POINTLESS TAX RELIEF. Greg Mankiw has Senator Clinton taking on the American Economic Association. She sounds silly.

Pressed to name a supportive economist Sunday, she replied, "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists because I know if we did it right, if we actually did it right, if we had a president who used all the tools of the presidency, we would design it in such a way that it would be implemented effectively."

That works in Star Wars, where either mental discipline or the power of the Dark Side makes for effortless effective implementation. That was a long time ago in a galaxy far away. On earth, complex adaptive systems do pretty much what they please.