Another chapter in The Cost of No New Taxes: The charter school here in the Twin Cities my niece graduated from last year almost closed a few weeks ago. Like all charter schools, it is hit hardest by Pawlenty’s “hide the damage” cost-shifting. The No New Taxes crowd will surely want to move to new gated communities as the sick and unmedicated and ill-educated people who are the collateral damage of their righteousness continue to pile up on street corners.

“Bye Bye,” I said happily to the North Stars when their owner tried blackmail, then falling on the floor of his room and crying, to get the state to pay for a new arena. The only damage done to the state by losing its professional-wrestling-team-on-blades was that it gave Norm Coleman an opening to bring hockey back and skate into the Senate.

“Bye Bye” I’ll happily say to the Vikings. Let them leave town before the medical bill comes due on all the brains they’ve squashed with reckless abandon. I don’t feel any need to spend a single penny increasing for rich white men the value of a franchise that feeds on violence, that runs a plantation that draws young men away from classrooms or reasonable expectations of life and slams them into one another for our enjoyment. Build your own damn stadium. Whine and good bye!

I know journalists aren’t in the business of just purveying good news — but look at today’s Strib. Wilf’s whining and the smart PR strategy Joe and y’all are talking about got him on the front page. On the cover of the suburban section is a story that really matters — young people teaching other young people in Teach For America.

If the Vikings take their concussions and skull fractures elsewhere, maybe we’ll pay a little attention to real futures for our kids.

Now…. none of this applies to the Twins, of course. Baseball is a religion, and we won’t fight about religion on this blog again, so soon.

MPR, good as it is, has a small fraction of the reporters the Strib has. It takes feet walking into offices and checking daily logs and reports, fingers dialing and asking questions, fingers digging into information online, voices asking hundreds of questions in each interview — it takes well-trained, motivated, smart, irreverent journalists, and lots of them, to give the public the information we need to know what’s happening in government, business, education, non-profits, our communities, all over.

Can MPR grow? Yes, and I hope it does. Can it grow to the point where it has hundreds of journalists? If it finds the solution to how to pull together audiences and make money doing it, they can. It’s a hard pull so far, but I applaud anyone who’s growing news organizations and supporting real journalism.

But it’s a learning moment for all of us.

I bet Obamao has huge regrets right now about taking the world’s worst job.

I agree with you totally that the consensus can be wrong. However, it’s usually wrong about what is going on now or predicting the future. Rarely is it wrong studying the past, especially after more than 70 years of pondering.

I do tell clients future performance does not indicate past performance because markets are variable — economic policy usually not so much. There are some tried and true tenants of economics that we all learned in Econ 101, 102, 103 etc. However, there are those that are still debatable.

Economists of the future will cast their opinions on what we are doing now — 10, 20, 30 years from now and make judgements on the soundness of the policy and whether it worked.

Incidentally, my role as a financial planner has less to do with financial issues (picking investments or studying markets or watching trends) than it does in influencing human behavior, which is the dominant determinant of long term investor returns — essentially more important than all the other factors combined.

My studies in economics and markets are far less valuable than understanding human behavior, a point I got to make in an interview yesterday with Wall Street Journal reporter and author Jeffrey Zaslow, a delightful reporter. Every now and again, I am pleasantly surprised when I get interviewed.

(I know that this isn’t what you mean, Mike–I’m just in ironic mode here)

The point is that a majority of economists can be wrong just as easily as one single economist can be wrong–the consensus opinion is quite often the wrong opinion–the consensus opinion was that there was no housing bubble in 2007, for example, when there clearly was one. The majority of financial analysts who are experienced enough and educated enough and connected enough and smart enough to get hired to run a mutual fund are wrong (ie, do worse than the S&P 500) year after year after year.

I’m not necessarily saying that your position is correct or not, only that saying that a majority of economists agreeing with your position literally is meaningless. “More” is not at all the same thing as right/correct. Nor is “most”. Indeed, if you look at the link I provided you, it shows that experts tend to be wrong more often than random chance when it comes to making predictions.

As a financial analyst, I am certain that you tell your clients over and over that past performance is in no way predictive of future performance–the fact than any economist might have once won a Nobel Prize is not any more likely to suggest that they are correct in their suggestions as to what is most likely to help bring this current recession to an end. Which, really, is what this discussion about the Depression is all about–we are just using past history as guide for what we think should be done here and now–argument from historical analogy. Of course, the real problem is that every analogy is imperfect, because, as any real economist will tell you, ceteris paribus (one of the few pithy things that I really learned from all of my economics courses–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceteris_paribus ) is never the case.