Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Housekeeping

I’ve made a few changes that will, hopefully, slightly improve your reading experience: The archives are fixed (weeks after 5/14 had mysteriously stopped displaying). I’ve replaced the FreeFind search engine with Google’s search engine. However, due to the failure of the archives, search engines were not finding entries from after 5/14. As soon as Google […]

Silver Lining in the GDP Report

Someone get President Bush a copy of the latest GDP report as he is telling a Missouri audience about the alleged highest real GDP growth in 20 years. I guess he’s still talking about that temporary spike in the annualized rate for 2003QIII (which is no longer being reported as 8.2% but only 7.4%). For […]

Sitting Next to Mrs. Kerry

During the 1993 State of the Union, Alan Greenspan sat next to Mrs. Clinton.  A friend asked what does this imply?  We now know that the successful economic policies of President Clinton included fiscal restraint combined was easy money that has become known as Rubinomics.  But I give it away – yes, it was Robert […]

Pre-Presidential Succession

Addressing the question of what to do if the presidency changes hands and both the incoming president and vice-president are killed before choosing a cabinet, Eugene Volokh comments on an interesting suggestion from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex): Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, proposed an interesting Senate […]

Stock Options and Transfer Pricing

Part VII of George Mundstock’s US Taxation of Multinational Enterprise (July 28) suggests that the arm’s length standard for avoiding transfer pricing manipulation does not work. Maybe it’s the very high standards of discourse in his first sixth threads, but I found this argument a bit unconvincing. But I’d like to take this argument “To […]

B and S

Those are the letters Chris Mathews and Pat Buchanan need to understand in order to tell “Osama” from “Obama”; learning those same letters could also help them understand the very things they utter. Here’s Mathews, and no, I’m not making this up: MATHEWS: [Buchanan], … Would you rather have Obama or Osama as your key […]

The More Things Change …

… The more they stay the same. Since George W. Bush has so much in common with Herbert Hoover, particularly in the areas of jobs and trade, and since I liked Obama’s speech so much, I decided to search for the 1932 Democratic Keynote speech and see if there were any interesting parallels. I couldn’t […]

IRS data: Americans’ incomes fell for two years

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Americans’ overall income shrank for two consecutive years after stocks plunged in 2000, the first time that has effectively happened since the current tax system was put in place during World War II, according to a published report Thursday. The New York Times, reporting data from the Internal Revenue Service, said […]

And Now, Random Convention Thoughts

Al Sharpton: good speech. My favorite line was this: You [President Bush on Friday before the Urban League] said the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That’s where […]