mungojelly

"Hmm. Maddow often asserts that Republicans are too scared to come on her show, and I'm inclined to believe her. She often *dares* people openly to come on (lately she's dared Liz Cheney, for instance), and that's rarely enough to bring them on. I think just about any important Republican figure could get a hearing on her show if they wanted it-- but of course they have no reason to." - mungojelly

"If a dollar isn't worth anything to you, well then I know some folks who would like that dollar! You're just overestimating the chances of winning (which are so tremendous that anything divided by them is crushed to dust), the fundamental human flaw which makes that sort of operation profitable. A dollar isn't worth much (especially these days, but that's another story), but still it's worth many many times more than the vanishingly small chance of winning. Anyway, now that I'm done with that critique.. I've had a similar idea. My calculus was a different one, though: I was thinking of people who have very little money, and in particular someone who has absolutely no chance of becoming rich on their own. My logic then was that while playing the lottery would still be a money loser on average, the decision to play would raise this hypothetical poor person's chances of being rich from absolutely zero to just something very small. Depending on how one values the possibility of being..." - mungojelly

"There wasn't any actual debate about whether to have that stimulus, just play debate for political purposes. It was a fait accompli. Every halfway reputable economist agreed that we needed someone to spend if we were going to pull out of the crash, and that the government was the only possible spender left. If we're going to talk about the actual political situation it doesn't make sense to talk about why we took that, our desperate, last remaining option. The real politics of the situation have to do with how people positioned themselves in relation to that story, the yarns they've spun to decorate the confusions of a distant public which does not understand what is happening." - mungojelly

"So... can I ask you a serious question? Is it actually your impression that laws passed by our Congress tend to have much of their effect in the first year? Listen, I'm not saying you're not allowed to bad-mouth Obama. Go for it. I'm just saying, if you care for it to be rational at all, you'll have to do it based on extrapolations of the likely effect of his programs into the future, not on some imaginary dictator-like power he has to instantaneously direct the entire government-and-therefore-economy. Nearly every policy of the government we are currently living under is one established by previous administrations and previous Congresses. A large government, and particularly a democratic government, has significant inertia." - mungojelly