Couldn’t Help But Notice (010908)
Denial over Iraq is apparently a deeply embedded river that runs through the Democratic Party. That there is not one word of credit for Petraeus is disgraceful, and should not be lost on the men and women of the US military when they vote.
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Federal tax collections in December appear to have been pretty good, based on December’s last Daily Treasury Statement:
About $10 billion of the reason why December 2007 looks like it will come in about 10% better than December 2006 is because the 31st was on a Monday (vs. on a Sunday in 2006). Withholding tax collections that day were a very high $20 billion (vs. $10 billion on December 29, 2006). Fiscal year-to-date receipts are running just over 6% ahead of last year, but if you take out the $10 billion timing difference, it’s more like 4.5%, which is mediocre.
The Monthly Treasury Statement for December comes out Friday afternoon.
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The previous item swings nicely into a column at IBDeditorials.com from Larry Kudlow: “Tax, Rate Cuts Would Perk Up The Slowdown.” Well of course they would. If Congress doesn’t pass any cuts, it will be for purely political reasons — the equivalent of saying “let the economy eat cake” and then blaming the situation on someone else.
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The recession has arrived, say analysts (link probably requires subscription). Pretty remarkable statement, given that it takes two consecutive quarters of negative growth for a recession to exist. So these geniuses know that the economy is going bad now, and KNOW that it will stay that way for the next six months? I call BS. I say that these clowns are just trying to get noticed, and are hoping nobody remembers when the likely-positive first-quarter GDP reports start coming out in late April.
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Google the Destroyer?
….. concern about Google is justified, not because of potential to take over the whole information business, but because of its potential and incentives to destroy the ability of the providers of the other components of the info system to perform their functions of creation, distribution, and organization. These components were already under severe stress as the forces of digitization, interconnectedness, and P2P wrecked their familiar business models, and Google is both profiting from these forces, and thus happily encouraging them, and making it difficult to develop new business models.
The concern about Google is based on a fear that it does not share this concern with restoring the viability of business models other than those based on advertising. Indeed, the concern goes further - that Google understands perfectly that the lack of property-rights based business models enhances its market power as the alpha dog of the ad biz, and that it will exercise its political and PR clout to prevent the development of alternatives. Hence its support for the academic communitarians, its hostility to proprietary software, its endorsement of net neutrality, its foot-dragging on YouTube filtering, its development of Android.
Boiling it down: Anything a person or company creates as an online service can be cloned by someone else, thrown up on the web for free with advertising, and make the paid alternative not worth having bothered with. So why create anything of meaningful value? (yes, I know that has media-related implications that I’ve never been totally at peace with)
Perhaps it’s overwrought, but it’s also worth keeping an eye on. The company is not that far from having control of a critical choke point in the information economy. And this is a company whose “do no evil” mantra covers up several serious ethical shortcomings. Remember that Google was among those that wanted, and still want, the protection of so-called Net Neutrality, and didn’t seem to think much about its censorship agreement with Communist China until after the deal was done.
