Matt Yglesias

Oct 7th, 2008 at 11:39 pm

The New Hoovers

225px_herbert_hoover.jpg

There’s something very odd about the Herbert Hooverism that seems to have taken over American journalism. This was the second presidential debate in which the moderator decided to editorialize heavy in favor of the odd proposition that amidst a recession caused by a credit crunch at a time when the federal government is able to borrow funds on very favorable terms that we ought to be imposing austerity budgeting. I have a bunch of disagreements with McCain’s policy proposals, but to his credit even he won’t embrace this. Mike Scherer seems to find the candidates’ refusal to follow Jim Lehrer and Tom Brokaw off the cliff to be some kind of dishonesty:

Neither candidate has the courage to speak straight with the American people about our nation’s fiscal problems. Asked about the financial crisis, McCain talked about energy independence, hitting the same talking points he used in July. Obama talked about the need to give tax cuts to the middle class, and expand spending programs, a proposal he put forward last year. Both men have proposed policies that will lead to an increase in the deficit, according to independent analysts, even without a dramatic economic downturn, which looks increasingly inevitable. Neither man has shown any clear intention to tell Americans to face head on the hard economic times that await us. This is politics. The candidates are playing it safe, not telling voters anything they don’t want to hear. They choose to demagogue Wall Street instead.

This is ludicrous. You need to respond to a downturn with expansionary policies of some kind. In recent decades, we’ve preferred relying on expansionary monetary policy (Fed interest rate cuts) rather than Keynesian deficit spending. But at the moment, there’s no real room left for the Fed to cut rates. That means you need deficit spending. Among other things, the nature of state and local budgets means that a contraction in the economy will naturally lead to a contraction in state and local spending. That will lead to further contraction in the economy. If the federal government did what Scherer’s suggesting and added its own cutbacks to state government cutbacks, local government cutbacks, and private sector cutbacks that would only deepen the recession.

Meanwhile, as you may have noticed, there’s a credit crunch afoot. A lot of people or business who might think they have solid ideas about how to invest some money in new production or sales are finding they can’t get the loans they need to do that. One of the few entities that still can easily raise large quantities of money on favorable terms is the federal government. If the feds don’t take up that opportunity and borrow cash that gets plowed into something or other, then there’s going to be no new economic activity at all. What we ought to be doing is debating not whether to spend, but what to spend the money on since, clearly, it’s much better to have the money spent on something useful than on something pointless.

Instead, though, a lot of the press’ leading lights seem to think we ought to follow Herbert Hoover off the cliff. Everyone’s been living too high on the hog and we need to liquidate everything. Massive suffering will be good for us.






56 Responses to “The New Hoovers”

  1. Bahrad Says:

    The media agreed with Hoover - at least the major media of the time (though certainly there were some socialist-leaning press that disagreed). The media are fundamentally conservative.

    And I think that’s how it should be, to some extent. I don’t really want journalists proposing policies. The issue is that a would-be leader needs to ignore the journalist framing about making choices and speak directly to the people. Obama has come close to doing that, and I think one reason he doesn’t want to is that he wants to hammer McCain over reckless tax cuts - and to do that, he needs some framing of limited resources and choices.

    But results matter. Everyone will support a New Deal 2.0 if it proves to work, in the short-term and certainly over the long-term if it continues to effective.

  2. Don Williams Says:

    Matthew ought to at least consider the possibility that the economists are full of shit. Our debt to GDP ratio is getting dangerously high. Yes, I know some countries are in even worse shape — but the US is the world’s largest economy and to some extent we’ve been carrying fuckups like Italy.

    Where I think the economists are stupid is that they don’t distinguish between wasteful spending and investment.

    If a private individual is in debt and has a low income, they might spend money on education to get a better job. But if they piss their meager funds away on wild drunken binges, they will be much worse off as time goes on — although life may look better in the near term.

    Wasteful spending has greatly hurt this country — we are spending hundreds of billions per year just on interest –money that is badly needed by millions of our citizens.

    Keynes’ stupid shit “In the long run we’re all dead” ignores the fact that we will be dead a lot sooner if we cut our veins the way he proposed.

    Clinton didn’t prosper because he pissed money away — the Internet was a very good investment. Today, developing new energy sources would be a good idea to pursue.

  3. Chris Says:

    I must hand it to Scherer; he’s gone from someone I’ve never heard of, to the leading contender for the famed Pickler award, given to the most obvious practitioner of sanctimonious conservative hackery masquerading as unbiased journalism.

    You can stop now, Mike; your victory is assured. Also, you’ve completely convinced us you’re a prick; really, your work here is done.

  4. blah Says:

    And the stupid fucking journalists said peep during Bush’s 8-year spending binge that created much of our current fiscal problems. They sure didn’t complain when Bush was maxing out the credit card to pay for his adventure in Iraq.

    Assholes.

  5. Donald A. Coffin Says:

    Andrew Mellon must still live:

    “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

    At least in some psrts of the media…

  6. tomj Says:

    The moderators talk as if the candidate’s policies are candy and not the main course. Why either McCain or Obama would scale back their plans is not apparent, unless the plans were something like invading a country for no reason.

    Both candidates’ plans are premised on the need to stimulate growth. Fortunately we have seen the effects of one plan over the last eight years, so we know it doesn’t work. Obama’s plan might work, and might be more helpful if things get worse.

  7. jamie Says:

    You know, Hoover ignored Mellon when he gave that advice. That’s the irony-he refused to let banks be liquidated. Read some Amity Schlaes (spelling?)

  8. Robert Says:

    “Massive suffering will be good for us.” Ah, good old western masochism. It’s almost endearing. But, rather obviously, any moral logic that promotes suffering is deeply flawed and should be spurned.

  9. El Cid Says:

    I’ll give the moderators a tiny amount of credit, of a sort: I think they’re commitment right now (not during the Bush Jr. Monarchy) on cutting spending during a recession is born mainly out of stupidity, and blunt ignorance, rather than a fiendish dedication to Hooverism.

    I could be wrong, though.

  10. Don Williams Says:

    1) One thing the media doesn’t mention is that US debt — government, household, corporate — is now 295 percent of our GDP. That ratio has not been that bad since the Great Depression:
    http://www.alkalizeforhealth.net/Ldebtclock.htm

    2) How will it be paid off? It won’t — that’s the purpose of a Great Depression: massive defaults

    With the result being the loss of enormous wealth, and the survivors burying their gold in the backyard because the government will seize it if it can.

    As always the New York Times will point this out only AFTER you are too hopelessly fucked to do anything about it.

    Just as they rethought those Judith Miller stories after about 2000 soldiers had died.

    Oh –and Punch wonders if you have heard that Wall Street may be getting a little risky in its management.

  11. DTM Says:

    As an aside, I laugh every time Palin lists Obama’s supposed trillion dollars of new spending as a “job killing” measure.

    But anyway, I think part of the problem is that some people equate spending with debt, and in the long run it is true that excessive government debt can have a recessionary effect (although it is also true that right now, the short term effects would likely be the opposite). But of course if you paid for the new spending by increasing tax rates on the wealthy, you wouldn’t have to increase debt (and since we are nowhere close to the marginal tax rates at which raising taxes might cause a recessionary effect, there would be no Laffer Curve issue either).

    In short, I think operating in the background here is the idea that raising taxes is somehow not an option. And that helps explain the failure of some people to realize that more spending (if paid for by raising taxes) would very likely have a stimulus effect.

  12. kafka Says:

    Meanwhile, as you may have noticed, there’s a credit crunch afoot.

    Some would call it a debt deflation…..

  13. Donald A. Coffin Says:

    According to Philip E. Strahan, “Bank Diversification, Economic Diversification?”
    (http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2006/el2006-10.html) over 9,000 banks closed between 1930 and 1933–nearly half the banks in the US. So, Jamie, maybe banks were not “liquidated” while Hoover was president, but for damned sure a lot of them failed. You got a clear distinction between “liquidation” and “failure”?

    And, yes, it is true that Hoover detested Mellon and his advice. But, in fact, between 1929 and 1933, a lot of that liquidation happened. Farmers went broke and lost their farms. The stock market crashed. Banks failed. Could Hoover have done much about it? Doubtful. Was Mellon happy? Probably.

  14. max Says:

    If a private individual is in debt and has a low income, they might spend money on education to get a better job. But if they piss their meager funds away on wild drunken binges, they will be much worse off as time goes on — although life may look better in the near term.

    There you go, Matthew: it’s those poor people over there who must have fucked up somehow who are going to pay during economic hard times. On the other hand, should really large banks get into trouble, well, we have to do anything to save them, and/or the stock market. Never mind that the stock market goes up and comes down and it is, in fact, supposed to do that.

    The funny part is that Hoover really tried to be proactive, but he could never really manage to get very far; in the meantime, lots of people were complaining about not enough fiscal discipline. This is pretty much the same sort of magical thinking that says tax cuts solve everything.

    Hilariously, no one sees Alan Greenspan as being Keynesian in his attempts to keep the big bubble inflated. That’s different: that’s helping the economy.

    max
    ['It isn't even greed, it's simply a total inability to understand that if the country goes down, those guys go with it.']

  15. John Says:

    I’ll give the moderators a tiny amount of credit, of a sort: I think they’re commitment right now (not during the Bush Jr. Monarchy) on cutting spending during a recession is born mainly out of stupidity, and blunt ignorance, rather than a fiendish dedication to Hooverism.

    Isn’t that worse? I mean, Hoover’s policies were, within the dominant paradigm of the time, defensible, and Hoover did his best at the time. But his failure occurred, what, 75 years ago? It’s incredibly famous. The fact that people like Hoover (and MacDonald in England, and Laval in France, and so forth, thought that the best way to deal with the Depression was austerity measures and budget balancing is well known. That this was massively unsuccessful is also pretty well known. That our leading prestige journalists are completely unaware of all of this is inexcusable.

    There is, I think, an argument to be made against the Keynesian position. One can argue that the New Deal didn’t actually do much good, that things got better under FDR because we’d already reached the bottom of the depression in late 1932, and things were bound to swing upwards anyway, and so forth. If Tom Brokaw or Jim Lehrer or (God forbid) Michael Scherer wants to make that argument, they’re welcome to - it’s an interesting question and one worth debating. If they want to act as though they’ve never heard of Keynes, though, someone ought to punch them in the face. It’s outrageous and absurd.

  16. John Says:

    Oh, by the way, since everyone loves the Nazis, the best comparison to make is not with Hoover. Instead, you should compare this policy to that of German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, whose austerity measures were practically identical to Hoover’s, but who has the advantage of being right before Hitler. Austerity in a Depression leads to the Nazis! No Second Holocaust!!

  17. wiley Says:

    Thank you, Robert. Suffering is not good. I will admit to a little schadenfreude for the fat cats who are sweating buckets, but I don’t see how people working three jobs to cover expenses are going to benefit from deprivation.

    NAFTA and the loss of our manufacturing base; the trillions(s) dollar wars with the “stream-lined” military, obscenely profiteering contractors, and more mercenaries than soldiers; the extreme concentration of wealth, the perverse orgy of unchecked speculation on Wall Street, and the repackaging of debt so creative that who actually owns most of it is anyone’s guess; floods, hurricanes, collapsing bridges and levees (McCain wants to add a lot of nuclear power plants to the disaster roster)…

    Hoover was another time, another economy. A different people. A different currency (backed by gold). Maybe invoking Hoover makes it seem like we’ve been here before, that we’re in familiar territory. Maybe framing the present in terms of the past is a way to avoid the suggestion that this could be Worse than the Great Depression, or a Tragically Impossible ClusterF*ck Like Nothing Ever Seen Before.

  18. brooksfoe Says:

    I was disappointed to find Obama playing along with this line, in his response to that woman’s trenchant question about why she should trust either of the two parties to get us out of the mess they’ve created. Obama said “You’re right. When families are in tough times, they cut back on their spending, but that’s not the way it’s been working in Washington.” But of course that SHOULDN’T be the way it works in Washington. This is one of those cases where average people’s instincts are exactly wrong — Washington should restrain spending in good times, and spend more in hard times. The government needs to do the opposite of what normal people do — that’s basic countercyclical recession-fighting.

    It’s also understandable that Obama isn’t going to use a town-hall debate format where he has 2 minutes to speak to try and explain countercyclical fiscal policy to the average voter. But one would hope that the people we expect to be better informed than the average voter, including us in the media, would do our bloody jobs for once and try to inform people rather than misleading them.

  19. Adirondacker Says:

    Matt Y. wrote: In recent decades, we’ve preferred relying on expansionary monetary policy (Fed interest rate cuts) rather than Keynesian deficit spending.

    Um um we’ve been doing both. The Fed has been keeping interest rates low while we’ve been spending on the Iraq war. Stereotypical Keynesian deficit spending is WPA leaf rakers. We’ve been pumping money into defense contractors for years to support the Iraq War. Been throwing money at the all volunteer armed forces too. Not to mention outsourcing a lot of the work in Iraq. Reagan did it too, instead of hiring leaf rakers spent money on the Defense Department. All those bright shiny toys we gave to the DoD came from somewhere. Not much difference if you are spending money on raking leaves or spending money on manufacturing weapons systems that don’t work. Well at least the leaf rakers make the parks cleaner….

  20. skeptic Says:

    I have a bunch of disagreements with McCain’s policy proposals, but to his credit even he won’t embrace this.

    I must be missing something here. McCain has proposed a spending freeze in both debates. How is that different than “austerity budgeting”?

  21. Realist Says:

    The important thing about Keynesian fiscal policy is that if you increase spending and lower taxes on the middle class in bad times, you have to decrease spending and increase taxes on the middle class in the good times. Otherwise it doesn’t work. But increasing taxes and decreasing spending when the economy, and therefore government revenue, is doing well, is politically impossible.

  22. John DE Says:

    It seems to me that the anchors’ views were shaped by the 1980s/late 90s. In that period, politicians talked about various plans and the deficit grew at a crazy rate — the responsible thing for the anchor to do was call them on it. To these anchors, those times have returned.

    It has nothing to do with the credit crisis.

  23. rapier Says:

    No matter what one thinks fiscal policy should be is now besides the point. The budget has been destroyed and not one dollar has gone out to the real economy to make one job. Three trillion dollars and counting has gone down the rat hole of prop jobs for damaged paper. The world has so far been happy to lend us money for that but they won’t lend us money to build a road or give food to the hungry.

    Or at least that is the probability as I see it. Treasury rates at some point are going to soar and the interest cost on the gigantic deficit is going to be an enormous drag on spending, and the willingness and even ability to spend for fiscal stimulus.

    Everything people take for granted has changed. I’ve said it again and again. The economic crisis is the biggest event most people have ever or will ever face. Everything has changed or will change. Every assumption about their economic future along with every cultural and political standard is going to be upset.

    The big question politically is will the authoritarians take over. I say yes.

  24. pimp hand strikes! Says:

    Hoover actually vastly increased government spending in response to the great depression. I know matt isn’t one of these guys to get all hung up about, you know, the truth or whatever, but this seems egregious even for him.

  25. k Says:

    David Ignatius, today: “And finally, since we’re all thinking about analogies to the Great Depression, am I the only person who finds something Hooveresque in McCain’s repeated insistence on the need to cut federal spending as a response to the economic crisis — even to the point of calling for a spending freeze. That same kind of anti-government, anti-spending rhetoric was at the center of Hoover’s disastrously failed recovery plan.”

  26. rea Says:

    Well, you can’t balance the budget at the bottom of the business cycle–it has to be balanced at the top. And we’ve got to at least try a stimulus, rather than the anti-stimulus tactic of trying to balance the budget now–we’ve can’t just announce, “the economy is going bust; see you on the other side.” Maybe we’re already screwed to the point where that will happen regardless of what we do. Bush’s 8-year folly has left us will little rooom to manuver. Nevertheless, there is no advantage to be gained by giving up . . .

  27. Owen Says:

    Skeptic and K are right. McCain’s “across the board spending freeze” is austerity measures. So are the reductions in spending that he keeps talking about.

  28. El Cid Says:

    damp hand: Hoover’s commitment to public spending to actually aid regular Americans came years into the Depression, and most publicly in 1932, his last year in office. Beforehand he mostly maintained a pretty public position in favor of voluntary coordinated efforts.

    Hoover was a decent and motivated man who tried to help his countrymen through the principles he held dear.

    What happened was that the entire world became willing to consider interventionist solutions which beforehand had been considered impossible.

    Bush Jr., on the other hand, is a callous jackass who has never, ever helped his countrymen, and is committed equally to free market fundamentalist ideology when it applies to intervening for ordinary people as he is to dogged incompetence and venality.

    I give Hoover the up on both Bush Jr. and McCain. I find it plausible that had Hoover won in 1932, he would have grown to adopt many of the elite-sponsored interventions on the scale of FDR. Bush Jr. and McCain would sink the nation into the trenches if they were given the chance.

  29. Njorl Says:

    Not that it needs it, but this is another nail in the coffin of “supply side economics”. Keeping wealth in the hands of the wealthiest does no good when they are afraid to invest or lend it. If the US is the only borrower people are trusting now, then it can’t hurt growth to obtain that money via taxation rather than borrowing.

  30. Kiran Says:

    I’ve been saying Keynesian economics is dead. Its pretty tough to deal with. We are already deficit spending by a fifth of the federal budget (pre-bailout).

    I feel bad for Obama, massive deficits are the way to buy your way out of recession (ask ronnie) , we already have massive deficits.

    Yep, GWB managed to break Keynesian economics. Admittedly his father didn’t understand them much either (raising taxes as the business cycle starts to fall).

  31. Don Williams Says:

    1) Stock index futures indicate that the markets will open down another 3 percent this morning.

    2) But what’s interesting is that gold is soaring — up past $900. Given that commodities usually FALL with approaching recession, that suggests the world thinks the US dollar is turning to shit.

    3) This is the dilemma the Fed was in back in the 1930s. The lying economists , starting with Milton Friedman, talked about the Fed being too stupid to listen to Keynes. But they were being dishonest by ignoring how the Fed was in a bind. Measures to Stimulate the Economy — huge deficit spending by the government,rate cuts, etc — can also KILL the economy if it encourages Capital Flight.

    4) Sometimes it is actually impossible to rescue a country from the consequences of prolonged corruption and stupidity.

    5) Of course, the Conservatives extolled Milton because he promoted their lies. Milton made the Depression the fault of the Fed, not of the greedy capitalists playing casino on Wall Street.

    Milton also covered up John Kenneth Galbraith’s Truth — that the Depression occurred largely because of a vast inequity in wealth and income. The people with Demand didn’t have any money to buy — and the people with Money to Buy didn’t need any more Supply. The wealthy were already living like kings and were sated.

    6) The US government doesn’t need to SPEND more to get us out of this mess. It needs to levy confiscatory taxes on the Superrich and transfer the wealth to those who make less than $100,000 per year. Initially, for pure survival — to give people the means to buy food,shelter, clothing etc.

    Later, to encourage commerce that provides REAL VALUE and which improves our lives — vice the bullshit that Bush has wasted $Trillions on.

  32. Don Williams Says:

    The government can start by making the Superrich pay off the $9 Trillion in debt ran up by THEIR Presidents — Ronald Reagan, George H Bush, and George W Bush. That would spare the workers from having to pay hundreds of billions per year in interest to wealthy bond holders.

    The Government doesn’t need to SPEND –it just needs to give the bottom 95 percent of the population the means to spend.

  33. Don Williams Says:

    This is why I argued so strongly in previous weeks that the Democrats should have made the Superrich pay for the cost of the $1.5 Trillion Wall Street bailout by including a Surtax in the Bailout Bill.

    That didn’t fly obviously. Because I didn’t include a $250,000 campaign donation with the suggestion.

  34. John Says:

    I find it plausible that had Hoover won in 1932, he would have grown to adopt many of the elite-sponsored interventions on the scale of FDR.

    I don’t think there was any danger of Hoover winning in 1932. It’s worth noting, though, that FDR campaigned on a theme of balanced budgets that year. That quickly went out the window.

  35. vhliv Says:

    I think El Cid is correct about the perspective Jim Lehrer and Tom Brokaw are coming from is the anxiety about the budget deficit circa 1990. What amazes me is that they really expected either candidate to break with previous campaign rhetoric or to get specific. Any step seriously outside their existing plans would have left them open to charges of flip-flopping and probably hurt their relationship with their respective bases, and in the case of Obama set the stage for opponents to tar him with his own words if he proceeds with counter-cyclical spending policies. But then as has already been noted before these moderators don’t seem to know their history as well as they would like us to believe. Had they looked back at the 1932 elections they would have known that one of the points the FDR and Hoover platforms agreed was on the need for a balanced budget. They might also have stumbled on a point I believe FDR made to the effect that a presidential campaign is not a time for a lecture in economics.

  36. AlanC9 Says:

    Don, what’s with all those Odd Capitalizations? Maybe it’s just me, but that’s always struck me as one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Internet Crank.

  37. nick Says:

    a program of selectively imposed austerity measures, targeted at pundits, would be a start….

  38. Dilan Esper Says:

    I’ve been saying Keynesian economics is dead. Its pretty tough to deal with. We are already deficit spending by a fifth of the federal budget

    That’s the problem. You can’t be a half-assed Keynesian– you have to impose contractionary fiscal policy during good times, which we haven’t been doing the past 7 years, to create the space for an expansionary fiscal policy in the bad years.

    If you run deficits the entire time, you crowd out investment with the higher interest rates and you don’t get much of a stimulus.

    Look, I can’t say I know exactly what to do right now, but the idea that we can just deficit spend our way to prosperity is way, way too simplistic.

  39. The Golux Says:

    I was at our usual post-racquetball dinner last week, and the other guys were talking about old-timers who loved FDR because of the WPA jobs that had kept them alive in the thirties. They obviously thought such affection was quaint, because they trotted out the old bromides about FDR’s policies not really bringing the country out of the depression, that the war was what got the economy going again. That’s true up to a point, but what the hell was the war effort if not massive deficit spending? What if there had been no war? Clearly, the government would have had to spend massively on something else, or the depression would have continued much longer.

  40. The Golux Says:

    As an additional point, the criticisms of FDR are flawed because if the war spending saved the economy, that only means that the shortcoming of the New Deal was that it wasn’t audacious enough, not that it was necessarily flawed.

  41. petr Says:

    Dilan Esper sayeth;If you run deficits the entire time, you crowd out investment with the higher interest rates and you don’t get much of a stimulus.

    Look, I can’t say I know exactly what to do right now, but the idea that we can just deficit spend our way to prosperity is way, way too simplistic.

    Um… please try and pay attention. Twisting words isn’t helpful. Nobody, ever, said we were hoping to ‘deficit spend our way to prosperity’ that’s just Reagan-era spin…

    We are all hoping to deficit spend our way into stability… There is a world of difference between stability and prosperity.

  42. Dilan Esper Says:

    We are all hoping to deficit spend our way into stability

    And that’s simplistic too. The deficit that funds your stimulus package will come on top of a deficit that is already 1/2 a trillion dollars plus an additional potentially $400 billion a year from the bailout package. So the government will be borrowing an additional trillion dollars, plus the interest on the national debt that will also go up.

    Now, where’s this money going to come from? That’s right, it’s going to come from the same financiers who would otherwise invest that money in private business, including the American economy. This will increase the cost of credit for businesses, just the same as a Fed interest rate hike would.

    The point being, when you run big enough deficits, you don’t get a significant stimulus anymore. All you do is make the problem worse.

    So no, you can’t deficit spend your way out of this crisis in any shape or form, whether it is to stability or prosperity. Unless you want to start World War III.

  43. Alejandro Says:

    A lot of those financiers are Arab sheiks and oil magnates. The price of oil just went south. They are hurting (no seriously) and cannot afford to prop up our debt through T-bills and the like anymore. They will be buying less of those (unless interest rates go up).

    So oil is down (yay) but the people that make the most money from oil are the ones that finance our debt, which we are piling on at ever increasing rates.

    I see this country going bankrupt within a year or so.

  44. Alejandro Says:

    The Golux Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
    As an additional point, the criticisms of FDR are flawed because if the war spending saved the economy, that only means that the shortcoming of the New Deal was that it wasn’t audacious enough, not that it was necessarily flawed.

    Maybe what we should so then is have programs to ration food and other goods so we can produce a whole lot of weapons and ammunition and ships and planes. Then we can just take them out into the desert and blow them up. That way we can save the economy!! And no one will have to be killed!! GENIUS!!

  45. battery Says:

    laptop battery
    laptop batteries

  46. laptop battery Says:

    laptop battery

  47. battery Says:

    laptop battery

  48. viagra Says:

    Great site. Good info

  49. tramadol Says:

    It is the coolest site,keep so!
    tramadol

  50. tramadol Says:

    tramadol
    I want to say - thank you for this!

  51. viagra brand Says:

    If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
    cheap brand pfizer viagra

  52. cheap viagra Says:

    It is the coolest site,keep so! viagra

  53. viagra cheap Says:

    Thanks for the review!
    viagra

  54. Prawl Says:

    Outstanding post and blog…..I’m very impressed with all the usefull information here! fat loss 4 idiots

  55. Cambre Says:

    Outstanding post and blog…..I’m very impressed with all the usefull information here! Copy N Profit

  56. Rosada Says:

    Idk whether to laugh or cry…


Jump to Top

About Wonk Room | Contact Us | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy (off-site) | RSS | Donate
© 2005-2008 Center for American Progress Action Fund
imageRegisterimageimageRSSimageimageimage image
image
Advertisement

Visit Our Affiliated Sites

image image
image 

Books By Matthew Yglesias
Book Cover

Heads in the Sand

Buy the book


imageTopic Cloud


Featured

image
Subscribe to the Progress Report




Contact Matthew Yglesias
Use this form to contact blog author Matthew Yglesias.

Name:
Email:
Tip:
(required)


imageArchives


imageBlog Roll


imageAbout Matt YglesiasimageimageContact MeimageimageDonateimage