Unintelligently Designed Policy Time to check in on the goings on in my home state. This update on Texas’ latest antics comes via Bob Park’s weekly newsletter: 3. INTELLIGENT DESIGN: URGENT APPEAL TO TEXAS SCIENTISTS. The Texas Board of Education has scheduled the science textbook vote for November 6. The books they approve will be […]

Cutting Corporation Taxes As reported in today’s NYTimes, congressional Republicans want to reduce the top corporate tax rate. The result would be to reduce federal tax receipts by $60 billion. I won’t even get into the problems associated with increasing an already massive budget deficit. However, it is worth noting other two points. First, collecting […]

How Much was Really Pledged in Madrid? Powell has done some serious arm-twisting, and numerous Iraqis have been running around like hucksters in Madrid over the past two days to wring some pledges of money out of the rest of the world to go toward Iraq’s reconstruction. Typical headlines are now reading “Iraq donations reach […]

Who Won in Tuesday’s Abortion Vote? We know who lost: women. But who won, politically? Republicans or Democrats? Barry, at Alas! a blog has a series of intriguing posts on the latest “partial-birth” abortion ban and abortion in general. (For your reading convenience, Barry also has the posts indexed here.) In this post, Barry makes […]

Insurance and Lemons Atrios is starting a series on insurance markets and common misperceptions about them. Part 1, here, discusses insurance in general and introduces two topics that are crucial to any discussion of insurance: moral hazard and adverse selection. Atrios’ Part 2 is forthcoming, but will address the specifics of health insurance; it should […]

Center for American Progress That’s the name for Podesta’s new liberal think tank, which basically opens today. I don’t particularly love the name, but I suppose it’s not too bad–after all, who can be against “American Progress.” More interestingly, they are supposed to announce their first nine fellows today, so assuming some of them are […]

Resource Allocation In a series of arrests spanning 21 states, the feds are apparently rounding up illegal aliens working for WalMart, or rather, aliens working for a subcontractor hired to clean WalMarts. The immigrants are reportedly mostly Eastern Europeans. Is it possible that a 21 state operation to nab 300 people in the country illegally […]

Some or All? Today, Clark announced his tax plans: Clark vowed to repeal or modify the Bush tax cuts for families making at least $200,000 annually, repeating a promise he made a few weeks ago, and the scheduled reductions for those families making less than $200,000 would be protected under his plan. Clark is taking […]

Baseball and Efficient Markets CBS Marketwatch reports on a recently circulated research paper by Ronald Kahn at Barclay’s Capital that makes a very good analogy between investing and baseball: The New York Yankees and Florida Marlins may match swings on the field, but given what they spent on player salaries to get to the World […]

Snow Learns His Lesson… Sort Of US Treasury Secretary John Snow, when asked today about future interest rates, gave the right answer this time. Contradicting evidence from earlier this week (described in my earlier post), Snow replied “I don’t really comment on interest rates. Interest rates are a matter for the Fed.” Well done. He […]