Sullivan has a marvelous chart of the percentage of the Federal budget that goes to earmark spending. Cutting back on earmarks is McCain’s proposal for rescuing us from our fiscal spiral. Not so much.
Michael Bérubé announces his return to the blogosphere here, here, and here. Heh. Nothing like a grand entrance.
Somali pirates have hijacked a Ukrainian freighter loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition.
The failure to act yesterday was so monumental stupid that I’m not quite sure what else to say. Want more synonyms for stupidity? You can read Brooks, Herbert, Cowen, …
Sharon Stone wanted to botox her kid’s feet.
And here’s John McCain’s old house. As if you needed another reason to not vote for him…
Embedded video from <a href="http://www.cnn.com/video">CNN Video</a>
Apt. 11d 
In his worst case scenario, Cowen says “Credit markets freeze up within the next week and many businesses cannot meet their payrolls.” Again, why the blazes don’t major corporations keep a month’s operating expenses on hand? People with MBAs and fancy salaries should realize that having no cash reserves is no way to run even a small household, let alone a multi-billion dollar business. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
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I think earmarks are a bigger problem than the amount you spend on the earmarks. You use the promise of them (or the threat of taking them away) to get votes for bills that cost much more than the price of the earmark. Plus, earmarks let incompetent and/or corrupt politicians buy off their constituents and have very long careers. (“Sorry, I didn’t see you there Sen. Stevens. Or you Sen. Byrd. No, I was talking about some other politicians.”)
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Again, why the blazes don’t major corporations keep a month’s operating expenses on hand?
In what form? Most of them do–in the form of a money-market account. But if the credit markets freeze up, the only form that would work is a gigantic pile of cash. For fairly obvious reasons, very few corporations have enough cash on hand as cash to meet payroll.
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Gold bouillon, perhaps?
SamChevre makes the point I woke up this morning thinking about. I, specifically, was thinking about how much money this would involve, if we wanted corporations to withdraw it and keep it in their mattresses.
I don’t know that all companies have an actual account where they keep this money — some probably do rely on lines of credit. But, the problem would hold even if it was in a money market account, because in order to withdraw it, the bank might need to borrow from another bank, in order to make the money available today.
Think of it as a spike, a peak demand problem.
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Remember, it’s not John’s house it belongs to Cindy, or a trust, or kids. John doesn’t own any houses.
I gather you voted against Kerry in ’04 because of all of his (his wife’s) houses.
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