Saturday, October 18, 2008

So who's the one running for office?

Economists put a lot of weight in "revealed preferences". The notion of revealed preferences is basically that you can tell a lot more about a person's actual preferences by watching what he does, than by listening to what he says. (Non-economists just say, "actions speak louder than words.")

Jim Lindgren writes:

I was stunned to see some document showing Joe the Plumbers' tax problems on my 10pm (CT)newscast on the local NBC affiliate in Chicago on Thursday night. They have very little time for any national news and they actually spent time on Joe the Plumbers' tax problems. Amazing!
But when an actual candidate — Barack Obama — released his tax returns, which on their face seemed to show an ethics violation of Illinois law, the press couldn't care less.
....
I really don't blame Obama for not addressing this; he released his tax returns after all. The problem is the press, which seems to be having more trouble than usual doing its job this season.

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