1hundredsixty8

 In ways both obvious and subtle, April has been an eventful month. There have been the headline events- the awful bombing in Boston, the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas, a rash of multiple gun-homicides around the country after the Senate could not get a bill on background checks for gun purchasers to a floor vote. Spring has been a shy bride, refusing to come out of her room for the marriage; the Upper Plains were hit by a series of late-season snow storms and temperatures in the Northeast have been unusually cool. In politics, the Cult of Strange Personality was reaffirmed: The peripatetic Mark Sanford returned and immediately acted appropriately weird; Anthony Weiner reappeared, now fully-clothed, and let it be known that he was interested in running for Mayor of New York City; the actor Ashley Judd announced she would not be a candidate for the Senate from Kentucky in 2014, thus depriving Mitch McConnell the opportunity to utilize his campaign’s opposition research about Ms. Judd’s struggles with depression back in the 1990’s.

More recently, the speed with which Congress moved last week to remove the sequestration budget limits on the FAA was astonishing. The legislation went from bill to law in less than a week; with its budget restored, the agency no longer has to furlough Air Traffic Controllers, can operate at full-staff levels and thus avoid the flight delays and cancelations which began to affect the nation’s air transportation system last Monday. Notable, of course, is the fact that the majority of the public does not travel by air; the anecdotal evidence suggests that business travelers and members of Congress were the groups most impacted by the delays. You may be excused if you jump to a cynical conclusion about why this particular issue was addressed so rapidly and in a bi-partisan fashion.

In the area of wonkish esoterica, we witnessed the dust-up over a paper published in 2010 by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (“Growth in a Time of Debt”). The paper, which claims among other things that there is a negative impact on economic growth when government debt reaches a level of 90% of GDP, has been repeatedly cited by deficit hawks around the world- and especially Republicans here in the US- as justification for policies of austerity in government spending. Last week, a University of Massachusetts graduate student published his own paper based on a review of the Reinhart-Rogoff data, during which he had found some basic errors in their spreadsheet. The 90% threshold vaporized and the anti-austerians danced for glee in the media. R-R did defend their conclusions in spite of the errors, and the skirmishing continues.

What is more fascinating than the spectacle of a bunch of academics duking it out in the pages of the New York Times is the fact that the policy- makers who were so quick to seize on the paper’s conclusions a few years ago are now totally silent on the issue. I assume their focus was fixed on spending whatever government funds necessary to ensure that their flights were not delayed.