Taking off the gloves:

— I think DC neighborhoods are too small and this support “MidCity” as a concept.

— The dynamic properties of New Keynesian models with learning.

— Illegal immigration is plummeting mostly thanks to a crappy economy.

— To answer Justin Logan’s question I think US military personnel will be gone from Iraq by 2012 as Ben Rhodes says.

— Actual hotels for zombies would be more interesting than these Irish “zombie hotels”.

— The absurd self-pity of the Kochs.

— The 113th anniversary of America’s first subway.

I really like both Metric and TV shows about animals. The “Stadium Love” video combines both.

Vince Gray and Adrian Fenty did a DC mayoral debate today of which, unfortunately, there seems to be no transcript. There is, however, a Dave Alpert has spent so much time trying to reassure urbanists about Gray. Here’s Austermuhle’s writeup of their back-and-forth on the crucial issue of parking

12:33 p.m.: Audience question on … parking. Really? Ugh. Fenty says you need to find balance between cars and other means of transit, cites Gabe Klein’s work at DDOT. This is actually a winning point for the mayor, at least from the urbanist perspective. Gray calls parking rates “outrageous,” firmly appealing to the car lobby. Boo! Does express concern over loss of business due to expensive parking, but also supports looking at alternative modes of transit.

I wish I had a proper transcript of what was said here since Austermuhle is tragically dismissive of the whole topic. But it seems clear enough that Fenty stood by Klein’s efforts to make the city less car-dependent, whereas Gray wanted to offer rhetorical support for that goal while simultaneously endorsing a policy concept—increased subsidization of parking—that’s diametrically opposed to that goal. I hope this is just Gray being opportunistic on the campaign trail, but I think the basic assumption has to be that Gray’s plan is to undo the controversial Fenty-era education and transportation reforms.

As a sidenote, when you look at the class divide between Fenty and Gray supporters it’s a reminder of how frustratingly upside-down the politics of these transportation issues often gets. Transportation reform plays as a kind of yuppie concern in practical politics, but the biggest losers from parking subsidies aren’t people like me—I could go out and buy a car tomorrow if I wanted to—but poor people for whom owning and maintaining automobiles is genuine financial hardship.

I wrote yesterday that I think the Reinhardt & Reinhardt finding that economies in the wake of a financial crisis typically experience years of slow growth is evidence that such crises are normally met with an inadequate policy response. The other read, the one that both Reinhardt’s and Carmen Reinhardt’s co-author Ken Rogoff seem to prefer, is that years of suffering are just quasi-inevitable. But it’s a little bit hard for me to understand why they take this line. In his latest piece, for example, Rogoff is full of gloom and doom but actually sees plenty of policy steps that could improve things.

In terms of fiscal policy, he agrees that stimulus could be helpful but thinks it might also be counterproductive unless we simultaneously tackle the long-term deficit situation. And he also thinks monetary expansion could help.

So despite the rhetoric of despair and how “It took more than a decade to dig today’s hole, and climbing out of it will take a while, too,” Rogoff doesn’t really seem to believe that. What climbing out of it will take, according to Rogoff, is decisive congressional action to pair short-term deficit expansion with long-term deficit reduction, combined with decisive Federal Reserve Open Market Committee action to raise the price level. If it takes a long time to climb out, that’s because his judgment is that those things are unlikely to happen. And I agree, they are unlikely to happen. But people shouldn’t confuse a political analysis of despair with an economic analysis.

This all reminded me of the last graf of John Cassidy’s profile of Tim Geithner from several months back:

“Why do policymakers screw up financial crises?” [Treasury Secretary Geithner] said before I left his office. “They screw up financial crises because the politics are horrible, and that deters action. They are slow and late and tentative and weak because they are scared to death of the politics. But sometimes a policymaker has to say, I’ll take pain now against pain later.”

That’s exactly right. It was right then and it’s right today.