The Cato Institute has provided us with more propaganda entitled the “Quick Facts Archive”: 1. Social Security will begin running a deficit by 2017.2. A medium income worker born after 1965 can expect a rate-of-return of less than 2% on his or her Social Security taxes.3. The Social Security payroll tax rate has grown from […]
You’d think that a tax cut jihadist like Robert Novak would be all for the work of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. Joshua Marshall catches Robert Hypocrit whining that a small reduction in government spending might hurt a Republican politician. So how do we pay for military pork if the massive tax cuts for […]
An AB reader sent along The Moral Hazard Myth by Malcolm Gladwell. The opening paragraph reminded me I’m overdue to see my dentist. As Kevin Drum so ably summarizes: Gladwell suggests that although politics has a lot to do with America’s weird and dysfunctional healthcare system, so does elite economic opinion. Read the whole thing […]
A sensible conservative suggested that I read the latest from John Tamny. While this sensible conservative and I are both in utter disbelief at what Tamny has written, I’ll not say who this smart conservative is as I’m still upset that I had to read the likes of this: To begin, Makin said the “U.S. […]
Mark Thoma points out to Thomas Bray that accepting a Keynesian view of macroeconomics does not mean one has to abandon Adam Smith’s view of microeconomics. Mark also points out that Bush’s adherence to fiscal stimulus in 2001 was in someway consistent with the message of the General Theory. I say “someway” because Bush’s ad […]
Mark Thoma reads a comment from John Tamny over at Mark’s blog and has decided Tamny will never understand basic economics. The topic Mark was trying to raise had to do with how Tamny fails to grasp either what Ben Bernanke or the long-run effects from monetary policy. Rather than concede his errors, Tamny compounds […]
Click on photo for larger image. Orange County, CA. Aug 21, 2005. Open House signs are common. Orange County, CA. Aug 20, 2005. Notice the Open House sign at the bottom and also the price of diesel. Diesel prices are a huge story in California. For the general economy it appears gas prices are starting […]
David Altig received some heat from Brad DeLong: Look at the what the figure tells us about the end of 1982. It tells us that at the end of 1982–in the middle of the deepest recession of the post-WWII period–after three years during which labor force participation had hardly grown at all after growing by […]
I once tried to compliment NRO’s Jerry Bowyer by saying that he provided nice time series charts before launching into his usual nonsense. His latest alas provides no such time series chart: Black unemployment is also lower than the average for the Clinton years. It is lower than the average of the past fifteen years. […]
James Hamilton is a proud member of CKNAWWW (Clueless Know-Nothing Analysts of the World Wide Web) and is a master of time series analysis: It seems very hard to quarrel with the statement that any given month’s value for the labor force participation represents the confluence of different factors, some resulting from trends that are […]