I’ll admit, I follow US politics about as closely as a foreign amateur can sanely follow it. Okay, delete “sanely”. I deserve a free anorak. But this I don’t get.

Hillary Clinton has lent her campaign $5 million.

No, seriously. This is her campaign. But she wants her money back. Nevermind that a champion of the working class, campaigning against the filthy rich conservative capitalist scum with tax breaks, happens to have $5 million in spare change lying around idle. Why didn’t she send that to the IRS to fund universal healthcare?

But seriously, how do you lend money to a campaign? To your own campaign, of all things? Most people “donate” to a campaign. Isn’t she willing to donate? Doesn’t she have enough faith in the campaign? Does she expect to get the money back from suckers who have the conviction to donate in future?

And does this suggest that the GOP isn’t going to get the dream opponent, the one they’ve always wanted to beat just for the personal satisfaction of watching a Clinton go down, in the same way the Democrats would have loved to run against, say, Jeb Bush?

Does this suggest that Barack Obama, the rookie, has more money than the venerable matriarch of the Clinton dynasty? That she’s the underdog now?

John McCain took out a loan to finance his campaign. This makes sense. He’s going to have to pay it back, win or lose. But is Clinton’s campaign going to have to repay her if she wins? Even if she loses? This boggles the mind. It’s not like campaigns are for-profit companies. What sort of organisation is left to repay the debt if she loses? Did McCain even think to consider this eventuality when he sponsored McCain-Feingold?

I mean, how do you lend money to yourself to finance your own career?

I sure hope, if she wins, she’ll tell the rest of us this trick. It sure sounds wonderfully useful. “Look how much money I’m willing to lend myself! Surely, Mr Angel Ventura, if I trust myself this much, you can fund my idea for a non-lethal light-sabre design — named Taser-B-Gone — that I can sell by the gross to police forces around the world?”

Update: Al Giordano reasons that the money is already spent, that the Clinton campaign now faces a major budget deficit (making a mockery of her “fiscal responsibility” claims even before she can prove it to be empty rhetoric as president), and that she is running a “match the Clinton campaign” advert in which she describes the loan as a gift from Hillary and Bill. Whether that’s true depends on what the definition of “give” is, I guess.

Update: Tim Dickinson, writing for Rolling Stone, points out that Bill Clinton said this kind of self-financing “clearly violates the spirit of campaign finance reform”. Far be it from me to defend American campaign finance rules, of course, but if the Clintons want to use it as a club against political opponents, they should wield it more carefully, lest they accidentally bop themselves on the head.

Two well-written items on economics caught my attention recently. They’re worth reading to get some perspective on issues that are sure to be mangled, spun, highlighted or covered up by the political candidates running for president in the US.

One is an essay written by South African tech entrepreneur, Mark Shuttleworth, a couple of weeks ago, in response to the first of the Fed’s two panicky rate cuts. With admirable simplicity, it explains the impact of using interest rates to modulate the economy, and why the US Federal Reserve, both under Alan “Maestro” Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, must shoulder much of the blame for causing the credit crunch, and for eroding economic performance with inflationary monetary policy. Shuttleworth says people who take over at the bottom and lead upwards do so even if “their voodoo had no mojo”. Which, applied to central banking, is as good an explanation as any of where the real “voodoo economics” lies.

Another is an angry editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that takes offence at the fact that the fiscal stimulus on which the Bush adminstration and Democratic leaders in congress agreed will prove to be nothing but an injection that merely postpones the pain, and increases the budget deficit for no discernable long-term benefit. Worse, the resultant deficit will be unjustly wielded as a blunt weapon in the election campaign, and could derail what should have been one of Bush’s most durable and important legacies: making his tax cuts permanent.

A road sign in Newberry, South Carolina.

(Hat tip:  Kevin, over at Wizbang.)

That’s it, then. Campaign 2008 is over, and Mike Huckabee has won.

You wouldn’t dare argue, would you?

No wonder the issues in the US election campaign are turning towards economic concerns. Not only are there some (economic concerns, that is), but the core Bush-bashing issue of his presidency is starting to look rather limp. MoveOn.org had to turn to vicious slander in its effort to discredit the Congressional testimony of General Petreaus as propaganda for the White House. The media has, in general, been fairly reliably opposed to the Iraq war. Reporters have consistently hedged good news with bad, and are usually skeptical of any news of progress. Some outright suppress it, revelling in predictions of the inglorious defeat of the US-led coalition.

Yet the orthodox view of Iraq as a disaster is under threat. Even the BBC is pointing to statistics that — across the board, it says — show the situation in Iraq is improving:

Is Iraq getting better? The statistics say so, across the board.

Over the past three months, there has been a sharp and sustained drop in all forms of violence. The figures for dead and wounded, military and civilian, have also greatly improved.

All across Baghdad, which has seen the worst of the violence, streets are springing back to life. Shops and restaurants which closed down are back in business.

People walk in crowded streets in the evening, when just a few months ago they would have been huddled behind locked doors in their homes.

Everybody agrees that things are much better.

Except the BBC, of course:

But is the improvement only skin deep? And will it last once the American troops, whose “surge” has clearly made a difference, begin to scale down?

Several quotations in the article do support the view that security, progress and peace in Iraq remain dependent on coalition forces and reconstruction efforts. Which leads to only one conclusion: those calling for a rapid withdrawal (including presidential candidates that do) are willing to give up the gains made, condemn Iraq to rule by partisan or insurgent militias, and sacrifice the peace and prosperity of Iraqis on the altar of political expediency. Perversely, if that happens they’ll get to say, “I told you so,” instead of paying the price for their betrayal. I hope the American people won’t let that happen.

The Carpe Diem blog has an interesting table confirming an argument Greg Mankiw recently made in an op-ed in the New York Times.

It is standard rhetorical fare on the left (and among foreigners who just love to find reasons to snipe at the US) to argue that private healthcare is worse than universal, socialised medicine, and the fact that raw life expectancy numbers in the US are lower than in more socialist countries proves this. Turns out the causes of lower raw life expectancy in the US are unrelated to the quality or accessibility of private healthcare, after all. If you account for the effects of premature death resulting from non-health-related fatal injuries, as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development does with its standardised life expectancy measure, the US comes out on top. Go figure.

(Via Greg Mankiw’s blog.)

It is true that the Republicans, in the US, haven’t had a stellar record on government spending since 2000. It has a high standard to meet, if it is to match its own rhetoric. It has been vulnerable to attack over profligacy, and in particular over Bush’s refusal to veto fat-laden bills. (Or rather, his inability to do so in practice because he has no line-item veto.)

It’s got so bad, I’m told, that the Democrats are now the party of fiscal responsibility, and if I’m a small-government libertarian, I should prefer to see Democrats in charge in the US.

Luckily, some people keep track of these things. Witness the House and Senate “RePORK Cards”, published by the Club for Growth, for example. It ranks senators and members of Congress on their voting record against pork barrel spending. These votes all involve amendments to bills aimed at removing discretionary spending earmarks on totally unrelated items.

Some highlights from the Senate, where 15 anti-pork measures came to a vote:

• Only three senators received a perfect score of 100% (and were present for a majority of the votes). All three are Republicans. A fourth, John McCain (R-AZ), was only present for two votes.
• Thirty-six senators scored below 10%. Of those, two are independents, the other 34 are Democrats.
• Next lowest on the list, at 11%, is the junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, who voted for one anti-pork amendments out of the nine for which she was present. Barack Obama scored 33%, or two out of six.
• Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) scored a 53%; Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) scored a 7%, voting for only one amendment.
• The average Republican score was 59%; the average Democratic score was 12%.
• Thanks to this dismal voting record, only two amendments were successful: one to cut funding for spinach growers from the Iraq Supplemental Bill, the other not to spend $1 million on a museum dedicated to the Woodstock Festival. Those that failed included funding a visitors’ center in Louisiana instead of providing shelter for victims of Hurricane Katrina (and they bash Bush over Katrina?), millions of dollars for bicycle paths instead of using the funds to improve bridge safety, and $100 million for the 2008 Republican and Democratic nominating conventions (go figure).

In Congress, where 50 anti-pork amendments were considered, these figures stood out:

• Sixteen members scored 100%. All of them are Republicans.
• The average Republican score was 43%. The average Democratic score was 2% — on average, Democrats voted for one anti-pork measure out of 50!
• The only Democrat to score over 20% was Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) who received an admirable 98% grade.
• 105 congressmen scored a round zero, voting against every single amendment. The “Pork Hall of Shame” includes 81 Democrats and 24 Republicans.
• The Democratic Freshmen — the new blood that was going to restore fiscal responsibility to Congress — scored an abysmal average of 2%. Their Republican counterparts scored 78% on average.

Let nobody ever again tell me (a) to support a Democrat for their spending restraint, and (b) to believe Democrats when they promise to clean up Congress. The only positive from this report is that Americans can hold their representatives accountable for their wasteful spending. Let’s hope they do so.

For an economics piece (and in the New York Times, to boot), this is a beautifully succinct, clear article. Written by Harvard professor of economics, Greg Mankiw, it addresses three of the most frequently cited canards about the US healthcare system and its implications for the notion that free markets and prosperity are two sides of a very valuable coin.

It argues that the following statements, even when superficially correct, do not mean what they appear to mean:

1. The United States has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than Canada, which has national health insurance.
2. Some 47 million Americans do not have health insurance.
3. Health costs are eating up an ever increasing share of American incomes.

The article is an object lesson in interpreting statistics, and as Mankiw writes, “As we look at reform plans, we should be careful not to be fooled by statistics into thinking that the problems we face are worse than they really are.”