rdan Noni Mausa in comments reminds us: (We forget)….how essential it is to understand sound and unsound arguments. Arguments are one tool of winning or losing in the struggle against your opponent and his definition of reality — a definition which will effect your life and improve his (or else why would he bother?) If […]

Stuart Eugene Thiel is a retired lawyer and economics professor (at least he taught at Wash. St and DePaul U’s) who comments around the blogosphere here and there. But to me he will always be Prof. Pollkatz proprietor of a really fantastic polling website with a concentration on Bush approval as aggregated from 15 national […]

Transcript of inaugural address courtesy of ABC News.

rdan Economistmom points to the Bush administration’s final economic report, remarking how lackluster it is and how scarce in quantitative data even concerning the overriding flagship notion of ‘tax cuts as driver of the economy’ meme. Bush Economic report 2009. Works now. Clinton Economic report 2001 Ok, go for it. Update: The links worked this […]

rdan Please double check your user id on js-kit carefully until you know what to check automatically. Sometimes it is the cookie which is deleted. Too many anonymouses makes for confusion…do not feel embarrassed by popping in your name in reply…we all understand. Anonymous will eventually be considered impolite. This note will be deleted in […]

The Quote of the 21st Century: And you’ve got Greg Mankiw — well, I don’t know what Greg actually believes, he just seems to be approvingly linking to anyone opposed to stimulus, regardless of the quality of their argument. Either that, or it’s a description of everything that is wrong with the field of Economics […]

Willem Buiter, whose early posts at Maverecon were the epitome of restraint, calls for nationalisation: By throwing cheap money with little conditionality at the banks, the Fed and the US Treasury may get bank lending going again. By subsidizing new capital injections, they reward bad porfolio choices by the existing shareholders. By letting the executive […]

In recent days there has been a lot of gnashing of teeth among Social Security supporters at the prospect of even having Social Security on the table during next month’s economic summit. I gave a few reasons a couple days ago why we don’t need to let ‘fear itself’ rule us Obama and Social Security: […]

Robert Waldmann Pieter Beinart serves up some conventional wisdom in the Washington Post. Unfortunately he is totally wrong, because he hasn’t checked the facts in the past 7 years. Beinart wrote “Older liberals remember …. They also remember the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, when prominent liberals predicted disaster, and disaster didn’t happen.”Oh didn’t […]

Robert Waldmann Gary Becker writes (via Lane Kenworthy who is strangely polite in response) As Posner and others have indicated, there appears to have been a huge conversion of economists toward Keynesian deficit spenders, but the evidence that produced such a “conversion” is not apparent (although maybe most economists were closet Keynesians all along). This […]