In the United States, personal debt keeps growing.

Who's to blame?

Is growth in "personal debt" inherently problematic or troubling? I am not seeing why.  It could just be that more and larger loans are available to more people than ever before.  That would be a good thing, right?

Maybe you've guessed, based on my coyness about mentioning the party names, that it is the Democrats who are pushing this pro-market change, while Republicans are in favor of anti-property rights zoning laws. Maybe Jason is on to something.

As the reporter correctly notes (probably thanks to Dr. Horwitz), about $1 of this is due to inflation, but I don't think she quite understands the full force of this fact. That means that a gallon of milk, over the past 10 years, has gone up 31 cents (3 cents per year) more per gallon than if it had increased at the same rate as the average consumer product. Of course, 3 cents here, 3 cents there, it can really add up across the consumer's full budget. But we also need to look at the other side of the budget, income.

The latest personal income data is for the 1st quarter of 2008, at $34,546 per capita. A decade ago, the same figure was $22,753. That is an increase of 51.8%. The "milk index" presented to us in the story went up 46.0% over the same time period. So income is increasing faster than milk prices. These means that the real price of milk has fallen over the past decade; not by a lot, but it certainly hasn't gone up. What is this food crisis everyone is talking about?

I know that conveying economic logic, as well as throwing lots of numbers at people, doesn't always come over well in 5 second blurbs on TV. But it also doesn't seem like it would have been that hard to put up the income data underneath the milk price data, and compute the percent changes.

I hate to sound all cheery and Panglossian about these things. The economic effects of Fed-generated inflation and the somewhat related economic slowdown are certainly real factors for concern. But the world is not falling to pieces.

The letter is signed not only by the CEO of Northwest, but also 11 other major airlines. The letter can be read here. CNN is reporting the story, so I assume it is legit, but it is just so illogical (at least, without a public choice angle). Here is the main piece of evidence offered:

Twenty years ago, 21 percent of oil contracts were purchased by speculators who trade oil on paper with no intention of ever taking delivery. Today, oil speculators purchase 66 percent of all oil futures contracts, and that reflects just the transactions that are known.

Well that solves it, speculation has gone up from 21 percent to 66 percent of oil contracts. Speculators must be the culprit!

Just a few quick questions: twenty years ago, who was buying the other 79 percent of contracts? Why aren't they classified as "speculators"? Are they simply saying that in 1988 spot contracts were the majority of transactions, and now futures contracts are? It's unclear from the letter, and it is also unclear that this trend would be unique to oil markets. I suspect similar trends could be observed for commodities where the real price has fallen in the last 20 years.

The only other recent ACLU post I can find with more than 10 comments is one on mandatory ultrasound laws, which has 24 comments. This makes sense when you realize that post is from June 26, the day of the Heller decision, and the thread was hijacked to discuss the case. That's right, the ACLU did not even blog about what a presidential candidate that has a working relationship with the ACLU called "one of the Supreme Court’s most important rulings on behalf of liberty" until 5 days after the decision (but they did have 5 blog posts on that date).

I would also be very interested to here the ACLU's definition of a "collective right ," and whether gun rights are the only negative liberty falling into this category. 

But I would like to ask a more fundamental question: How do we even know there was an "outbreak"? It's not as if there had been no cases of salmonella last year or the year before. The CDC tells us that every year there are 40,000 reported cases, but those are only the ones that actually get reported and "the actual number of infections may be thirty or more times greater." So there are possibly at least 1.2 million cases per year, or 100,000 per month. This "outbreak" has involved 869 people in about 2 and a half months. This is an outbreak?

Of course, they will tell you that this is a rare strain of salmonella, which only 3 people were reported to have in 2007. And there were apparently common factors found among those that were ill: 1.) "consumption of raw tomatoes" and 2.) "persons who ate at restaurants." Now seriously, how many of you (at least, before the FDA/CDC generated scare) had ate a raw tomato and ate at a restaurant within the past week? I would guess this group of people is something like half of the U.S. population. And a few hundred people got sick.

My guess is that the effect is actually random, but government agencies and the media like to see patterns where none exist. Fooled by randomness. And once the "outbreak" is announced, I'm sure that more people get tested, thus more reported cases. Some of those around 1 million unreported cases are now getting reported. And the false outbreak scare has cost the food industry at least $100 million (I've seen estimates more than double that).

Now Lou Dobbs is one-upping Krugman and calling for Bush's impeachment over this. Seriously? Oh yes, I'm sure if you doubled the FDA and CDC budgets, they could get to the bottom of this, plus prevent all those 1.2 million cases from happening in 2009. Yeah, right. We live in a risky world, much less risky than the past, but still risky. It would be better if we the people, the government, and the media just acknowledged this fact.

First, the "lost tribe" of the Amazon that wasn't so lost (via LRC). They do exist, but the back story was not exactly true:

Far from being unknown, the tribe's existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that 'uncontacted' tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry.

The disclosures have been made by the man behind the pictures, José Carlos Meirelles.

Meirelles admitted that the tribe was first known about almost a century ago and that the apparently chance encounter that produced the now famous images was no accident.

Second, the "pregnancy pact" at a Massachusetts high school that might not have been. It appears there is basically no evidence that it existed:

"There was definitely no pact," 17-year-old Lindsey Oliver [one of the pregnant girls] told "Good Morning America" on Tuesday.

Mayor Carolyn Kirk also denied a pact existed after a closed-door meeting with city, school and health leaders on Monday.

Kirk said she and Superintendent Christopher Farmer have been in touch with [Principal] Sullivan [the source of the rumor], and he was "foggy in his memory" about how he came to believe there was a pact.

I would be willing to wager that the retractions got less attention (other than by bloggers) than the original, "shocking" stories.

I have previously speculated that the metric system may be inferior to other measurement systems, because of the possibility of large errors.

The bias also relates to uncertainty regarding coordination of behavior. If a meeting is scheduled to begin at 10:00AM, my experience is that the meeting will not begin at 10. Some people will show up early, thinking the meeting starts at 10 and not wanting to be late. Some will show right at 10. Some will show up late, thinking the meeting starts "around 10."

Speed limits are another coordination problem. If the speed limit is 55, can I be ticketed for going 56? 60? 65? There seem to be vague rules of thumb, I assume occasionally enforced by courts, but it all seems quite arbitrary. Stated simply, the bias is "when numbers are stated in multiples of 5 or 10, the number loses some of its focal point quality."

I have read Nudge, and have lots to say but really do not know where to begin (or where the "review" would eventually go). Overall I think the book is very confused and confusing, above all since the authors are often ambiguous as to whom the advice is directed: individuals, firms, or government (as Mario Rizzo stressed mulitiple times in a discussion with Thaler).  But I do have some "nudges" for the "rounding bias." And just to be clear, these are suggestions for private meeting organizers and owners of private roads (I expect local governments love the revenue generated from the uncertainty).

For starting meetings (or parties), I have occasionally used the trick of starting at "odd" times, such as 3:03PM. Starting 3 minutes past the hour becomes focal (perhaps simply because it is novel), and the repetition of 3 sticks in your mind. This seems to have had some positive effects, but maybe this is just confirmation bias. For speed limits, posting non-round numbers would be a similar nudge, such as this 29 MPH speed limit at the private Valdez Marine Terminal in Alaska (according to this page the Marine Terminal also has speed limits of 11, 16, 21, and 26).

Reading the article itself should raise some red flags. First is the statement that "The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of 'global warming' is comprehensively and urgently addressed." Note the use of the word "prove." Is there some direct connection, even a theoretical one, between global warming and earthquakes? The article never says, but claims that the author has "proved" this fact and "proved" that "the global annual energy of earthquakes on Earth began increasing very fast since 1990." The article also points out that the increase in seismic activity "is not theoretical but that it is an Observable Fact." Yes, Observable Fact, capitalized. (In the "published" article it is labeled "Observed Reality.")

The work is all done by Dr. Tom Chalko, an "Australian scientist." Although the article doesn't say so, a quick Google search shows that the article was published in the NU Journal of Discovery. "NU" stands for Natural University, which, their website tells us, is "nowhere in particular and yet everywhere on Earth." So basically, it is a website, which publishes this "journal" on a very occasional basis (this article is the fifth published since 2001). Dr. Chalko is also on the editorial board. Apparently, Chalko has a PhD in Laser Holography ("The Science of Light") and also writes books on new age healing. None of this is mentioned in the article, and no other scientists or anyone else appears to have been consulted for the CBS piece.

So obviously, this guy is not a geologist or climatologist. But so what? Hasn't he, as he states, compiled all the earthquake data from USGS between 1973 and 2007? And didn't he find a strong change in trend 20 years ago? What of that Observable Fact that he "proved"? Okay, so there is no causative relationship proved. So what?

Take a look at the graphic accompanying the CBS story. Although there are no labels, I assume time is on the x-axis and some measure of earthquake activity on the y-axis. Notice that big jump about one-third in? It seems a bit big for a one-year change, with two distinct time trends before and after. Any idea what could have caused that? Well, let's ask USGS. First they tell us:

Although it may seem that we are having more earthquakes, earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have remained fairly constant throughout this century and, according to our records, have actually seemed to decrease in recent years.

Hmm, that's interesting. Anything that might have caused a change in the data in the last 20 years, as CBS and Dr. Chalko report?

A partial explanation [for the perception of more earthquakes] may lie in the fact that in the last twenty years, we have definitely had an increase in the number of earthquakes we have been able to locate each year. This is because of the tremendous increase in the number of seismograph stations in the world and the many improvements in global communications. [My emphasis]

Oh, well it all makes sense now. But how many people that read the headline on CBS, or MSNBC, will do any fact checking? Of course, none of this means that climate change is not happening, and that there will not be some negative consequences from it. But journalists' willingness to publish the results from any "study" without doing the most basic fact checking about the data or whether there was actually causation demonstrated is definitely a worrying trend. It also seems to be correlated with increasing CO₂ levels.

Update (6/19 at 5:02pm): The story was still the lead CBS's SciTech page mid-morning, but now it appears to be gone -- down the memory hole with no explanation. But don't worry, the link to MSNBC story still works and it is also on Yahoo (and the CBS graphic which was prominently displayed on their SciTech page hasn't been erased yet). The MSNBC and Yahoo stories are actually press releases with the source listed as "Dr Tom Chalko." The CBS story was the press release cut-and-pasted to appear like a real story, but the link to Chalko's article and his byline were removed. Good for CBS if they removed pseudo-science (or rather, non-science), but shouldn't they run a correction as the lead story for the next 12 hours or so?

Update (6/20): The CBS story is now in Google cache. There is apparently disagreement between CBS and the AP over the origin of the story (rather than just the press release). Climate Audit is also following the story.

The following statement by Krugman got me thinking:

One amazing decision [by the USDA] came in 2004, when a Kansas producer asked for permission to test its own cows [for mad cow disease], so that it could resume exports to Japan. You might have expected the Bush administration to applaud this example of self-regulation. But permission was denied, because other beef producers feared consumer demands that they follow suit. 

Several things are curious about this piece of evidence cited by Krugman. Above all, it seems quite odd to use this as a counter to Milton Friedman's claim that "private companies would avoid taking risks with public health to safeguard their reputations and to avoid damaging class-action lawsuits." It seems they were trying to self-regulate. What stopped them? Not the free market, but, as Krugman accurately notes, the USDA itself, which was headed by "a former food-industry lobbyist." This is market failure? Is that the best you got? If this is evidence that the Bush administration is more about corporatism than capitalism, I'm all for it, but Krugman doesn't quite pitch it that way.

There are interesting historical parallels a century before, also related to testing of cattle. Salmonella poisoning in tomatoes on my cheeseburger was not the concern, but rather a much more deadly disease: tuberculosis. The year is 1908, and Chicago (a major cattle-processing center) has just enacted an ordinance to limit the spread of tuberculosis, requiring testing of cattle and pasteurization of milk. As reported by Olmstead and Rhode, competitors in the nearby

Elgin area used their influence to capture the Illinois legislature. Their main ally was long-time Speaker of the House, Edward Shurtleff. ... After helping these interests capture the committee investigating milk health measures, Shurtleff spearheaded the passage of the 1911 state law prohibiting cities from requiring tuberculin testing. [My emphasis]

But again, oddly, Olmstead and Rhode use this as a piece of evidence in support of market failure. Their argument is actually more sophisticated than Krugman's: differing regulatory regimes across localities and states increased information asymmetry problems, allowing unscrupulous cattle owners to profit while endangering consumer and cattle health. The asymmetry problems would seem to be even larger with more localized regulation, that is, at the level of the individual cattle owner. But this still seems like a better example of regulatory capture than market failure. How this information problem was eventually solved is quite interesting, but I will save the full story for another day. Here is a brief preview.

Olmstead and Rhode provide an account in a companion article to the one linked above, and they emphasize a cooperative federal-state program to test cattle for bovine tuberculosis. It is interesting to note though, the absence of any mandatory federal regulations, either for testing of cattle or pasteurization of milk. The testing program they describe was voluntary, and, believe it or not, there was never a federal regulation mandating pasteurization of milk, even to this day (yes, really, I mean it). The U.S. Public Health Service has long issued model legislation for states, but it was never mandated (recall the claim above that state and local regulations could not work). I have a radically different explanation for the historically important process of eliminating tuberculosis, but am still in the process of collecting all the relevant facts, so you will just have to wait.

Update: Dr. Tabarrok passes along a post of his from 2004 regarding the mad cow self-regulation ban that Krugman referenced. He had the regulatory capture angle nailed as the story broke, and correctly notes that USDA has had the "power to decide minimum and maximum testing" since 1913. I should further note that my above summary of his position as "Tabarrok disagrees [that we are 'back in The Jungle']" is not precisely correct. He stated that there is "no evidence whatsoever" for making such a claim, a less sweeping claim than Krugman's (and the correct one, in my judgment).

Earlier this week I saw a similar poll on CNN, but it was actually presented as a tradeoff (see the story and the actual questions). The results are similar to the survey Caplan points to: people are more worried about long lines than high prices. But, as the Gallup poll shows, when you don't present it as a tradeoff, you get huge majorities in favor of dumb policies. We happened to be discussing Caplan's work in class on Tuesday, and I mentioned this CNN poll to the students as evidence that the public is not really that irrational, just subject to some framing effects.

Of course, if the second question about rationing had not been asked, it's possible that some politician could trumpet this survey as a reason for imposing price controls. Maybe someone will anyway, but at least in this case it probably won't get put into effect. But in many cases, the majority's response to non-tradeoff questions are often enacted as policy (and used as support for the policy, and then later social scientists claim that democracies "give the people what they want"). 

I also note that this is already being called "the Mueller Effect" in the comments at Caplan's blog (well, by one commenter so far). If Stigler's Law holds though, this may be known to history at "the Horpedahl Effect" (ugh).

Frightening historical note: support for price controls is much higher today than immediately pre-Nixon price controls (at least when questions are asked in a non-tradeoff manner). I need to head to the library and check the Gallup archives, but this JEH article claims that in June 1971 (two months before price controls), 50% of Americans favored wage-and-price freezes, compared with 53% today! Caveat: those were for general controls, not just gasoline prices. It is also fascinating to witness the dramatic spike in support among Republican elites following Nixon's announcement of the policy. What were their "real" preferences?

This summer I am teaching Public Choice, and we have spent a little time working through the basic calculus of voting model. As, I hope, my students can now articulate, in order for your vote to matter in an instrumental sense it has to break a tie (or force a tie). We also spent plenty of time discussing non-instrumental reasons for voting, but as far as influencing an election, unless the margin is one vote your can not influence the outcome.

Okay, so there is a Republican Congressional primary in Virginia tomorrow, and the candidates are Amit Singh and Mark Ellmore [edit: in the 8th District]. Some mud has already been thrown in public and through private emails, but it's now really heating up, as they say. Singh is somewhat of a newcomer/outsider to the party, and it appears that there is some fear that he may present a challenge and be very important. In fact, the Ellmore campaign thinks that Singh is a very important guy, so important that he personally is allowed to cast 4,655 ballots.

In an email I received from they Ellmore campaign today, they claim that "thanks to Amit Singh, Democrats control the Senate and no judges are confirmed." You see, in 2006 Republican George Allen lost his Senate race by 4,655 votes. Amit Singh did not vote for George Allen. But as far as I know, Singh only possesses one vote. So how could his vote have tipped the election? It's unclear. (Note: Singh was not a public figure in 2006, so announcing who he was voting for could not have influenced anyone to vote for Allen.)

Is this just a single typo in the email? No. The Ellmore campaign goes on to ask "Why wouldn't Amit Singh support George Allen to keep the Senate in Republican control?" Again, Singh's support wouldn't have changed one thing about that election. And further: "Amit Singh helped to sabotage George Allen's Senate race in 2006 that gave control of the Senate to the Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Kerry Democrats." In conclusion, Republicans don't understand how elections work, in a very fundamental sense.

The Ellmore campaign email makes other accusations against Singh, including linking him to Ron Paul. Oh, the horror! But, oops, seems like Ellmore has kind things to say about Paul as well.

Yah for democracy. 

First, a few sentences on methodology in economics. While I think Milton Friedman went too far in his influential writings on positive economics, I also believe that the radical Austrian critique is incorrect (at least, the naive one that we can't use any data or models in our writings). So I don't really have a dog in the methodolgy fight, or if I do it is of mixed breed with uncertain pedigree.

However, the purpose of this post is to point out to economists that our methods are not really that much worse than those in supposedly "harder" sciences. And I can take a shot at journalism, always a fun thing to do. (Enough throat clearing.)

The fourth most popular story on Reuters.com from this Tuesday is titled "Heavy marijuana use shrinks brain parts: study." First sentence "Long-term heavy use of marijuana may cause two important brain structures to shrink." See that, "may cause," sounds scientific. Apparently these parts of the brain are related to memory, emotion, fear, and aggression. Queue clichés about "loss of short term memory" and "reefer madness."

And we can't accuse the journalists of misinterpreting scientific studies (in one sense), because we have the lead researcher from the study quoted as saying "These findings challenge the widespread perception of cannabis as having limited or no harmful effects." Snap! But we can possibly accuse journalists of something else (read on).

Of course, if you flip to the second page of the article (the print edition equivalent of "turn to page A18" -- how many people do this?), we find that "researchers acknowledged that the study did not prove it was the marijuana and not some other factor that triggered these brain differences." Wow, really? So what is this study about? Well, apparently 15 marijuana users and 16 non-users had their heads measured, and the ones of marijuana users were somewhat smaller (31 is a very small N, if you didn't know). And from this you get the blaring headline noted above (how many people read past the headline or first paragraph?).

The researchers, to their credit, do admit that the study proves nothing -- but only after making sweeping statements about their results. The journalists, to their credit, do print this admission and give three sentences to a pro-Marijuana group -- but only on page 2, and only after the highly misleading headline and page 1. This, of course, is a familiar pattern: see two other marijuana studies in just the last month.

So, dear economist, the next time some tells you that your theory and/or data don't "prove" anything you should admit that they are right, but take heart in the fact that proving something is very difficult in any science (and be sure to point this out as well). 

The study found a strong and direct relationship between the RFEI of the area ["bad" food sellers / "good" food sellers] in which someone lives and their likelihood of being obese or having diabetes.

The right way to answer it - causation (seen on MR):

The results find no evidence of a causal link between restaurants and obesity, and the estimates are precise enough to rule out any meaningful effect.

Conclusion: you make yourself fat. Neighborhoods with more obese people have more fast food restaurants because people vote with their dollars.

Class dismissed. 

This part of northwest Indiana is just a few miles to the south of the Lake Michigan sand dunes that draw Chicago urbanites to summer homes, but it is Bible Belt country.

This got me wondering: Would any Chicago Tribune writer ever refer to any location inside Illinois as being part of a "Bible Belt"?  My hypothesis, of course, was that none would; to do so would be politically to link Chicago with backwardness, which Chicago boosters must avoid.

Paging through this Google search bears out my hypothesis; of the 60 hits for "Bible Belt" on chicagotribune.com, those which reference a specific location are plotted on the map below.   Locations in Missouri are cited three times, but miraculously Bible Beltedness never manages to touch the Unholy Land that lies betwixt the Mississippi and the Wabash.

My favorite among the articles is the only one that specifies that a location is NOT part of a "Bible Belt".  Dover, Pennsylvania, was the focus of a January 2005 news item; Dover's school board had "become the first in the nation to incorporate the possibility of an 'intelligent designer' in its biology curriculum as an alternative to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution".  This mystified Tribune staff correspondent John Riley:

Founded in the early 1700s by German immigrants fleeing religious persecution, Dover is hundreds of miles from the Bible Belt, and on the surface there's no obvious reason it should be the focus of a grand debate over the forces driving the cosmos.

Accordingly, on the map, I have set off Dover with a line that's roughly at a 200-mile radius -- and lo and behold, it does comport with the other Tribune "Bible Belt" mentions.

I only want to comment on a small part of the article, the only fact (or rather, data) where Parker attempts to show that something new, and perhaps worrying is going on with respect to demographic trends:

Meanwhile, immigration trends have shifted drastically in the past 40 years, as growing percentages of Americans are foreign-born. In 1970, just 4.7 percent of the total population was foreign-born - 9.6 million people. By 2000, 11.1 percent, or 31.1 million individuals, were foreign-born, according to the Census.

Contributing to the growing unease among yesterday's Americans is the failure of the federal government to deal with the illegal immigration fiasco. It isn't necessarily racist or nativist to worry about what these new demographics mean to the larger American story.

Leave aside illegal immigration for the moment, as Parker is concerned with the growth in legal, foreign-born Americans. She is worried about "these new demographics." But are they really new? The data she presents seem to indicate so, with the percentage of the population that is foreign-born growing drastically from 1970 to 2000. But take a look at the full historical series from the same Census bureau that Parker cites.

Parker just happened to choose the low-point (1970) of 150 years of data as her baseline. I can see no logical reason for doing so (maybe someone else can correct me). Not only were there a few years from the early 20th century higher than the percentage in 2000, but every single Census year between 1860 and 1930 had a higher percentage of foreign-born Americans.

Pointing out this fact does not mean that Parker is wrong; their may be a qualitative difference (e.g. willingness to learn English) between past and current foreign-born populations. Maybe. But it can not simply be asserted. Show me the data, then we can have a discussion. Again, data showing qualitative differences does not close the case, as my data does not. But is necessary to start a reasonable discussion.

http://jeremy.horpedahl.googlepages.com/PublicChoice_Summer2008.pdf

For the first half of the class, we will be going over the basics of Public Choice, which of course focuses on democratic political systems. In the second half, I am covering some newer and somewhat unorthodox areas, such as the work of Caplan and Wittman, non-democratic political systems, and economic history that falls within the general Public Choice line. I'm looking forward to a fun and interesting class!

I understand Caplan's response as consisting of two parts. Part one: even when framed in terms of paying more taxes, the American public still supports bigger government (or at least the status quo). Part two: question variations involve information effects, which can have significant but ambiguous (from a policy interpretation standpoint) results. I see the two parts as intimately linked, and I still maintain that support for libertarian policy changes exists.

Dr. Caplan directs us to the GSS. Yes, the question Caplan refers us to (variable TAXSPEND, for those that want to check) indicates that the public prefers bigger government, but I don't think the implications are what he infers. First, this is not "overall government spending" as Caplan indicates, but social spending (which is perhaps less than half of spending, depending on who you ask). More importantly, the question is very unconstrained. It asks about three categories of spending, in an open-ended way, as well as three (plus) categories of taxes. (I use "open-ended" to refer to interpretation of the question, rather than "fill in the blank" as many surveys do.)

One could just as easily point to the GSS result (variable CUTGOVT) that the median position is "in favor" of cutting government spending as something "the government might do for the economy" (the result is very strong, almost 9:1, if we group favorable vs. non-favorable responses). There appears to be a social intransitivity, with the public favoring both more spending and fewer taxes. But I would direct your attention to the unconstrained nature of Caplan's favored GSS question, especially on the taxation side. As the Mueller article indicates, merely asking individuals to reevaluate their response "if the government had to raise taxes to finance the additional expenditures" achieves a noticeable decline in expressed preference for policies.

To me, this is a huge issue. Can the respondent simply "make up" the method of finance or is she constrained, to some degree, by the question? Dr. Caplan doubts that "the public is that stupid" to not realize that more spending requires more taxes. I agree. But taxes can take many, many forms. I would suspect decreasing support (this is empirically testable) among survey respondents over the following three taxation options for increased government spending: 1. unspecificied (possibly "free" or taxation of the others); 2. taxes (in general) increase; and, 3. your taxes increase. Mueller tests option 1 vs. 2, but alludes to the importance of option 3 (p. 216 fn. 6). Furthermore, I would suspect decreasing support on option 3 for increasing dollar amounts of taxation (probably the same for option 2).

Which option is the accurate one, in terms of what the public (or more simply, an individual) "really" prefers? Is it number 1, 2, 3, or one of the various subsets (2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, ...)? I honestly do not know, but in my very junior estimation, no one knows the correct answer (my hunch is that the most constrained and accurate wording, in terms of actual tax policy, may be best). And how the question is framed can significantly affect the median voter result. Many, many others factors must be considered (preference falsification comes immediately to mind, in a major way), but the question is far from being resolved. I eagerly anticipate the future debate, as to my young mind this (the post title) is the central question of public choice and political science.

(Caplan's suggestion of a dissertation on this topic is absolutely awesome, but unfortunately I will not pursue it. I have now locked-in to my dissertation topic: an economic analysis of the origins and consequences of voting rights expansions, with an historical application to the early 19th century U.S. [much, much more to come, I promise!]. However, this is a great topic which I intend to further research and eventually write about. Someone should definitely claim as their own for a dissertation).

If Marion County had split 56%-44% as did Lake County, Clinton would have won Indiana not by two points but by five points.  Anyone think the national conversation this week would have been the same at that margin?  So, yeah...big ups to Indy on this Pole Day morning.

None of the MSNBC journalists called McAuliffe on this.

UPDATE (7:12pm): Keith Olbermann just brought it up to Russert, citing RealClearPolitics.

UPDATE (7:24pm): MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan just claimed that Obama led in Indiana by 7 points two weeks ago. 

UPDATE (10:27pm): Eugene Robinson just joked that Hillary might come on stage, eventually, late at night, if she holds on to a tiny Indiana victory, and claim that her campaign had come from 35 points behind.

Is there a difference between RENT CONTROL and RENT STABILIZATION?

Some of the people who email us say "rent controlled" but actually MEAN rent stabilized -- they do not know the difference.

Why is it so hard to be accurate? There is a difference between rent control and rent stabilization, as only about 50,000 rent controlled units exist vs. more than one million stabilized units, and rent control has a different set of regulations than rent stabilization.

Why is it so hard to realize that government euphemisms don't take hold over the vernacular overnight?  These things take time...