Comments on: A conversation with economic specialist Dambisa Moyo

I agree that it is sensible to make aid data based rather than pity based, and I even agree that the whole notion of "aid" and "development" are problematic in that they are hierarchical and paternalistic. So I am in general sympathetic to Mrs. Moyo's arguments, however I find her approach overly hostile to aid to the point that it seems a bit dogmatic. I mean should we force HIV patients to pay market prices? Never the less a thought provoking interview.

Random Thoughts on Frontline: TenTrillion and Counting

* It is interesting that the "starve the beast" hypothesis floundered because they forgot to factor in that there was a source of cheap credit in the world (china, saudi arabia) so that even if you cut taxes it will be easy to keep spending... at least for a time.

* when Bush said 'we have a surplus we want to cut taxes so that the money can go back to "the people",' it really was a farce. What he should have said is we want to cut taxes so that we can borrow a lot of money from "the people"... "the people"'s republic of china that is.

* You know I was interested in this idea that if you cut taxes on dividends and capital gains then you increase liquidity and thus improve the efficiency of how capital is allocated. However, you've got to balance that against the fact that capital allocation is just a profession like any other. The market determines how useful any profession is by setting a salary for a worker in that profession. Are we really sure that the government needs to subsidize the pay of bankers over that of a doctor? I mean fine. Let people move money around into and out of investments, there shouldn't be taxes on transactions. But at the end of the day, when people are paid their salary, people who make their money from allocating capital should be taxed at the same rate as any other profession.

* Bush was an incredibly backward looking president. Backward looking and overly obsessed with the terrorist threat.

* America needs to make these investments other countries have made in us more secure. One way to do that is to make them denominated in a different currency. Of course you shouldn't give something away for nothing. The thing we need from china is to increasing consumer spending, to do so they need their economy to be much more open to outside investment. Let Wal-Mart work its magic. Look, China has made tremendous strides in developing the worlds best manufacturing infrastructure, but Americans have developed the worlds best distribution and sales infrastructure. We each need to work on the flip side of the coin.

* Looking at the graph the long term budgetary problem is medicare not social security. In the last 8 years Bush tried to fix social security and but made the budgetary problem of medicare worse. The reason they went for social security was they had a "solution" for that problem: to transfer money going into social security from US government debt (i.e. treasuries) and instead invest in the stock market. Well at least this particular bad Bush idea didn't get implemented.