Brad DeLong has the breakdown of things taken out of the no-longer-possible-to-defend-as-stimulating stimulus bill. Nice to see that no Republican, and precious few Democratic Senators, believe in following even Andrew Samwick’s tepid endorsement: Congress and the Obama Administration should be very discriminating in what they will spend money on. Bailout money for banks and large […]
McClatchy via their Planet Washington web page brings us a list of what actually got cut from the Senate bill. And the title pretty much tells the story (though I will be adding a few words later). What the Senate’s cut: Funds for states and schools Here’re the cuts, according to Sen. Leahy’s office. Based […]
What is infrastructure? Some people seem to have a working definition that limits to highways and bridges. Others would expand it to include anything built of concrete and steel. Well that is a little too narrow a view. Instead we should include pretty much all public capital goods in that definition. So in addition to […]
I’ve said before that the “Buy American” provisions in the stimulus bill were not exactly a major issue. (I believe the phrase was roughly, “could drive a broken Mexican truck through the holes, even if dead drunk.”) Many economists (hi, Barkley) disagreed, even while some acknowledged that the income effect from “buying American” would be […]
Duff and Phelps, which tends to be the rating agency you go to if S&P or Moody’s won’t rate you highly enough, provides a convenient evaluation table (p. 22 of this report) for the marvelous negotiating techniques and acquisition skills of the previous Administration. Since the current Administration is now threatening to continue with the […]
By Spencer The employment report shows the economy accelerating to the downside. This is now the worse employment drop in the post WW II era. The index is now at 97.1(100= peak) as compared to 99.0 at this point in both the 1974 and 1981 cycles. Hours worked continue to accelerate downward Although wages are […]
rdan The Guardian discusses fungibles. Americans are not used to this directness of private company foreign exchanges of workers. We have relied on visas and encouraging low wage illegal immigration to accomplish this task. It seems to me we will have to get used to a greater variety of hiring practices from private, ‘American’ multi-national […]
I am flattered that the economic of contempt guy* wrote me a long e-mail about my last CDS post. The e-mail is after the jump. my comments on his comments in [brackets] I am flattered by the attention. Really, I stress, I only recently learned what a CDS is. I wanted to respond to your […]
I was pontificating earlier today about how many of the now-unemployed Financial Services workers were, in a previous life, engineers of one stripe or another, and if we’re going to be doing things with the stimulus bill such as re-engineer the power grid, some of them may well decide to return to their previous life. […]