Miscellaneous

Charges (wisely) Dropped

&C, even the liberal New Republic’s blog, has a pretty good roundup on the buzz surrounding Osama and reasongs why is Bush unexpectedly giving a press conference tonight at 8:00.

Alan Kreuger writes on the ballooning federal deficit. Items of note include Goldman, Sachs raising its estimate of the deficit for the current year to $375b (without including the war, and $75b higher than last OMB numbers I’ve seen)…”This dire predicament inspired the Committee for Economic Development, a nonpartisan business organization, to issue a report yesterday calling urgently for tax increases and spending cuts to put the government’s fiscal house in order. Unless corrective action is taken, the group warned, investment, productivity and living standards will suffer.”…”Although the group’s recommendation of higher taxes is unlikely to be popular, past experience with deficits suggests that tax increases are virtually inevitable before the decade is out. Even Ronald Reagan ended up raising taxes to try to make up for the big shortfall from the 1981 cuts.”

Wednesday is (well, was) Cartoon Day at Alas, a Blog.

AB