No Criticizing Reagan or Bush II As you may have heard, CBS (the network that didn’t bring you a somewhat unflattering biographical movie about the Reagans) is refusing to broadcast MoveOn’s ad during the Super Bowl. MoveOn is responding by doing what it does best: organizing emails, letters, and phonecalls. Since my favorite ad was […]

History Never Exactly Repeats Itself In the late 1960s, the US had a very expansionary monetary policy. To keep their currencies from appreciating, the world’s major central banks had to keep buying dollars, effectively expanding their own money supply at the same fast rate. Being inflation-shy, however, they hated doing so, and soon stopped. That […]

Calculating the Cause of the Budget Deficit You can check out a thorough decomposition of the causes of the US budget deficit at The American Street. The punchline: the state of the economy only accounts for a small fraction (less than 15%) of the US’s budget problems this decade. On the other hand, tax cuts […]

Greenspan and Job Security Fed Chair Alan Greenspan must both want to keep his job and think that Dean is going to be the next president. On Friday, CNN and others reported that Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean tried out a new tactic Friday while campaigning in New Hampshire, accusing Federal Reserve Bank chairman Alan […]

Yet More Speaking for Itself This time, from John Ashcroft: “Weapons of mass destruction including evil chemistry and evil biology are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community. They were the subject of U.N. resolutions,” Ashcroft said. We’ll see whether the nefarious chemistry and biology […]

Breakdown of Higher Government Spending AB noted that this morning the CBO released its new estimates of the budget deficit for 2004 and beyond. The news continues the almost monotonous upward revisions in the US’s budget deficit problems over the rest of the decade. This dovetails with a debate that has been growing of late, […]

Koufax Award Voting Now Open Start here, and work your way down. AB

Going in the Wrong Direction Just last week, the president announced that he planned to cut the deficit in half over the next five years. Yet the latest deficit projection for 2005 is now $20b higher than the previous projection: In its bi-annual budget outlook, details of which were obtained by Reuters from congressional sources, […]

More Speaks for Itself This time from a Yahoo news story excerpting from a forthcoming biography of Tony Blair: The extent of Mr Cheney’s opposition emerges in the biography of the British prime minister by Philip Stephens, the Financial Times’ political columnist. In the run-up to the war, Mr Blair worked closely with Mr Bush […]

What it Takes To Be President … Apparently, the media has concluded that Dean lacks it. August Pollack lays out a great plan for Dean to become more presidential. AB UPDATE: Click here for a scandalous Dean photo. Seriously, click. You’ll be glad you did. (Via Atrios)