The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions Reader Jon H. emailed me Tom Friedman’s latest NYT Op/Ed piece, 30 Little Turtles. The editorial is about Indian call centers and what those jobs mean for the Indians who get them. It’s definitely worth reading, but that’s not the point of this post. In my […]

The Politicization and Bastardization of Science, Continued Via CalPundit, this news from the WaPo: President Bush yesterday dismissed two members of his handpicked Council on Bioethics — a scientist and a moral philosopher who had been among the more outspoken advocates for research on human embryo cells. In their places he appointed three new members, […]

The Other Danger of Protectionism Typically, if one country engages in protectionism, others will respond in kind. That’s exactly what’s about to happen: Four years after the WTO ruled against the United States, Congress has still failed to repeal export subsidies, known as the extraterritorial income exclusion, that the trade organization determined to be illegal. […]

Even the Well-Off Don’t Like Trade These Days Via Dan Drezner, I see that Tuesday’s USA Today reported that The poll shows that among Americans making more than $100,000 a year, support for actively promoting more free trade collapsed from 57% to less than half that, 28%. As Dan says, it’s not so much the […]

Debt Mountain In a post that relates to Kash’s Monday post on the current accounts deficit, Karsten, a European blogger who follows finance, explains why massive US deficits haven’t lead to soaring interest rates: As we all know that no saving of note takes place in the US we could assume that most of last […]

Income Inequality in the US Following up on AB’s post about how well the wealthiest have done in recent years, here’s a graph showing the share of aggregate income earned by high-income households in the US. Unfortunately we don’t have 2003 data yet (other than Forbes’ data on billionaires), but I think it’s a safe […]

Make the Tax Cuts Permanent! Now! Quick, before this trend stops: All told, it was a fabulous year to be very rich. [Forbes magazine] counted some 587 billionaires around the world, up from 476 in 2003. Their total net worth jumped to $1.9 trillion from the $1.4 trillion the magazine counted in 2003. “After two […]

Even More on Greenspan A staffer at The Century Foundation, about which I know little other than that Ruy T. is affiliated with it, alerts me to a short article by Bernard Wasow on Greenspan. The article concludes with So Mr. Greenspan would pay for massive tax cuts, about half of which go to the […]

More Trouble for Blair Source: Britain Spied on U.N.’s Annan. Highlights: LONDON – British intelligence agents spied on U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan (news – web sites) in the run-up to the Iraq (news – web sites) war, a former member of Prime Minister Tony Blair (news – web sites)’s Cabinet said Thursday. Short, who […]

Conservative Economists Write a Letter A group of economists, including “the presidents of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, the Pacific Research Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute as well as scholars at the Hoover Institution and the Manhattan Institute all signed the letter” are annoyed at the pro-regulation position of a certain political strategist: “Your […]