Marginal Utility

by Ken Houghton

I'm buried right now, even without working for direct pay, but want to make certain this gets mentioned.

Mark Duggan and Fiona Scott Morton have an NBER paper (#13917; gated link here*) examining the results of the first year of Medicare Part D. To no one's great surprise, they find that it wastes a lot of money compared to direct government purchases that it works well for the most common drugs,* not well at all for the "protected" class of drugs (basically expensive cancer/AIDS treatment that have few rivals and are therefore all required to be carried by Part D providers), whose prices may have increased by their inclusion.

But what is most (generally) interesting is the list of most common drugs prescribed under Part D:

Lipitor, Zocor, Prevacid, Nexium, Zoloft, Epogen, Celebrex, Zyprexa, Neurontin, Procrit, Effexor, Advair, Paxil, Norvasc, Pravachol, Plavix, Allegra, Wellbutrin, Oxycontin, Fosamax, Vioxx, Singulair, Protonix, Actos, Ortho, Aciphex

That's right; "hillbilly heroin" is #19 on the IMS Health list of prescribed drugs under Part D.

*If anyone finds a non-gated version, feel free to ref it in comments and I'll add it. (Tom, just edit appropriately if you find one.)

**Duggan and Scott Morton do note that "If a price is suboptimally high, there can be over-utilization of the treatment, with physicians and other health care providers potentially inducing the demand of consumers," but appear to assume that is not the case here.

Labels: Bushonomics, Economics, Health Care

by Ken Houghton

After I tried (with a hint of irony) to say something nice about RWR (and Tom corrected me*), John McCain undermines all that goodwill with another mailing:

While many of us are aggravated and displeased when we see exactly how much of our hard-earned money goes to the federal government - if one of my Democratic opponents is elected in November, you can be certain your tax rate will increase across the board. [emphasis his]

Hmmm; increasing deficits (ameliorated only slightly by a Social Security Trust Fund surplus that even Andrew Samwick is now defending), an ever-more-costly war (some of which is "off balance sheet" [think derivatives], so the actual deficit is ever higher), and more than a 2% difference between income (read: taxes) and outflows that have increased at greater than the rate of inflation only for defense for all of the Discretionary Spending. (And if cactus at AngryBear updates this post,*** I suspect the differences will be even worse.)

But I'll hold out hope, John; after all, you're a Straight Talker. What's your plan?

I believe today, as I have always believed, in small government, fiscal discipline and low taxes. I believe that tax cuts work best when accompanied by lower spending. And I make the promise to you that if elected president, I plan to make the present tax cuts permanent, lower corporate rates from 35% to 25% and end the Alternative Minimum Tax, which will affect millions of middle class families.

Let's see:

1. "make the present tax cuts permanent": I assume this means the 2001 and 2003 cuts that were scheduled to "sunset" in ten years because even then—with a trend toward paying off deficits and Saint Alan talking about the Evil that would be a Sovereign Wealth Fund—our representatives and Senators knew they would be too costly on an Infinite (or even Extended) Time Horizon. So monies that are in the baseline CBO projection, for instance, would not be there. Need taxes, or cuts in spending.
   
2. lower corporate rates from 35% to 25%: Well, as pgl pointed out last year, it would be absurd to assume that the actual corporate tax rate is at 35% now.**** But, once again, baseline projection monies are no longer there. Need taxes, or cuts in spending.
   
3. "end the Alternative Minimum Tax"—this is the first year in a few that I wasn't hit by the AMT. But this is also, definitionally, the first time in a few years that our Gross Income was less than about 250% of the national average. And this is outright elimination. (The CBO released a report this month [PDF] that projects the 10-year cost of just indexing the AMT to inflation of $700B.) So this is a major loss of revenue, without any noticeable income

So that's three proposals: all tax cuts without a single revenue source in sight. And I'm not betting that John "we'll spend 100 years in Iraq, but don't worry, only 95 of them will be as an active fighting force" McCain is going to reverse the GWB trend in increasing defense spending at greater-than-inflation rates.

The kicker? There's only one way to cause this miracle to happen:

But I cannot succeed in my efforts without your immediate financial support. [I spare you the link]

So the only way not to pay taxes is to pay tribute to a man who plans to increase deficits in a major way, crowding out entrepreneurial activity and further impairing growth.

Makes me long for the days when RR appointed David Stockman to run the OMB. At least then we got Straight Talk from a Republican.

*This may be what I get from believing my accountant, who may well have confused 1986 and 1996.** Though it remains remotely possible that Reagan did start the ball rolling to some small extent:

Most Americans already escape the tax by either rolling over, or deferring, their capital gain when they buy a more expensive house, or by taking a one-time exemption for up to $125,000 in gains allowed for those 55 and older.

So it's possible that Reagan initiated it, while Clinton both eliminated the age restriction and raised the limit. But that's probably not the way to bet.

**We are both of an age where that happens. Having heard the, er, update of Kurtis Blow's classic "Basketball" last weekend on Radio Disney, I suggest that the decay of memory and the "memory of decay" is natural.

***I thought he had, but I can't find it on a quick use of The Google (TM Sadly No!).

****If we do the math, taking the 39.3% overall corporate tax rate here and the proportions documented by the CBO here***** [PDF; 1.6% of GDP for Federal; 2.1% for all], we would conclude that the effective Federal corporate tax rate is currently 39.3% * 1.6/2.1 or 29.9%. So take heart, John; we're halfway there and you haven't done anything yet.

****I am comparing a 2004 ratio with 2006 data, but since the Tax Foundation indicates a difference of 0.1% between 2001 and 2006, this does not seem unreasonable.

Labels: Bushonomics, defense, deficit, Personal Finance Advice of Alan Greenspan, Republican Party

by Ken Houghton

My favorite paper from this year's AEA is now available from NBER (gated; non-gated copy available here).

Also noted, the prepared text for the most interesting presentation (most interesting, to some extent, from the non-prepared text at the beginning) was the lead article in the current issue of Post-Autistic Real World Economics Review (not clearly available on the website; PDF available here; AEA version here).

More later, which probably means the middle of next week.

Labels: Bushonomics, Economic Development, Economics

by Ken Houghton

Scott Horton discovers that the guys at G-Mu (not these guys; the historians) have dropped James Buchanan to #2 in the Pantheon.

Memories of the Ford Administration (even though it elides Buchanan's homosexuality) may never be read the same again.

Labels: Bushonomics, History, literature

by Ken Houghton

Via Tim F. at Balloon Juice.

(link statements too painful for me to quote; Tim F. did here.)

Labels: Bushonomics, policy wonk, Science

by Ken Houghton

This summarylive-blogging of the SOTU is rather close to accurate.

Highlights:

9:24 Okay, I love me some trade deals. But even I find it hard to believe that the greatest threat to human liberty today is the specter that Panama may not be able to sell us handmade hats.

9:58 Oh. My. God. As soon as the Bush says the word "African", CNN cuts to apparently specially staged woman in full African gear, with a child wrapped in a leopard print throw. "Cue human props!"

10:02 Let us go forth to do their business? Was that seriously the last line of his final State of the Union speech? Are we toilet training them? Who's writing his speeches these days--the copywriters for Charmin?

Labels: Bushonomics, Democracy, policy wonk, Politics

by Tom Bozzo

A correspondent asks:

I'm searching for economic advice. If I were to create a national holiday meant to coincide with the stimulus package being planned in Washington, when would be a good time to have the holiday?

It's not so much an economic question, and I dunno. Perhaps, like "Love Day" from The Simpsons [*], it should fill in the gap between established spending opportunities. In one of many cases of life imitating The Simpsons, many of those gaps have been filled — as Easter, for one thing, is being marketed increasingly as Christmas II rather than Chocolate Bunny Time. Otherwise, I don't think windfall opportunities for the Mobility are consistently timed enough to locate the day that's the statistical middle of them.

Any thoughts?

(Cross-posted at Scatterplot)

------------------------------------------

[*] Not to be confused with "Love Day" (2004) from Blue's Clues [**], though I've wondered whether that's a deliberate wink at parents trapped in front of the Tube with their toddlers.

[**] And I never thought I'd say it, but Dora the Explorer makes Blue's Clues look like Twin Peaks.

Labels: Bushonomics, Tax Incentives

by Ken Houghton

Via Mark Thoma, the Tax Foundation discusses the timing of births (somehow without considering that eighteen years out might be a better time in one's earnings life cycle to take a deduction).


But the 'graf that catches attention is this one:

A similar issue is scheduled to take place 23 months from now with the estate tax. Under current law, it will be nonexistent in 2010, but will come back in full force in 2011. This could possibly lead to some difficult decisions having to be made in December 2010 regarding the value of one's living a few extra months or years relative to the financial gain to heirs of a zero estate tax bill.

Now where have we seen that before?

Paul Krugman in the NYT 30 May 2001 ("Bad Heir Day," via the PKarchive):

There's a scene in the 1966 British comedy "The Wrong Box" in which the son of an irascible plutocrat pushes his father's wheelchair along the top of a cliff, responding with a dutiful "Yes, father" to each outpouring of verbal abuse. Then the old man waves his hand at the industrial landscape below, and declares, "When I'm gone, all this will be yours." "Yes, father," replies the son — and pushes him off the cliff.

That scene came back to me as I delved further into the absurd piece of tax legislation that a House-Senate conference devised and that George W. Bush triumphantly signed last weekend. The Bush tax plan was always peculiar: in order to hide the true budget impact, its authors delayed many of the biggest tax cuts until late into the 10-year planning period; repeal of the estate tax, in particular, was put off to 2010. But even that left the books insufficiently cooked, so last week the conferees added a "sunset" clause, officially causing the whole bill to expire, and tax rates to bounce back to 2000 levels, at the beginning of 2011.

So in the law as now written, heirs to great wealth face the following situation: If your ailing mother passes away on Dec. 30, 2010, you inherit her estate tax-free. But if she makes it to Jan. 1, 2011, half the estate will be taxed away. That creates some interesting incentives. Maybe they should have called it the Throw Momma From the Train Act of 2001.

UDATE: Anonymous in comments notes that the Tax Foundation has been hitting this issue since late 2005, with this giggle, and three substantive pieces.

The Tax Foundation is, of course, shocked to discover what Krugman and his readers have known for nearly seven years.

Labels: Bushonomics, life cycle, Tax Incentives

by Ken Houghton

Louis Hyman sends a shudder through Ken Lewis's heart:

Homeowners cannot build equity in an overvalued house, no matter what the terms of the mortgage.

In the "ownership society," equity is all, and voting with your feet becomes the right thing to do.

Labels: Bushonomics, Housing Bubble

by Ken Houghton

Via the Social Science Statistics Blog, a flyswatter for the happy Milanophile.

As a bonus, the same post leads to (and features a picture of) a graphic-laden representation of What Georgie Wanted the US Budget to Be.

Which, given my recent obsession, leads to the obvious question (zoom in on the penny in the lower right corner): If "the cost growth per beneficiary in the Medicare and Medicaid programs has tracked cost trends in private-sector health-care markets" (h/t DeLong; the original is WSJ subscriber-only, though it was probably Digged), why was the Medicare budget only projected for a 5% (nominal) increase? Or does that question answer itself?

Labels: Brad DeLong, Bushonomics, Econometrics, Economists View, Health Care, Janelle, Politics, Statistics

by Ken Houghton

Via Reuters, (h/t Marc Andreessen):

For every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants aged 8 to 16 months understood an average of six to eight fewer words than babies who did not watch them, Frederick Zimmerman of the University of Washington and colleagues found.

The lump of labour specificity raises its head in a second post today:

"The results surprised us, but they make sense. There are only a fixed number of hours that young babies are awake and alert," said Andrew Meltzoff, a psychologist who worked on the study.

"If the 'alert time' is spent in front of DVDs and TV, instead of with people speaking in 'parentese'-- that melodic speech we use with little ones -- the babies are not getting the same linguistic experience," Meltzoff added....

"Old kids may be different, but the youngest babies seem to learn language best from people."

This implies:

Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute who worked on the study, said parents frequently asked him about the value of such videos.

"The evidence is mounting that they are of no value and may in fact be harmful," Christakis said.

And just this year, the State of the Union cited Baby Einstein founder Julie Aigner-Clark as "represent[ing] the great enterprising spirit of America."

Damn the consequences, full steam ahead!

Labels: Bushonomics, education, human capital, Kids

by Tom Bozzo

He has some sense of timing, that WPE!

Bonus Bushism from the presser:

Another factor one has got to look at is the amount of liquidity in the system. In other words, is there enough liquidity to enable markets to be able to correct? And I am told there is enough liquidity in the system to enable markets to correct.

Or, 'someone said "liquidity" in the briefing, and I'm using my Harvard MBA training to
use it in sentences!'

Labels: Bushonomics

by Ken Houghton

The Smoking Gun notes that I. Lewis Libby, the attorney who secured a pardon for Marc Rich, paid his fine by cashier's check on the same day that the Appeals Court ruling (no) and the "commutation" (yes) were announced/decided:

Supporters of Libby, who served as Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, stressed that while Bush's action kept Libby from a prison cell, the onerous six-figure fine was still intact.

Labels: Bushonomics, Politics

by Ken Houghton

Via John Fox at the Curious Capitalist, THE summary of Bushonomics (via the WaPo series):
Oh, and one other interesting moment in the article. Ed Lazear apparently needed Cheney to tell him that the mortgage-interest tax deduction is popular:

When Edward P. Lazear, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, broached the idea of limiting the popular mortgage tax deduction, he said he quickly dropped it after Cheney told him it would never fly with Congress. "He's a big timesaver for us in that he takes off the table a lot of things he knows aren't going to go anywhere," Lazear said.

Looks as if Jared Bernstein or pgl of AngryBear was more right than the ever-optimistic Brad DeLong on this one: which DeLong, much to his credit, declares openly today [all links to DeLong's site].

Labels: Brad DeLong, Bushonomics

by Ken Houghton

I've watched silently as several Econ blogs have wandered into politics long enough to take shots at Hugo Chavez over the past few days, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It finally has, as Boz points out the obvious:

If the [US-proposed] OAS resolution [regarding censorship in Venezuela] doesn't pass or get publicly debated, this is why. The Bush administration goes after Chavez hard while treating Musharraf, a leader with far less democratic legitimacy, with kid gloves. Can you blame other countries for thinking that US criticism is based on political alliances and not political ideals? Can we really ask allies like Chile and Brazil to step up and defend democracy in Venezuela if the US supports authoritarians like Musharraf?

The understatement of "far less democratic legitimacy" cannot be emphasized enough.

So, really, I'm recapitulating Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons:

What Boz said here. Every word.

Labels: Bushonomics, Latin America, Meta, Politics

by Ken Houghton

Be Afraid. Be VERY Afraid.:

The Bush administration promised today to find someone quickly to succeed Paul D. Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank, and bring management skills to the job of healing an institution battered by the turmoil over Mr. Wolfowitz’s tenure.

To coin a phrase, "A fine mess you've got us into, Georgie."

Labels: Bushonomics, Economic Development, Economic History, Politics

by Tom Bozzo

Shorter Robert Hahn and Robert Litan (directors of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Institution Joint Center for Regulatory Studies):

Having political officers sign off on regulations will help ensure that career civil servants' vision is down the right tunnel.

Ken (*) offers a couple choice quotes:

“Of course, the particular person the president appoints could skew the process away or towards the balancing of costs and benefits, but we think the president should have that choice.”

And

“While it is an open question as to whether the president has the legal authority to make this change, we think that he does; if the president does not, then Congress should give [i.e., cede] this general authority to the president directly.”

Fact is, the executive branch's ability to interpret statutes in drafting regulations already gives it considerable power. Meanwhile, Hahn and Litan don't actually show that the legislative process isn't biased towards excessive weighting of costs of narrow interests that can afford to lobby against diffuse societal benefits. And they trot out a "regulations may cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year" line without proper comparison to our low-fourteen-figure GDP. (**)

Additionally: While Hahn and Litan are free to make normative statements regarding how regulation should be carried out, it should not be forgotten that the legislative power is not constrained by cost-benefit considerations. I hope turn to some of the good reasons for that (at least by AEI-grade cost-benefit calculus) the next time a blogging window opens.


(*) Who has teh ability to see posts-in-the-making.

(**) Which puts me in mind of this fabulous post from Brad Altrocket. The key pull quote (ah, if only I could write such things):

Put it like this: let’s say I pay a chimpanzee two cents every day to come over to my house, pull down my pants, light a match and singe one of my pubic hairs. “Ouch!” you say. “Bradrocket, that seems like an awfully silly thing to do!” “Nonsense!” I say in between howls of burnt-pubis agony. “I’m only paying this chimp two cents a day to do this!!... YOU CAN’T EVEN GET MIGRANT LABOR THAT CHEAP!!!! IT’S A DAMN BARGAIN!!!!”

And that... is basically what the Iraq war is like, but much, much worse. Please keep that in mind the next time you write an article about the war being a “bargain.”

Labels: Bushonomics, Regulation

by Ken Houghton

It's a catty summary, to be certain, but not an unfair one in this Self-Delusional NYT piece. First admit the truth:

Today’s decision, which followed months of study by a presidential working group, reflected both the strong antiregulatory philosophy of the administration and the formidable new clout and influence of the wealthy hedge fund industry. Three of the major economic policy makers in Washington — Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Robert K. Steel, who is the under secretary of the Treasury, and Joshua Bolton, the White House chief of staff — are all alumni of Goldman Sachs, which in the last decade has evolved into perhaps the most significant player in the private equities market.

And only then get around to letting readers know that the games are being played with Other People's Money:

Millions of Americans do not qualify to make investments in the funds, which are pools of largely unregulated assets, but they are unknowingly exposed to the risks associated with hedge funds through their pension and retirement accounts.

James Hamilton at Econbrowser—one of the premier analytical economists in the country, and perhaps the closest thing to my political and temperamental opposite in all of the blogsphere (Tom's mileage likely varies significantly)—thought about hedge funds and, instead of leaping to a likely conclusion, examined the available data. The scary thing is that he comes to the same conclusion I do:

When I heard about the disastrously irresponsible investments made by the Amaranth hedge fund, my first reaction was, who would be so stupid to have put up the margin requirements for such a scheme? The answer turned out to be found in my own backyard-- the San Diego County Employees Retirement Association apparently donated over a hundred million dollars to this worthy cause.

He follows this will three paragraphs of fascinating detail; follow the link above. His conclusion from those 'grafs is:

But as far as I'm aware, there's no place you can go to find an audited statement of the assets and liabilities of these "alpha fund managers", so there's no way to verify exactly what the nature and magnitude of the risk is that's being palmed off on the county. We have only the word of the county fund managers that they're doing something smart. They in turn are likely basing their own confidence primarily on the word of the alpha fund managers. At least in the case of Amaranth, we know how much that word is worth, and it ain't $233,830,268. [emphasis mine]

He has a specific recommendation as well:

But when the buyer is acting on behalf of the government, to me it seems very appropriate for the government to set statutory limits on the extent to which managers' interests can be permitted to deviate from those of the beneficiaries. Specifically, I recommend that California's County Employees Retirement Law be amended to specify that if one calculates the sum of all investments, pledges of collateral, financial liabilities and exposures, and margin deposits and calls made by a county retirement fund in institutions for which there are not publicly available annually audited balance sheets of those institutions' assets and liabilities, the sum of all such commitments across all such institutions can not exceed 10% of the retirement fund's total gross assets.

On one side, we have James Hamilton, stating that there is not enough transparency in the hedge fund industry to allow unlimited investment by government-run funds in hedge funds. On the other side, we have "[t]he Bush administration and senior regulators."

Anyone else feeling less well about their 401(k)/403(b)/IRA??

Labels: Bushonomics, hedge funds, pension funds, retirement

by Tom Bozzo

In today's Capital Times, Judith Davidoff offers this misleading lede:

While social conservatives were expected to fight the mandatory vaccination of young girls against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer, the loudest opposition in Wisconsin is coming from a more unlikely source: pediatricians.

A state Senate co-sponsor of legislation to require the HPV vaccine says:

Echoed [Robert] Wirch: "Cervical cancer is a preventable cancer, and we should do everything we can to get rid of this terrible cancer."

But the pediatric community is balking.

If not for those meddling pediatricians!

WTF?! said I, father of a two-year-old daughter... fourteen paragraphs into the story, it turns out that the pediatricians are not actually opposed to requiring the vaccine per se:

The objections are not about the vaccine itself, [James] Conway [of the Wisconsin Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatricians] stressed: "I don't think anybody from the medical side of things would dispute that the preliminary data and the design behind how they actually developed this vaccine is a terrific step forward for medicine."

It is about the implementation, he said.

While insurance companies are pledging to pay for the costly vaccine, Conway questions who will cover the vaccine for the underinsured and uninsured. He said the federal program that covers vaccinations for children without insurance can now barely pay for the other vaccines that have come on the market in recent years.

Now, according to the story, even at the stiff monopoly price of the vaccine (about $360, per the story), the cost of treating cervical cancer runs to the tune of more than 10 million annual doses of the vaccine. The economic case for vaccination looks clear enough. (Something Gov. Doyle might consider before throwing around more questionable tax expenditures.) A smart policymaker would cough up the money to make the AAP (fully) happy.

The George Bush/Heritage Foundation method? Not so much. The fundamental of the Bush "plan" is that the vaccination decision should be made on individual assessments of willingness to pay the $360 in a world (ideally, in that view) of high-deductible insurance that covers little routine care. Some people — probably concentrated in high-risk, low-income demographic groups — will choose "wrong" and society will pay for avoidable cervical cancer cases around mid-century.

--------------------------------

Herein lies the rub of the Edwards-Blogger business. Any of the major Democratic contenders are smart enough to pass on the opinions of certain "sensible" economists and consign health care a la the WPE back to the right-wing think [sic] tanks. Then again, so were John F. Kerry and John Edwards, and they lost to the WPE and the MEVPE (*) in part because their campaign was fatally slow in the face of the right-wing noise machine's onslaught. People with better policy ideas than George W. Bush or the Republican '08 field are a dime a dozen; people who can win a campaign which, as John Rogers rightly observes, will be a "f***ing knife fight" are not.

(An additional curiosity is that this particular kerfluffle seems to have been an attack on the rapid-response mechanism itself. Amanda Marcotte being the Edwards campaign's blogger-in-chief and Melissa McEwan the netroots coordinator, they'd have presumably coordinated the response had the targets been anyone else on Edwards's staff. As Waveflux observed in Shakes's comments, the progressive blogs stepped into the breach and arguably saved the Edwards campaign from the influence of the "elite punditocracy" with its civility-over-substance bias and showed the value of campaigns having key netroots staff whose bloggerly charisma actually motivates the netroots.)

-----------------------------------

(*) Most Evil Vice Preznit Ever.

Labels: Bushonomics, Health Care, John Edwards, Journamalism

by Ken Houghton

While this WSJ piece (free) speaks as if it is a good thing, one would think the "state's rights" people would see this as Yet Another Federal Intrusion:

Today, there are 47 people on federal death row -- more than double the number six years ago -- and Mr. Wilson this week became the seventh sentenced in a state without a death statute of its own since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988.

Let's put that 47 into context:

In 2000, there were 18 inmates on federal death row, but none were from a state that disallows capital punishment.

So there has been more than a 150% increase in Federal death penalty convictions in the past six year. Which means a lot more funds being spent on relatively few cases (since death penalty cases cost more to prosecute, regardless of whether they are successful; this, by the way, is a Good Thing); even Becker-Posner would likely view this as suboptimal resource allocation.

And who was the driving force behind this expansion. Why, the man who lost the 2000 Missouri Senate election to a dead man:

Things began to change in 2002, when federal prosecutors secured a death sentence in Michigan, a state without a death penalty. A year later, Mr. [John] Ashcroft ordered U.S. attorneys in New York and Connecticut to seek death penalties against 12 defendants even though prosecutors handling the cases had recommended against doing so or decided not to pursue capital charges. At the time, the Justice Department said there shouldn't be "one standard in Georgia and another in Vermont."

"There's all this talk about how death row is declining, but that's not true for the federal system," said Ruth Friedman, director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project, a federally funded program that assists lawyers in the post-conviction stage of capital cases.

Anyone who thinks the break date being 2000 is coincident should be strongly disabused:

Eric Holder, a former U.S. attorney in Washington who was deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, said that in the 1990s, he and then-Attorney General Janet Reno weren't as likely to override a local federal prosecutor who didn't think a crime warranted capital punishment.

Overriding local federal prosecutors "was relatively rare during the Clinton years," Mr. Holder said. "Having both been local prosecutors, we really deferred to our U.S. attorneys' understanding that they knew their local situations."

The Justice Department declined to comment on this point.

Labels: Bushonomics, Death Penalty, Gore, Optimal Resources