Second, in that spirit, let’s add some data (the unemployment rate):

1984: 8.0% .. 7.3%
1987: 6.6% .. 5.8%
1990: 5.4% .. 6.3%
1993: 7.3% .. 6.5%

Without doing any calculations, I see a clear correlation of the unemployment rate to the ratios of revenue increases to spending cuts in these 4 years.

Given this additional context and our current unemployment rate, shouldn’t the ratio be more like 5:1 or higher (R:S), not 1:2 or lower?

I’m not being serious here, JB. I’m showing how easy it is to play this game. And that’s all it is – a game. Like musical chairs.

BTW, saw you shortly ago with Ezra Klein on MSNBC. Ezra is a blogger. Period. BS in Political Science from UCLA. Not an economist, not a mathematician, not a rocket scientist or anything else like that. Just a student of conventional wisdom, like so much of the revered punditry of our day. Being a student of conventional wisdom really isn’t that hard, JB.

Ezra is a prolific blogger, to be sure. Relative to authors (and software developers), though, not so prolific.

He does a great Chinese room imitation of a geek economist. But he’s not an economist, and he only looks and talks like a geek. If he wants to actually be a geek – not just look like one – maybe he should try getting a PhD in something “techy,” like, I don’t know, computer science. Just sayin’.

At the end of the show you were just on, Ezra was trying to complain about folks talking about nothing but deficits and ignoring unemployment. Like you two did – talk about deficits and ignore unemployment. So he’s trying to offer ideas about solutions to the unemployment issue, having not mentioned until the commentary at the end of the show. No new ideas, by the way; nothing an informed high school senior wouldn’t be able to glean from news reports, if all they did was read news reports.

I don’t mean to be unkind to Ezra, but I’ve known dozens of Ezra Kleins who couldn’t cut it as PhD students. I’m glad someone does what he does; I just can’t take him seriously as a “leading pundit on economics,” and it’s frustrating that he’s about the best there is on the subject.

Put another way; what’s troubling about Ezra is not Ezra; it’s how the rest of you pay deference to him – and should, since his content is so often better – with as little background and education as he has. That shows, to me, but apparently not to actual economists. No wonder none of the “progressive” economics community have any ideas, besides “we have a demand problem; we needed more stimulus.” Problems and solutions are entirely different things, and the lack of demand is a symptom, not a cause, of the problems. Maybe it just takes more than a BS in poli sci to see that. Sigh.

It’s getting harder by the day to take any of this seriously. People are homeless and starving to death out here, while pretend pundits and capitalism-biased economists are playing mutual groupies for each other. I wanna puke.

I understand where you’re coming from on the role of government, but I’ll be making it clear to my kids that their lives will be extremely hard if they don’t get at least a bachelor’s degree.