by cactus I live in a city of with less than a quarter million people. (The greater metropolitan area is larger, of course – there are well over half a million people in the surrounding area.) Since we moved here a year and change ago, its hard to avoid noticing that in this city, politics […]
by Linda Beale A Year and Counting: re-regulation of Wall Street On Monday night, I participated in a symposium on the Financial Crisis: One Year Later, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Citizenship and others. With me were Larry Ingrassia, Business Editor of the New York Times, and Chip Dickson, CFO of W2Freedom, […]
by Bruce Webb Key Senate committee passes health care plan The Senate Finance Committee passed a long-awaited $829 billion health care bill Tuesday by a 14-9 vote. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was the lone committee member to cross party lines, breaking with other Republicans to vote for the measure. All the committee’s Democrats supported the […]
rdanChild Labor Through the Strange Filter of Orthodox Economics Peter Dorman at Econospeak notes that our official line concerning child labor in international trade has little research to back it up, and tends to always say ‘don’t mess with trade’: There is much to endorse in the innards of the argument made by Matthias Doepke […]
by reader ilsm The Tanker Saga, Continued, New York Times Oct 8 2009: Trying to recover from past mistakes, the Pentagon has initiated a third competition for a new Air Force midair refueling tanker. After two bungled attempts, defense officials, contractors and Congress really need to get it right this time. [snip] Another unresolved competition […]
The close: [W]hen the New York Times came and offered [Ross Douhat] a column, he did not turn it down saying “no, I clearly do not deserve this honour, others are far more qualified for it that me”. The NYT thinks Douhat’s important because people link to him. They neither realize—nor care—that you’re laughing at […]
Robert Waldmann AHIP The health insurance lobby just declared war on the Baucus plan. This is new, since they previously supported health care reform. It is not, however, surprising. AHIP made its condition clear, they would support health care reform provided that all were insured. Basically the individual mandate was the price for their support. […]
by cactus Time to End Regulatory Capture of the USDA by the Meat Packing Industry A couple years ago, I had a post looking at particularly egregious case of regulatory capture. I noted that the gubmint refused to allow a small meat packing company to test all of its beef for mad cow disease. The […]
No original content here, just two posts that make even more sense together: Mark Thoma proves he’s an economist (not just an econometrician) by reminding everyone of the Opportunity Cost of the Oughts from a long-term perspective*:((Rdan…Attribution of the quote is in error due to a format error at Mark’s…the original is from Joseph Stiglitz […]
by Bruce Webb John McCain and others have been all over TV arguing that the success of the Surge in Iraq proves that we should just go ahead and throw forty thousand more troops on top of the twenty thousand sent in March to Afghanistan. Well ignoring for the moment that where the surge increased […]