Economists Rule!

Before the weekend, Hillary Clinton was expected to win Indiana by 5 percent and lose North Carolina to Barack Obama by only about 8 percent. Then, on Sunday before the election, Hillary made the mistake of offending a group of people who she thought were irrelevant.

You know the rest: Hillary barely won 1 percent more votes than Obama in Indiana and lost North Carolina by more than 14 percent.

What seemingly innocuous group did Hillary offend? Economists, of course. On ABC’s Sunday morning show, George Stephanopoulos asked, in reference to her gas-tax holiday plan, “can you name an economist who thinks this makes sense?”

“I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” Hillary answered. “If we had a president who used all of the tools of the presidency, we would design it in such a way where it would be implemented effectively.”

Apparently, economics is not one of the tools of the presidency, or at least of a Clinton presidency. She adds that she wants to solve the housing crisis by freezing interest rates, solve the health care crisis by freezing health care costs, and solve the energy crisis by making the oil companies pay to find the solution — all ideas that most economists would say are self-defeating.

Many generic brands have now arrived click here now cialis cheapest on the world stage. Being capable of having a sexual intercourse is a vigorous physical cialis pills australia activity, which increases heart rate as well as cardiac work. For women and men it is advised not to consume this medication if you have severe heart, liver and http://pharma-bi.com/ sildenafil 25mg kidney problems. In addition, the cost of this method eventually will generic tadalafil tablets end up spending unnecessarily to own a device which you will get can help you in rebuilding the sexual strength to last longer in bed. “The American wage earner and American housewife are a lot better economists than most economists care to admit,” our 38th president liked to say. “They know that a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take from you everything you have.”

I am not sure Americans are as knowledgeable as Ford claimed, but apparently some know something about economics. Hillary’s television ads said, “Let’s make the oil companies pay the gas tax.” How dense do you have to be to not realize that the oil companies will simply pass that cost onto consumers, thus saving people nothing? Or, seeing their profits decline, that the companies will invest less in future energy supplies, thus making oil prices rise even more.

Obama called Hillary’s plan “pandering,” but in fact most electioneering today is pandering. What made Hillary’s plan particularly absurd was that she was proposing to do something before she would be elected. If the idea was so good, why just do it for the summer? Why not promise to make it permanent if she is elected president? Those kinds of questions would certainly make some people question her sincerity.

The gas tax debate displaced the Jeremiah Wright debate in the last week of the campaign. Apparently, enough people understand enough economics to cause Hillary to lose some votes.

H.L. Mencken famously said that “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” But it is possible, just possible, that Hillary is losing because she underestimates the intelligence of American voters. Maybe she should have pandered to economists.

Update: Fake Steve Jobs predicts that Hillary will quit the race today (Thursday). I suspect he may be right — her only reason to stay in the race now is to raise enough money to repay the $11.4 million she personally loaned her campaign. Even if Fake Steve is wrong, his post on how Hillary tried to raise money in Silicon Valley two years ago is hilarious (and may even be slightly true).