Another entry from the "duh" files

The Baseball Crank notes a couple more recent "duh" moments.

Albany Times Union:

Now, early revenue figures suggest that taxing the wealthy more under this year's state budget may have driven away richer New Yorkers. That could make the economic comeback for the state even harder.

"You heard the mantra, 'Tax the rich, tax the rich,' " Gov. David Paterson said Wednesday at a gathering of newspaper editors at an Associated Press event in Syracuse. "We've done that. We've probably lost jobs and driven people out of the state."

Does this mean that the Governor is educable? Will anyone on the left remember this the next time the "tax the rich" mantra starts? I wouldn't count on it.


And, from the Wall Street Journal:

Around $90 billion of the $787 billion stimulus package was dedicated to state Medicaid programs. The money, which goes out quarterly to the states and is known as FMAP funds, has moved faster than stimulus dollars allocated to many other spending categories.

The GAO, the congressional watchdog charged with monitoring how states are handling their share of the stimulus package, found that most states it studied were using the Medicaid funds to cover increased caseloads and to maintain their current services and eligibility criteria. Some states were also using the funds to avoid cutting payments to hospitals and doctors.

State officials "expressed concern about the longer-term sustainability of their Medicaid programs after the increased FMAP funds are no longer available, beginning in January 2011," the report said.

The report also found some states were using the money to free up other parts of their state budget that would otherwise have been used for Medicaid. Several states reported the funds were helping finance general state budget needs.

fungible, a. and n. ({sm}f{revv}nd{zh}{shti}b({schwa})l)

A. adj. (See quot. 1832.)
1818 H. T. COLEBROOKE Oblig. & Contracts I. 64 In the instance of money and other fungible articles. 1832 AUSTIN Jurispr. (1879) II. xlvi. 807 When a thing which is the subject of an obligation..must be delivered in specie, the thing is not fungible, i.e. that very thing, and not another thing of the same or another class in lieu of it must be delivered. Where the subject of the obligation is a thing of a given class, the thing is said to be fungible, i.e. the delivery of any object which answers to the generic description will satisfy the terms of the obligation.

The GOP Governors were, of course, racists when they suggested at the time that this might happen...