Elsewhere:
1. They asked me to write about my “favorite election- or campaign-related movie, novel, or TV show” (Salon)
2. The shopping period is over; the time for buying has begun (NYT)
3. If anybody’s gonna be criticizing my tax plan, I want it to be this guy (Monkey Cage)
4. The 4 key qualifications to be a great president; unfortunately George W. Bush satisfies all four, and Ronald Reagan doesn’t match any of them (Monkey Cage)
5. The politics of eyeliner (Monkey Cage)
You seem to use “i don’t mean to pick on…” similarly to how most people use “No disrespect, but… “. That’s okay though, David Brooks manages to write columns that are simultaneously content-free and condescending, so he really should be picked on.
The “Dow 36,000” authors (Glassman and Hassett) not only got the number wrong, they did their own calculation wrong. First they assumed that the “equity risk premium” was going to vanish, meaning stocks would become as safe as bonds. Then they applied the Gordon Dividend Discount Model to come up that 36,000 figure. Only they confused earnings growth with dividend growth. As we know, the Dow didn’t reach 36,000 by 2005; it plunged to under 10,000 by 2005. Adding insult to injury, the authors refused to own up to their errors insisting they didn’t state a time horizon. But they did. Right in their book you can read that the Dow was supposed to hit 36,000 before 2005. Later they admitted they were wrong. Wrong assumptions, wrong model, and wrong calculation. How bad can it get? These guys should be pumping gas, not writing articles about finance.