Hat tip tp Charles Patton for pointing out the MarketWatch account of how the Treasury Secretary has dodged the Federal debt ceiling again: WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – The U.S. Treasury acted Thursday to avoid hitting the national debt limit and said it’s “imperative” Congress raise the debt ceiling by the middle of March. Treasury is suspending […]
Michael Mandel and I agree on at least one thing – R&D is an investment: The factory is a long-lived investment which provides returns not just this year, but years into the future. That’s why Intel’s investment gets added into GDP, separate from the value of today’s production of microprocessors. Similarly, R&D is a long-lived […]
Check out the Valentine Day report from Adweek: DALLAS – The Bush administration spent $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars on 137 contracts with advertising agencies over the past two-and-a-half years, according to a Government Accountability Office report released by House Democrats Monday. With spending on public relations and other media included, federal agencies spent $1.6 […]
Jonah Goldberg over at The Corner opens with: Warrantless searches, Katrina fingerpointing, $7.8 trillion budget, Abramoff spin: these were the stories buffetting the White House last week. Table 3.2 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports the Federal spending for 2005 was less than $2.55 trillion. Does Jonah expect this Republican government to triple Federal […]
AB reader Fred C. Dobbs directs us to the Economic Assumptions chapter for the President’s budget. Starting on page 171, we see: When the economy is operating below potential, the unemployment rate exceeds the long-run sustainable average consistent with price stability. As a result, receipts are lower than they would be if resources were more […]
Kash noted the endorsement of the Division of Dynamic Analysis from Bruce Bartlett which had me dusting off my copy of the General Theory as I read this from Bruce: The great recession of 1973-75 was a severe blow to Keynesian economics because inflation was high while at the same time there was significant unused […]
Ben Bernanke has testified before Congress numerous times in the past, but today was the first time that he spoke as the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. Overall, Bernanke’s testimony struck me as quite optimistic. He mentioned the potential hazards for the economy in 2006 of growing inflation and a […]
Bruce Bartlett jumps on the dynamic analysis bandwagon, applauding the creation of the “Division on Dynamic Analysis” at the Treasury Department. Menzie Chinn and PGL have covered the prinicpal problems with this political exercise disguised as economic analysis, so let me just add two small points to what they’ve said. First, Bartlett is quite wrong […]
Expert marksman and Nobel laureate Dick Cheney delighted the Conservative Political Action Conference with the suggestion that free lunch supply-side spin is solid economics: Cheney touted President Bush’s recently announced proposal to create a tax analysis division as a move toward providing more evidence for the administration’s side of the argument. “The president’s tax policies […]
Michael Mandel’s piece in Business Week yesterday ended by posing the following question. Suppose the doomsayers are right, and the housing bubble bursts in 2006. Suppose that the fall in real estate prices is large enough and widespread enough to cause significant economic problems for the US. What should Democrats propose that the US government […]