Week of May 19, 2008

They say in the stock market, ‘Buy into a business that’s doing so well an idiot could run it, because sooner or later, one will,’” Buffett said. “The U.S. is sort of like that. I think the country will do fine whether it’s the Democratic or Republican candidate, but I strongly prefer the Democrats.

What was the greatest wealth-creating film of all time? That question was answered by Robert Mundell, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of economics at Columbia University. His answer: Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese's 1976 classic starring Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster.

Mundell's explanation, according to a report in The Financial Times, works like this: Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin, John Hinckley, claimed he shot the president in an effort to impress Jodie Foster. (The movie features a scene in which De Niro attempts to assassinate a politician.)

The wave of sympathy for Reagan in the wake of the shooting deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. According to Mundell, the passage of those tax cuts at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money was instrumental in creating the era of prosperity that followed.

"Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP," Mundell said."It's the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5-trillion and $15-trillion of output to the U.S. economy."

Barack is worth millions now. It's almost all based on these two books, two books not based on a job of prodigious research or risking one's life as a reporter in Iraq. He has written about himself. Being able to take your own life story and turn it into this incredibly lucrative franchise, it's a stunning fact.

A candidate who cannot get elected [Obama] is being nominated by a party [the Democratic Party] that cannot be defeated, while a candidate who is eminently electable [McCain] is running as the nominee of a party [the Republican Party] doomed to defeat.