Mark Thoma has started an interesting discussion beginning with a Q&A with Paul Krugman: Alan Gertler, Reno, Nev.: I’m a scientist, not an economist, so I’m fairly naive when it comes to what drives the economy. My question is this: Have the tax cuts stimulated the economy as claimed (which I don’t believe given the […]
That didn’t take long. When William Niskanen produced a regression that suggested years in which taxes were low also tended to be years in which spending was high, one had to expect that the National Review would have some comment: While Niskanen has accounted for the effects of the business cycle, he has not taken […]
Alan Greenspan makes an important point: NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan sent a message to Washington policymakers: Don’t think about naming him to another commission seeking to untie the Gordian knot of Social Security reform. …Greenspan warned that retirement health-care costs are more of a problem for the federal government than […]
Kash’s post on the latest consumer price inflation news allows us to raise a couple of additional points. Our first graph provides the latest on real wages for production or nonsupervisory workers, which have generally been declining over the past two years as nominal wage increases have not kept pace with consumer price inflation. While […]
I’ve taken the liberty of composing a picture that addresses the implausible notion that the Federal government’s budget deficits are the result of “ungoverned forces”. The graph below shows the on-budget federal budget balance – that is, the budget balance excluding the Social Security Trust Fund surplus – and the ways in which various deliberate […]
While Mark Thoma has a few words about the partisan garbage Karl Rove delivered to the American Enterprise Institute, let me start here: The economy itself began slowing in the third quarter of 2000 as GDP declined by an annual rate of 0.5 percent. And all of this took place before George W. Bush set […]
The latest op-ed from David Brooks is entitled From Freedom to Authority and includes this spin: In the 1970’s and 80’s, conservatives felt the primary threat was the overweening nanny state. Ronald Reagan tried to loosen the structures that restricted individual initiative and led to national sclerosis. He and Margaret Thatcher deregulated, privatized, cut tax […]
Mark Thoma points to a couple of pieces from Robert Reich, which I want to discuss in a bit. Mark leads with some nonsense from R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.: There is a bigotry against the term Supply-Side Economics. That is the only way to explain it. The prejudices of those who for decades have believed […]
Last Thursday, we suggested that Greg Kaza more carefully read the paper by Greg Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl that Kaza used as evidence for supply-side economics. We are happy to report that Brad DeLong has read this paper and notes: The abstract is misleading. It should read, “The feedback is surprisingly large: in the long […]
John Tamny starts his latest op-ed with some wisdom from Herbert Stein: Seeking to shift blame away from the Federal Reserve and the Nixon White House for the oil shocks of the early 1970s, the late Herbert Stein said, “My devotion to the old-time religion is not so great as to make me believe that […]