I’ve been over this a lot, but with Richard Mourdock challenging Richard Lugar, I keep seeing references to Mourdock’s quixotic decision to challenge the Chrysler bankruptcy decision as something other than ill-conceived, so I’ll mention the central point once again. There was no path to Mourdock’s challenge that resulted in Indiana getting more money.

As we might recall, Chrysler was dying on the vine. There was nobody willing to step in and pay much money for the company, so they filed bankruptcy. As part of the bankruptcy, a third-party was willing to step in and pay more money for the company than it would get through liquidation. That third-party in this case was the United States of America.

What really seemed to piss off Mourdock and his supporters is that the third party was willing to give the unions something. But, let me repeat, secured creditors got more under this deal than they would have under any other offer on the table or liquidation. Seems that, what Mourdock’s complaint boiled down to in essence, is that he wished the third-party’s offer gave secured creditors more. But there was never any showing that an outside purchaser had any obligation to pay secured creditors more than they would get from liquidation. If some other third-party wanted to offer them a better deal, they could do so, but there wasn’t any such entity.

That’s getting at the substance of Mourdock’s complaint; pretending that he had any right to drive this particular litigation. Procedurally, he was out of line. Indiana’s share of the debt was tiny, and it had agreed to let the majority holders of secured debt run the show. In that sense, it was doomed bringing the litigation in the first place, even if the state had had a plausible claim.

Then there is the fact that Mourdock had purchased Chrysler shares at distressed prices in the first place; those discounted prices reflected the risk inherent in the transaction.

And, there is the impact on Indiana’s manufacturing sector. The U.S. participation in Chrysler’s restructuring allowed Hoosiers to keep their jobs instead of suffering the fall out from liquidation.

And, I’ve been hearing that Gov. Daniels is spouting some nonsense about how Mourdock’s Chrysler litigation produced some kind of momentous Supreme Court decision. It wasn’t momentous, but a fairly routine Munsingwear order.

Interesting discussion about recognizing one of our economic problems as being the incentive for wealth to be invested instead of merely loaned. Apparently this means limiting its liquidity and creating incentives for wealth to be locked up in productive activity rather than just loaned out in liquid fashion to profit on interest.

This discussion – to the extent I understand it; and I confess I’m no expert – ties in with some of the themes of Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips and what he calls “financialization.” He looked at previous empires in decline and found that a lot of their economic activity got tied up in, basically, moving paper around instead of actually producing anything terribly useful and that this precipitated their decline.

An AP story that showed up in the Lafayette Journal & Courier with a contribution from Max Showalter suggests that self-serve grocery lanes might be diminishing.

The articles says that studies are showing that most people prefer checking out with a live cashier and, therefore, some chains are phasing out the self-serve lines.

Market studies cited by the Arlington, Va.-based Food Marketing Institute found only 16 percent of supermarket transactions in 2010 were done at self-checkout lanes in stores that provided the option. That’s down from a high of 22 percent three years ago.

Overall, people reported being much more satisfied with their supermarket experience when they used traditional cashier-staffed lanes.

I’m definitely with the folks in the story who prefer the self-serve checkout lanes. It’s quick, easy, and I don’t have to deal with people.

Update Patton Oswalt has a bit:

Came across this language in an old Indiana Supreme Court case, Kelso v. Cook, 110 N.E. 987, 992-993 (Ind. 1916) and thought it was worth sharing:

But vastly more important, if [Art 2, sec. 2 of the Indiana Constitution] controls, any election of the precinct, though avowedly an adherent of no party, may participate on equal terms with party adherents in selecting its candidates, and the adherent of one party, with only single candidates for nominations, might, with safety to his own party, go into the camp of his political adversary and maliciously vote for its most unworthy candidates with the deliberate purpose of wrecking it. No political party ever held a voluntary primary open to others than its adherents, and it may be safely assented that no sane organization, political, religious, or otherwise, will ever voluntarily countenance such folly as permitting the selection of its officers by nonadherents. To assume that because of said constitutional provision non-Republicans may select the officers and candidates of that party, is as devoid of reason as the assumption that agnostics be permitted to elect the trustees of a church. To assert that Democratic or Progressive candidates may be selected by Republicans, Socialists, and adherents of no party, is as fatuous as the idea that a military strategist ought to submit his plans for his country’s defense to the commanding general of the enemy.

Craig Ladwig, over at Hoosier Access, has some interesting critiques of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce’s method of scoring legislator voting records.

The problem, as I understand it, is that the Chamber picks votes it considers important, then scores legislators – docking points when you didn’t go the Chamber’s way. This affects campaign contributions and the likelihood of primary challenges (for Republicans anyway). However, the Chamber’s representative votes are not necessarily good economic ideas; even where one embraces conservative economic principles. Craig gives examples of local Indiana price preferences, carbon dioxide pipelines and eminent domain, and Clean-Energy-Improvement-Financing Districts. But, if legislators vote against those things, they’ll lose Chamber support.

One meme that’s been going around is the notion that we can’t tax the rich because they’re the job creators. First, this doesn’t seem to comport with recent history. Taxes on the wealthy are a historical lows and job creation is anemic at best. And, the idea is pernicious. It has a “be happy with your scraps, you ungrateful peasant.”

Also, for those so inclined, Jesus.

It’s really just trickle down economics with a fresh coat of paint slapped over it.

I don’t know a whole lot about Troy Davis’s execution by the State of Georgia, but I do know that it has a lot of people thinking about the death penalty today so I thought I’d briefly mention my thoughts on the subject. I’m not in the “all killing is murder” camp. There are actions that are reprehensible enough that, if someone does them, I am comfortable with the notion that death is an appropriate consequence.

My problem is that I don’t believe we have a system to determine whether the accused committed the acts in question that is reliable enough to use in conjunction with a punishment that is ultimate and irreversible.

Finally, I can’t help but notice that there seems to be a lot of overlap between the “government can’t do anything right” crowd and the “government can reliably identify and execute the guilty” crowd.

The Indiana Law Blog passes along an article in the Logansport Pharos Tribune. The story doesn’t justify my headline — I just have a thing for alliteration. But, it’s budget season, and during lean times, county budgets get pared down. This includes the county courts. In Cass County, one of the Superior Court judges spoke to the County Council and alluded to the mandate power.

Unlike other county departments, because the department head of the court is the judge, the court can mandate itself additional resources. Other county departments have to go without if the county council does not appropriate money. Fortunately, with the exception of maybe one incident, I have not seen a judge that has used this authority frivolously. That said, it strikes me as a structural imbalance which makes me wonder if courts should be funded at the state level rather than the county level — the judges are state officers, spending much of their time adjudicating laws enacted by the state, sentencing criminals under state statutes for charges brought by the Prosecutor – another state officer, etc. So much of the court budget is just out of the county council’s control.

In Tippecanoe County, coming up, we have the possibility of five murder trials where the county is going to have to pick up a lot of the tab for prosecution, public defender, and judicial expenses. Almost none of those expenses are driven by county level policy making. As a general rule, it seems like the expense should be borne at the same level as the policy making.

Dorothy Snyder, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has an interesting article entitled “Cutting the cable cord?” Internet broadband offerings, cell phones, Netflix, and other variables are upending the cable landscape.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed, not explored in the article, is how different my kids’ media consumption is than my own was at their age. The odd uptick in shows like Sponge Bob or Avatar notwithstanding, my kids tend not to be very interested in passively staring at a TV screen. Rather, they’re much more likely to play games on the computer. Cole, for example, likes to play around with a program called Game Maker to create (so far) small games – he’ll supplement this with trips to YouTube to look up tutorials on how to use the program. Or, he’ll play some kind of Mario game on the Wii, then get caught up in YouTube videos and music folks have posted with a Mario theme.

This does not bode well for the traditional cable television offerings. (I imagine that there are those among us who smirk a little at the notion of a “traditional” cable model since cable television penetration isn’t actually that old a phenomenon.) The article discusses a family who scaled back on their cable purchases when Comcast jacked the price up from $100 to $160/month. And, it mentions folks for whom cable bundling of telephone service isn’t a money-saving option because they already ditched their land-line.

All of these are familiar issues to me. We’ve gone back to the cable company more than once when their “promotional” pricing was expiring and requested (and received) additional “promotional” pricing as an alternative to us going elsewhere with our business. For me, I think the media pipe into our home is the main concern — I would be at a loss without Internet access generally — but, particular program offerings are no longer critical to me. “Must see” TV is a relic of the past.

That outsourcing government work to private contractors will get the work done more cheaply and efficiently is an article of faith in some circles. It’s not always (or perhaps even usually) true. Ron Nixon, writing for the New York Times, reports on a study showing that government pays a lot more for private contracts than it does for having comparable work done in-house.

Despite a widespread belief that contracting out services to the private sector saves the federal government money, a new study suggests just the opposite — that the government actually pays more when it farms out work.

The study found that in 33 of 35 occupations, the government actually paid billions of dollars more to hire contractors than it would have cost government employees to perform comparable services. On average, the study found that contractors charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers.

In the past, I’ve shared my own experience with bringing printing of bills for the General Assembly in-house — it resulted in some fairly substantial savings over the amount they were paying to contract out the printing.