Economists for McCain

This reason story makes me glad I did not sign the petition when given the opportunity to do so.

More broadly, the costs and benefits of attaching oneself as an economist to one or the other of the major parties are not completely obvious to me. I am not very happy with either party these days (or, indeed, with politics as an enterprise) and try to avoid identifying with either one but I am not sure how successful I am. It will be interesting to see what happens to my consulting in DC after the election.

I suspect there is an excitement and adventure aspect to working with a campaign, though there is also the potential for bad outcomes, as with Austan Goolsbee's public spanking for telling the Canadian consulate in Chicago the truth about Obama and NAFTA (which of course everyone who understands how these things work already knew). I suspect that the same is true about being on the Council of Economic Advisors, though people tell me that regardless of party, most of your time is spent explaining to policy types that demand curves slope down, that tax dollars cost society more than a dollar, that cost benefit analysis is worth doing and such like. I remember seeing Doug Holtz-Eakin on C-Span once explaining to a congressperson the difference between marginal and average tax rates. This is surely the Lord's work but man it must get tedious after a while.