joe Wilson‘s — specifically, drill.

But while he says, way down in the piece, "Drilling in the outer continental shelf should be considered as well," it plays less of a role in his vision than it does in the Energy Party‘s, if that. It comes after he urges us to "explore all avenues and every energy alternative, from more R&D into batteries and fuel cells to development of solar, ethanol and biomass to more conservation."

TurbinesAll of that follows his exploration of his main idea, which is to convert a large portion of our energy
generation to wind power, which he lauds by saying "Wind is 100% domestic, it is 100% renewable and it is 100% clean." He would use natural gas thereby freed up from power generation to run our vehicles.

All that is great, but I think the best passage in the piece is when he explains why we must take extraordinary measures to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I leave you with that excerpt:

    Let me share a few facts: Each year we import more and more oil. In 1973, the year of the infamous oil embargo, the United States imported about 24% of our oil. In 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War, this had climbed to 42%. Today, we import almost 70% of our oil.
    This is a staggering number, particularly for a country that consumes oil the way we do. The U.S. uses nearly a quarter of the world’s oil, with just 4% of the population and 3% of the world’s reserves. This year, we will spend almost $700 billion on imported oil, which is more than four times the annual cost of our current war in Iraq.
    In fact, if we don’t do anything about this problem, over the next 10 years we will spend around $10 trillion importing foreign oil. That is $10 trillion leaving the U.S. and going to foreign nations, making it what I certainly believe will be the single largest transfer of wealth in human history…

What stuff is really worth

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This is a test of age as much as anything, but I’m curious as to what y’all think stuff is actually worth.

I got to thinking about this looking at the receipt pictured back on this post, which showed that a diet Pepsi I bought for my daughter cost me $1.39. But that wasn’t the outrageous part. The outrageous part was that a bottle of water — and we’re talking tap water here, folks, not mineral water or holy water or something that the bottler claims was gleaned from an Icelandic glacier — cost the same amount.

Set aside the fact that we’re poisoning ourselves drinking from plastic. My beef is with the price. And my sense of injustice flows from an internal meter I have that says things are worth a certain amount, and no more. I arrived at most of these prices as a kid, when buying a PopSicle and a Mad magazine required a couple of hot summer hours spent combing the weeds along the side of the road looking for pop bottles, which back then were worth money when you returned them to the store (AND better for the planet).

However long I live, in my mind, every penny I spend on such items above these prices is a penny I’ve been cheated out of. For that and other reasons, I seldom buy these items any more. Here is a partial list, just to get the discussion started:

  • Soft drink — 10 cents. That’s 10 wheat pennies, or a dime if you get it from a machine. This is in 12 oz., returnable bottles, so you get two or three cents of that back. Preferably a real Co-Cola of the kind they don’t make in this country any more (did they really think they’d fool us with that "New Coke" scam, followed by the "return" of "Coca-Cola Classic" in which corn syrup substituted for cane sugar? we know only the Cokes from Mexico taste right any more) or a Nehi grape. Or maybe a Teem, or an Upper 10.
  • Comic book — 12 cents. Mind you, that’s the inflated price, from a dime. I am not opposed to theSgtrock_2
    folks at DC Comics making a couple of pennies, and even though I thought the two-cent increase a great injustice at the time, I made the adjustment at a young age, and now accept the higher price. Of course, the "specials" — the ones with "imaginary" stories in which Perry White gets super powers, or an all-red kryptonite edition or some such, which had the content of about three regular comics — were well worth a quarter. Mad magazine was also worth a quarter. Anyway, this price consciousness has prevented me over the years from buying my son who still collects comics as many as a good Dad probably should on special occasions.
  • A computer — gazillions of dollars, especially if it had the computing power of the one the Man of Steel kept at the Fortress of Solitude, which had a voice recognition program and could tell you anything about anything. As for real-life computers, only a big gummint agency like NASA could afford one, and then only if it was a supreme national priority to go to the moon or something. So this is one area where we’ve come out ahead, even if we don’t get to go to the moon any more.
  • Water — free. Oh, sure, Mamanem might have paid a monthly bill or something, but what concern was that of mine? Even when I lived in South America, and we never drank straight from a tap, and every drop we drank had to be boiled and put into a gin bottle first (the bottles were hand-me-downs from the guy my Dad replaced; I don’t know what they cost originally), I don’t remember having shelled out any of my money for it. I did spend money there on Cokes, which in Ecuador at the time cost 40 centavos, which was the equivalent of two cents back in the day when a sucre was worth a nickel. (Which is way back before the sucre went all Zimbabwe and the country switched to the U.S. dollar.)

You get the idea. And as for you wise guys who are going to tell me that a newspaper’s never been worth more than a nickel, I beg to differ. My sense of what a newspaper is worth formed as an adult, and as an adult I’ve always been aware that the person who buys the paper is paying a small percentage of what it cost to produce it. I will say, though, that 5 bucks for a Sunday New York Times is too much, even if they put gold, or even Mexican Coca-Cola, in the ink.

More good energy news

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Back on this post, I mentioned one tidbit of evidence that was encouraging in Energy Party terms, in that at least one guy had decided to go with mass transit.

Since then, there have been a couple of news items that are, shall we say, a tad more substantial in statistical terms.

First, there was the story about Americans driving 30 billion fewer miles in a six-month period.

Now, we see more folks turning to rail travel.

As a market-oriented guy like Charles Krauthammer would put it, we’re just reacting rationally to $4-a-gallon gas.

But any way you look at it, it does make us look smarter, doesn’t it? Up to a point, anyway.

Wouldn’t it be great if we started doing such things on purpose, because we wanted to reduce our dependence on petrodictators? Is that too much to hope for?

Another Southern take on Warner-Lieberman

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Mere moments before the DeMint release came in, I received another release from the Southern Environmental Law Center with a different take on Warner-Lieberman, also from a Southern perspective.

Since I’ve got a lot of other stuff to do, I’m leaving this for y’all to sort out:

South has much at stake as U.S. Senate begins historic debate on climate change legislation

June 2, 2008
Nat Mund, Director, SELC Legislative Director (703) 851-8249
Trip Pollard, Director, SELC’s Land & Community Program (931) 598-0808

The U.S. Senate today began much-anticipated debate on the Climate Change Security Act of 2008, also known as the Warner-Lieberman bill. The U.S. has lagged well behind other industrial nations in addressing the threat of global warming. 

While the nation and the world will benefit from passage of legislation to control carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the South in particular has much at stake – and much to contribute toward curbing carbon emissions.  Each of the six states in SELC’s region (AL, GA, NC, SC, TN, VA) rank among the top 15 highest sources of carbon pollution in the U.S.   If the six states were a nation, we’d rank 7th in the world in total carbon emissions. 

Nat Mund:  “The South’s sprawling development patterns and reliance on coal for electricity mean a huge carbon footprint. And we have a lot at stake – miles of fragile coastline and some of the most biologically diverse spots on the planet.   Senators Warner, Lieberman and Boxer deserve tremendous credit for shepherding legislation to this point.”

Trip Pollard:  “Transportation generates one-third of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S., and is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in many states in the South.  Federal climate legislation must include significant funding for states and localities to implement smart growth and alternative transportation measures that can cut emissions – and help people save money – by reducing driving.”

Background:
Power plants  The South is heavily reliant on coal for its electricity. The region is home to the nation’s three dirtiest coal-fired power plants in carbon emissions – Scherer (GA), Miller (AL), and Bowen (GA). The Cumberland plant in Tennessee ranks #8.  Today there are proposals pending for four more conventional-style coal-fired power plants that would add at least 22.6 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year (see chart below).

Transportation  The South is the fastest sprawling region in the U.S., and transportation programs in the region have focused on road-building.  This translates into rising carbon emissions from the ever-increasing number of miles we are driving. From 1990-2005, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in SELC’s region increased 48.9%, outpacing the national increase of 39.2%.  Between 1982 and 1997, SELC’s six-state region developed more land by far than any other region; 6,064,500 acres compared to the next highest, the eastern Midwest at 3,777,200 acres.  Last week, a report by the Brookings Institution found that many southern metro areas had a higher than average carbon footprint per capita.

At risk   If global warming is unchecked, miles of shoreline in Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia – and the people who live there – will be more at risk from rising sea levels and more frequent and powerful hurricanes. By the same token, the likelihood of more intense drought will dry up drinking water supplies along the coast, in the Piedmont and in the mountains of the fast growing region. Ecologically, some of the most biologically diverse habitats in the world – including the Southern Appalachian highlands and longleaf forests along the coast – could suffer dire consequences.   

        Company Megawatts       CO2 emissions tons/year Cost estimates as of 5/08      
Pee Dee, SC     Santee Cooper   1320    11 million      $1.35 billion 
Cliffside, NC   Duke Energy     800     6.25 million    $1.8 – 2.4 billion    
Washington County, GA   Electric cooperatives   850     unknown at this time    $2 billion    
Wise Co, VA     Dominion  Power 585     5.4 million     $1.8 billion   
TOTAL           3,555   at least 22.65 million  at least $6.95 billion

Sorry about that chart; it didn’t transfer all that well. I’d give you a direct link to the release, but it’s not up on the site yet.

Lieberman-Warner can’t possibly be as good as DeMint makes it sound

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Just got a release from Jim DeMint about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. Now I’ve gotta tell ya that what with the last week of the legislative session and the last week before the state primaries and other stuff, I haven’t sat down and studied said legislation. If I were going to editorialize about it, I suppose I would, but who’s got time for that?

This leaves me with sort of a vague sense that it must be a pretty good thing, since Joe says it "would substantially cut US greenhouse-gas emissions" and other good stuff, and Joe’s never lied to me as far as I know.

But now Jim DeMint is trying to double my knowledge of this bill with HIS release, and I don’t have time to read to the end of that, either, but I did read the headline, which says "Lieberman-Warner Will Cost SC Jobs, Could Double Gas Prices."

OK, "cost SC jobs" sounds pretty bad, but then he says it "could double gas prices," which sounds like a move in the right direction, in Energy Party terms, and that’s amazing in itself, seeing as how everybody else in Washington seems to be all about encouraging increased consumption with gas tax holidays and tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and other demagogic doo-dads.

But surely he’s exaggerating with the "double" bit. Now mind you, if we had doubled the price a couple of years ago with a stiff federal tax — jacking it from $2 to $4 a gallon — we’d be paying the same price we are now, have chilled consumption, encouraged conservation, dealt a likely death blow to some of the worst regimes in the world by dropping the floor out from demand, and the extra money would be OURS, in our federal coffers, rather than in the hands of the sheiks and the thugs abroad.

But we didn’t. And I sincerely doubt we’re going to do so now, no matter how brave Mr. DeMint thinks Joe is…

Broder takes buyout from WashPost

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We keep getting complaints about the whole no-opinion-pages-in-Saturday’s-paper thing, and when anybody complains to me personally, I ask them what they’d do, given the imperative of cutting expenses. Given our staff cuts over the last few years, I was faced with either doing pages of lesser quality seven days a week, or doing fewer pages, maintaining quality, and staying here really late every Friday night putting a bunch of Extra stuff online for you ingrates.

No, really — I’m humbled by folks missing our pages so much.

But it might be helpful if people had a bit more understanding of the problems newspapers are having lately. I’ve been saving up stuff for a post, such as:

  • Staff buyouts at the Raleigh News and Observer, which is owned by McClatchy, which also owns The State.
  • The announcement of buyouts at The Charlotte Observer, another McClatchy paper, as well.
  • The fact that the International Newspaper Marketing Association is changing its name to drop the "newspaper" part. I am not making this up, as Dave Barry would say.

Actually, I had meant to gather a bunch more pieces of similar string for you to help you gain a little perspective on all this. But I can’t wait for that, on account of the latest.

David Broder, the dean of Washington political columnists, has announced he’s taking a buyout from The Washington Post. You’ll still see his columns, but he’ll be a contract employee. Here’s a memo he sent to us today:

{DAVID BRODER COLUMN}<
{(ADVISORY FOR BRODER CLIENTS)}<
{(For Broder clients only)}<
   <
   Dear friends:<
   I want to give you a heads-up that later this week, The Washington Post will be making an announcement that, along with many other longtime employees, I am taking the buyout offer — and to tell you what it does and does not mean.<
   The column you have been running will not change at all, and you will continue to receive it from The Washington Post Writers Group. I will continue to write from the same office in the Post newsroom and will continue to travel the country to wherever politics is happening. You will find me at the Democratic and Republican conventions this summer and on the campaign trail this fall, just as I have been this winter and spring.<
   As of Jan. 1, I will become a contract employee of The Washington Post Company. For the last two years, the bulk of my reporting has gone into the column, rather than the news pages of the Post. This change will allow me to focus entirely on the column, while freeing up the Post to use its budget for other news-section salaries and expenses. It will not diminish my ability to be out where news is happening.<
   I look forward to being part of your paper for many years to come….<
   Many thanks,<
   David Broder<

Get the picture? The biz is changing. Small wonder that some people come to me as a blogger, without even knowing I have this newspaper gig…

Anyway, I wanted to make sure you knew about the Broder thing as soon as I knew.

Let’s talk military buildup

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There are certain things that worry me, and nobody seems to be talking about them. In fact, our public conversations tend to go off in directions entirely opposed to where the discussion should be going. For instance:

  • Children’s brains are essentially formed, in terms of their ability to learn for the rest of their lives, by age 3. What do we do about that? I don’t know, but it’s weird that we can’t even make up our minds to fund 4K for all the kids who could benefit from it.
  • Also on education — we need to bring about serious reforms in public education, from consolidating districts to merit pay to empowering principals. But thanks to our governor and his ilk, we talk about whether we want to support public schools at all.
  • China is growing and modernizing its military at a pace that matches its economic growth. It won’t be all that long before it achieves parity with our own. But instead of talking about matching that R&D, we can’t make up our minds to commit the resources necessary to fight a low-intensity conflict against relatively weak enemies with low-tech weapons.

Anyway, there was an op-ed piece in the WSJ today about the latter worry:

China has a vast internal market newly unified by modern transport and communications; a rapidly flowering technology; an irritable but highly capable workforce that as long as its standard of living improves is unlikely to push the country into paralyzing unrest; and a wider world, now freely accessible, that will buy anything it can make. China is threatened neither by Japan, Russia, India, nor the Western powers, as it was not that long ago. It has an immense talent for the utilization of capital, and in the free market is as agile as a cat.

Unlike the U.S., which governs itself almost unconsciously, reactively and primarily for the short term, China has plotted a long course, in which with great deliberation it joins economic growth to military power. Thirty years ago, in what may be called the "gift of the Meiji," Deng Xiaoping transformed the Japanese slogan fukoku kyohei (rich country, strong arms) into China’s 16-Character Policy: "Combine the military and the civil; combine peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military."

Anyway, discuss amongst yourselves. And if you can, try to get the people running for president to talk about it. We need them to…

Act your age: Join the Grownup Party

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
YOU’VE HEARD of the “UnParty” and the “Energy Party” — at least, you have if you’ve kept an eye on this space for any length of time.

But I have yet another name for my never-ending battle against the foolishness of the Democratic and Republican parties: the Grownup Party.

What is the Grownup Party? Let’s start with what it isn’t. It isn’t based on age. If it were, John McCain would win the party’s nomination this year, hands down. But John McCain recently proposed something that violated everything the Grownup Party stands for: a summerlong gasoline-tax vacation, which treats the voters of this country like children: You don’t like paying those mean ol’ nasty gas prices? Awww. Here’s a lollipop. Hillary Clinton likewise offended GP sensibilities by endorsing the McCain plan. Barack Obama, the youngest candidate out there, was the only one acting like a Grownup. (Although he did vote for a similar tax holiday as an Illinois state legislator. Presumably, he’s matured since then.)

Why do Grownups not like the gas tax vacation? Sigh. Because they understand that if it has any effect on the market at all, it will encourage more fuel consumption during the busy summer months, which is bad enough in itself, but even worse in that increased demand leads to higher prices. And that way the money will go to the oil companies (it was reported last week that investors were disappointed because Exxon Mobil made a profit of only $10.9 billion in the first quarter), to petrodictators and to terrorists, instead of into the U.S. Treasury — that is, our treasury.

Which brings us to something else about Grownups — they understand that in America, the government is us, rather than being some menacing thing out there, and that we’re very fortunate to live in this country at this time rather than in Russia under the czars — or under Vladimir Putin, for that matter. And we’re especially fortunate not to live in a place where there is no government, such as Somalia under the warlords.

When the government does something we don’t like — which is pretty often, political immaturity being rampant — we don’t stamp our feet and talk about taking our ball (or  taxes, or whatever) and going home. Instead, we take responsibility for it, and try to bring it along. Yes, it’s a thankless task, like picking up after one’s children, or explaining to them why they can’t stay out late with their friends. But someone has to do it.

The task may seem hopeless as well — but only to the sort who gives up. Grownups know they don’t have that option, so they keep putting forth ideas that make sense, day after day, just like Daddy  going to work.

Here’s an example: On Friday, I posted an item on my blog headlined, “Free Thomas Ravenel.” Yes, it’s childish to cry out for attention with such misleading stunts, but I did it in the service of a Grownup purpose (and besides, it helped my three-year-old blog reach its millionth page view later that day). That purpose was to raise the question, Why do we want to pay to feed, clothe and house Mr. Ravenel for the next 10 months?

That’s what we, the taxpayers, are going to do. Ravenel attorney Bart Daniel told the press last week that his client will report to federal prison May 29 to begin serving his sentence for conspiracy to possess cocaine with the intent to distribute.

Yes, he needs to be punished for flouting our laws (especially since he was our state treasurer at the time), but think about it: Mr. Ravenel is a multi-millionaire. Wouldn’t a multi-million-dollar fine — him paying us — make more sense than us paying for his incarceration? Yes, he was fined $221,000, and had to pay $28,000 in restitution. But we’re going to turn right around and spend a lot of that to keep him locked up over the next few months.

That’s on the federal level. Closer to home, South Carolina locks up more people per capita than almost any other state, and then refuses to appropriate enough money to run our prisons safely, much less to rehabilitate prisoners so that maybe we won’t have to lock them up again.
That’s why we advocated Attorney General Henry McMaster’s “middle court” idea in a Wednesday editorial. It would operate in a way similar to drug courts, combining individual attention with certain punishment for anyone who breaks the rules. But as long as offenders followed those rules, we wouldn’t waste money locking them up.

So far, the boys and girls over in the Legislature have not gone for this idea. That’s bad.
This is good: The city of Columbia is facing up to the fact that it costs money to lock people up for more offenses than Richland County does. The city has finally agreed to start paying a per diem fee for city prisoners housed in the county jail.

As we said in a Friday editorial, the good news here is that as a result, the city will encourage police officers to lock up fewer offenders who pose no physical threat to the citizenry.
This is progress. When it comes to nonviolent offenders, the “lock ’em up but don’t pay for guards” position is infantile — all emotion and immediate gratification, without a logical foundation. It’s encouraging to see our capital city moving away from it, however gradually. We await similar signs of progress on the state and federal levels.

But we’re not holding our breath. That would be childish.

To read past columns about the Grownup Party and more, please proceed at a sedate, dignified pace to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Tom Friedman’s back, and he’s going to bat for the Energy Party!

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Tom Friedman is finally back after a four-month, book-writing sabbatical. The NYT said he’d be back in April, and he just barely made it! (Now I can stop fielding those phone calls from readers wanting to know what happened to him. Here’s a recording of one of those. )

And he’s coming out swinging… and best of all, he’s coming out swinging on behalf of the Energy Party (whether he knows it or not). His first column is headlined, "Dumb as We Wanna Be," and you’ll see it on our op-ed page tomorrow. An excerpt:

    It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.
    When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit…

Go get ’em, Tom! That’s a very fine leadoff hit. Coming up to bat next, on the same op-ed page, will be Robert Samuelson, and he’ll bring Friedman around to score. His piece, succinctly headlined "Start Drilling," is the rhetorical equivalent of a hard line drive down the opposite-field line:

    What to do about oil? First it went from $60 to $80 a barrel, then from $80 to $100 and now to $120. Perhaps we can persuade OPEC to raise production, as some senators suggest; but this seems unlikely. The truth is that we’re almost powerless to influence today’s prices. We are because we didn’t take sensible actions 10 or 20 years ago. If we persist, we will be even worse off in a decade or two. The first thing to do: Start drilling.
    It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. By government estimates, these areas may contain 25 billion to 30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion barrels of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves)….

Not start drilling as a substitute for conservation or the search for new fuels (as the ideologues of the right would have it, and the ideologues of the left deplore), but in addition to. Like I said, this is straight out of the Energy Party playbook (yeah, I know this started as a baseball metaphor, not football, but bear with me).

To reduce dependence on tyrannical foreign sources, to help out Mother Nature, to keep our economy healthy, to stoke innovation, to win the War on Terror, and make us healthier, wealthier and wiser, we should adopt the entire Energy Party platform. We should, among other things I’m forgetting at the moment:

  • Increase CAFE standards further — much further.
  • Raise the tax on gasoline, NOT reduce it, so that we’ll suppress demand, which will reduce upward pressure on prices, and we’ll be paying the higher amounts to ourselves rather than America-haters in Russia, Iran, Venezuela and yes, Saudi Arabia.
  • Use the proceeds for a Manhattan Project or Apollo Project (or whatever
    else kind of project we choose, as long as we understand that it’s the
    moral equivalent of war) to develop new technologies — hydrogen, solar, wind, geothermal, what have you — and shifting the mass of the resources to the most promising ones as they emerge.
  • Reduce highway speed limits to 55 mph, to conserve fuel and save lives (OK, Samuel? I mentioned it.) And oh, yeah — enforce the speed limits. The fines will pay for the additional cops.
  • Drill in ANWR, off the coasts, and anywhere else we can do so in reasonable safety. (Yes, we can.)
  • Increase the availability of mass transit (and if you can swing it, I’d appreciate some light rail; I love the stuff).
  • Fine, jail or ostracize anyone who drives an SUV without a compelling reason to do so. Possible propaganda poster: ""Hummers are Osama’s Panzer Corps."

And so forth and so on.

My point is, no more fooling around. It’s way past time to get serious about this stuff, and stop playing little pandering games. Let’s show a little hustle out there. And no dumb mistakes running the bases out there, fellas…

P.S. — The name of the book Mr. Friedman’s been writing, which will come out in August, is Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America. So yeah, he’s got an economic stake in these concepts. Well, more power to him. There’s money to be made in doing the smart thing, and to the extent he can persuade us to move in that direction, he deserves to get his taste.Just to help him out, here’s video of him talking about these ideas. Here’s a link to his recent magazine piece on the subject.

Hillary joins McCain in pandering on gas tax; Obama stands up to them both

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This has been a busy day and I’m just getting around to some basic things now. But I couldn’t let the day pass without noting how right Obama is about this:

Obama says rivals Clinton, McCain pandering on gas tax
By MIKE GLOVER and BETH FOUHY
Associated Press Writers
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Democrat Barack Obama dismissed his rivals’ calls for national gas tax holiday as a political ploy that won’t help struggling consumers. Hillary Rodham Clinton said his stance shows he’s out of touch with the economic realities faced by ordinary citizens.
    Clinton and certain Republican presidential nominee John McCain are calling for a holiday on collecting the federal gas tax "to get them through an election," Obama said at a campaign rally before more than 2,000 cheering backers a week before crucial primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. "The easiest thing in the world for a politician to do is tell you exactly what you want to hear."
    Clinton, who toured the Miller Veneers wood manufacturing company in Indianapolis, said "there are a lot of people in Indiana who would really benefit from a gas tax holiday.
    "That might not mean much to my opponent, but I think it means a lot to people who are struggling here, people who commute a long way to work, farmers and truckers," Clinton said. She has called for a windfall tax on oil companies to pay for a gas tax holiday.
    "Senator Obama won’t provide relief, while Senator McCain won’t pay for it," Clinton said. "I’m the only candidate who will provide immediate relief at the pump, with a plan."
    With his comments, Obama continued a running dispute over whether ending collection of the gas tax is the quickest and best way to help consumers. Leading in delegates and the popular vote, Obama in recent days has focused on McCain, but he broadened that criticism Tuesday to include Democrat Clinton.
    "Now the two Washington candidates in the race have decided to do something different," said Obama. "John McCain started it, he made the proposal, and then Hillary Clinton said ‘me too.’"
    The plan would suspend collecting the 18.4 cent federal gas tax 24.4 cent diesel tax for the summer.
    He said drying up gas tax collections would batter highway construction, costing North Carolina up to 7,000 jobs, while saving consumers little.
    "We’re arguing over a gimmick that would save you half a tank of gas over the course of the entire summer so that everyone in Washington can pat themselves on the back and say they did something," said Obama.
    "Well, let me tell you, this isn’t an idea designed to get you through the summer, it’s designed to get them through an election," said Obama. He said his call for middle-class tax cuts would be far more beneficial than suspending gas tax collections.
    Obama took a different view on the issue when he was an Illinois legislator, voting at least three times in favor of temporarily lifting the state’s 5 percent sales tax on gasoline.
    The tax holiday was finally approved during a special session in June of 2000, when Illinois motorists were furious that gas prices had just topped $2 a gallon in Chicago.
    During one debate, he joked that he wanted signs on gas pumps in his district to say, "Senator Obama reduced your gasoline prices."
    But the impact of the tax holiday was never clear. A government study could not determine how much of the savings was passed on to motorists. Many lawmakers said their constituents didn’t seem to have benefited. They also worried the tax break was pushing the state budget out of balance.
    When legislation was introduced to eliminate the tax permanently, Obama voted "no." The effort failed, and the sales tax was allowed to take effect again.
    Responding to Obama’s criticism, McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said the Illinois senator "does not understand the effect of gas prices on the economy. Senator Obama voted for a gas tax reduction before he opposed it."
    Bounds was deliberately echoing one of Democrat John Kerry’s most troublesome missteps of the 2004 presidential campaign. Kerry said of funding for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
    Obama and Clinton both opened their campaign day in North Carolina. Clinton toured a research facility and collected the prized endorsement of Gov. Mike Easley.
    "It’s time for somebody to be in the White House who understands the challenges we face in this country," said Easley, in announcing his backing of Clinton. She then promptly headed for a string of events in Indiana.
    "The governor and I have something in common – we think results matter," said Clinton.
    Easley is popular with white, working-class voters that have formed the base for Clinton’s success in recent primaries.
    Clinton also collected an endorsement from Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, who praised "her support in rural America, her commitment to national security and her dedication to our men and women in uniform."
    Skelton, a conservative Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, was among a half-dozen Democratic House members called to meet with Clinton after she won the Pennsylvania primary last week.
    While Obama is favored in North Carolina, the race in Indiana is very tight, and Obama was heading there Wednesday.
    Obama collected endorsements of his own during the day: In Kentucky, Rep. Ben Chandler, son of former Gov. A.B. "Happy" Chandler, gave Obama his backing ahead of that state’s May 20 primary, and in Iowa, Democratic National Committee member Richard Machacek – a supporter of former Sen. John Edwards before he dropped out of the presidential race – switched his support to Obama.
    Interest in the two primaries next week has been high. Officials in Indiana said nearly 90,000 people have cast early ballots, far outpacing absentee turnout in 2004.
    At stake Tuesday are 115 delegates in North Carolina, and 72 in Indiana.
Beth Fouhy reported from Indianapolis. Associated Press writers Christopher Wills in Springfield, Ill., and Sam Hananel in Washington contributed to this report.

Obama’s the only one acting like a responsible grownup here. He’s also the only one speaking up for Energy Party values.

What McCain and Clinton are both doing on this is appalling. They’re treating us like two-year-olds, and proposing to act in direct opposition to the nation’s interests.

Dogonomics

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Guy_006

Just fed the dog, and mentioned to my wife that he’s really low on food, so that one of us will be sure to get another one of those huge bags. She asked if there was enough for tomorrow, and I said yes, and for the next day, too.

Then I thought a moment, and added, "But don’t tell him how low it is… as far as he knows, that can is limitless." All he needs is someone with opposable thumbs to open it — we keep his ready food in one of those big popcorn cans my great-aunt gives us each Christmas — and to place it in his bowl. He’s completely dependent on this for survival, but that’s fine; he trusts us completely.

But if he knew that it was possible for the can to run out, that would rock his world completely. He’d stay up nights worrying about it. He might even get an ulcer.

It’s reassuring to me that at least one sentient creature I know never worries about where the food is coming from, or paying the bills, or whether that work on the house can be put off another year, or anything else. All he has to do is threaten intruders — and he has a loose interpretation of the word — in his own rather easygoing way (you don’t have to work hard at it when you’re as big as he is), and everything is covered.

Dogs are good, loving, dutiful creatures. If anyone I know is to be free of worry about material limits, I’m glad it’s a dog. He deserves it.

Why not just let in more Mexicans?

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Over the weekend, we had our gazillionth in a series of letters from indignant writers insisting that they are NOT anti-immigration, they are anti-ILLEGAL immigration:

    We in the pro-enforcement camp do not oppose legal immigration, and we do not call for discrimination against legal immigrants, no matter their race or ethnicity. All we ask is that our government enforce its immigration laws, secure our borders and deport illegal aliens.
    Since when is being in favor of law enforcement on a nondiscriminatory basis racism? Certainly, those who favor illegal immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens have been unfairly labeling us, as they have no legitimate reason for opposing enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws.

And of course, for about the gazillionth time I thought, fine — let’s change our immigration limits and streamline our procedures so that the Mexican labor our economy seems to demand can get in legally. Then, we’ll all be happy. I certainly will, because I don’t like having a shadow, extralegal population either. People in this country from another should be documented. People who are hot about illegal immigration will also be happy. People who just don’t like having a lot of Mexicans around will not be, but you can’t please everybody.

Why not remove the incentive to come in illegally by lowering barriers to legal immigration? I’m not an economist, but it seems fairly obvious that there is a demand for Mexican labor in this country — and a demand for American work in that country — that is greater than the supply we are currently processing legally. Those demands will continue to exist, and those forces will continue to attract vast waves of people to this side of the border, whatever laws we have. So let’s get serious about getting a handle on it.

The people who actually ARE economists disagree with each other on all this, of course. Here’s an interesting, fairly dispassionate piece that was in the NYT Magazine a couple of years back, which examines whether we should let so many unskilled workers into our economy. If you’re looking for an absolute "yes" or "no," you need to look elsewhere, but I found the discussion interesting:

    Economists more in the mainstream generally agree that the U.S. should take in more skilled immigrants; it’s the issue of the unskilled that is tricky. Many say that unskilled labor is needed and that the U.S. could better help its native unskilled by other means (like raising the minimum wage or expanding job training) than by building a wall. None believe, however, that the U.S. can get by with no limits….
    What the economists can do is frame a subset of the important issues. They remind us, first, that the legislated goal of U.S. policy is curiously disconnected from economics. Indeed, the flow of illegals is the market’s signal that the current legal limits are too low. Immigrants do help the economy; they are fuel for growth cities like Las Vegas and a salve to older cities that have suffered native flight. Borjas’s research strongly suggests that native unskilled workers pay a price: in wages, in their ability to find inviting areas to migrate to and perhaps in employment. But the price is probably a small one.

That last point, of course, is an important one to discuss. And in fact, if these are NOT "jobs Americans don’t want," but merely jobs with conditions and wages depressed by an oversupply of cheap labor from south of the border, then we should reduce the flow northward, and thereby raise wages and conditions for Americans (and the cost of goods and services, but that might be a policy outcome we decide is worth it).

But if, in the aggregate, these millions of Latinos are just a supply meeting a demand without widespread ill effects on the working class, why not let more in legally?

‘They’re panicking out there right now, I can feel it.’

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Yes, that headline is a quote from the wisdom of Billy Ray Valentine, former star of that once-great Philadelphia commodities brokerage, Duke and Duke. Sorry, but with me, analysis of financial matters doesn’t get much deeper than that. That quote popped into my head yesterday morning as I was observing, with my PDA brower set to the WSJ site, the reaction on Wall Street to the Bear Stearns bailout.

The latest word is that the crisis has been averted, or delayed, for what that’s worth.

I must confess that, since I get a bit confused just following what Winthorpe and Valentine did to the Dukes at the end of "Trading Places," I hardly know what to think about this supposedly Earth-shattering set of events surrounding Bear Stearns.

This is a barrier to my reading the news stories about it. As an editorial page editor, I read with the constant question in my mind, "What do I think about this?" I read any news story skimming past most of the who, what, where and blow-by-blow stuff, looking for answers to specific questions that will help me come to a conclusion.

But I don’t find answers even to the preliminary questions that occur to me regarding the buyout of Bear Stearns, such as, "When people go to work in the morning at Bear Stearns, what do they do?"

I do get a little more sophisticated than that. I also ask, "Why did the Fed deem it necessary to prod J.P. Morgan Chase to buy out Bear Stearns?" And wasn’t there something really unseemly about the government helping one financial firm buy out another at $2 a share? (I am reminded disturbingly, and almost certainly irrelevantly, of the case I read about recently regarding the Manhattan Elevated Railway, which Jay Gould bought at a fire sale price in 1881 after a judge had helped run down the value of the stock — young Theodore Roosevelt built his early legislative career largely on the basis of fighting such deals.)

What would have been the awful thing that would have happened had the bailout (or purchasing at a ridiculously low price — which seems to me like a really, really different thing from a bailout) not occurred? And why did the markets panic so AFTER it occurred? Was it because having the Fed invest $30 billion on behalf of you and me? Should I be freaked out, too? Should I be pleased or ticked off that the nation’s central banker exposed itself like that for the sake of one company?

What does this mean to us average Joes? Are we going to be more or less likely to buy our little boys the G.I Joe with the kung fu grip? And will anything ever happen on Wall Street that will get me that 52-inch HD TV with 1080 resolution? Let’s get real here, people.

But the people who allegedly know the answers to these compelling questions just drone on and on in a language of their own…

WSJ says the recession is here

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For those of you keeping score, The Wall Street Journal reports the following:

    The U.S. has finally slid into recession, according to the majority of economists in the latest Wall Street Journal economic-forecasting survey, a view that was reinforced by new data showing a sharp drop in retail sales last month.
    The survey, conducted March 7 through 11, marked a precipitous shift to the negative from the previous survey conducted five weeks earlier. For example, the economists now expect nonfarm payrolls to grow by an average of only 9,000 jobs a month for the next 12 months–down from an expected 48,500 in the previous survey. Twenty economists now expect payrolls to shrink outright. And the average forecast for the unemployment rate was raised to 5.5% by December from 4.8% in the previous survey.

Make of that what you will. Economics is (are?) not my forte.