I don’t pretend to know Joe Lieberman’s motivation, but it’s working to perfection if his goal is to divide Party leaders (Obama, Reid, etc.) from the Democratic progressive base. I don’t remember seeing this level of outrage from movement progressives before, and I wonder if the only possible way to quell it is to secure […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Provider Taxes An under-the-radar tax funding scheme is the prevalence of health care providers taxes. Our most current information indicates 44 state have some variation of a provider tax (in addition to various schemes to use or misuse tobacco settlements allegedly earmarked for health care spending). Most of […]

Alan Greenspan: The U.S. Federal Reserve has done all it can do to reduce unemployment and needs to worry more about the risk of inflation from the stimulus it poured into the economy, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Sunday. But didn’t we just Get All That Money Back? [link added] Greenspan’s reason unemployment […]

Following up on this post, a 4-week auction over year-end (PDF) that sold at 0.00% interest, with a coverage ratio of 4.4:1. (Yield unchanged from the previous week, and the week before that.) Who could see Looming Inflation in this? See next post.

Via alea‘s Twitter feed, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—the people who were specifically selected by the company to regulate AIG—has launched a Financial Literacy campaign. (Full disclosure: I have, in the past, had discussions with the OCC. I won one and lost one.)

I urge everyone to Go Read Garth. And then you will understand that Economics is The Science of Supporting the Status Quo and Stifling Innovation, as Steve Jobs (h/t Patrick) noted several days ago.

UPDATE: Greg Sargent (via Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter feed) notes that I am hardly alone in my concluding pargraph. The last even semi-useful part of health care “reform” (and that was of dubious value) is dead: The idea of letting people ages 55 to 64 buy into Medicare, announced just last week, had threatened to explode […]

Rahm Emanuel accidentally Tells the Truth and Shames the Devil: “We have to get them off the sidelines and get them to play a more active role in our economic recovery,” Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said on Sunday. “They play an essential role in helping the economy grow.” Gosh, the Administration […]

by cactus Comparing Presidents: Real GDP per capita Growth Rates and Changes in the Tax BurdenIn last week’s exciting episode I posted this graph: A few quick comments… this is actually a correction – I screwed up the graph the last time by not following the same convention with Nixon and Ford that I did […]

UPDATE: D-Squared chimes in, saying in less than 100 words what took me a couple of thousand (though with no quotes): After the “first hundred days” in the term of a new Democratic President comes the next stage; the almost impreceptible transition among his supporters from saying “of course, he’s been hampered by all sorts […]