I lifted these comments by rl love concerning a way to look at our current discussion about jobs from Linda Beale’s post on Tax Foundation analysis: Rl love writes on the nature of trade for the US: Stiglitz: ” … the export of T-bills is different from the export of cars or computers or almost […]

reader sammy submits this question: Population Density and Ideology Sammy compared the famous Red/Blue electoral map (by county) with a map of Population Density and found pretty strong correlation. Areas with high population density vote Democratic, while areas with low population density vote Republican. What, if anything, explains this correlation? Sammy’s theory is: 1) People […]

I have some topical threads for Sat. and Sun. but not tonight. Two are poke in the eye sort of topics.

FINS from the Wall Street Journal names Linda Beale and ataxingmatter in Top Five: Sharp analysis and blunt delivery make this academic take on taxes work. The blogger Linda Beale writes entries that don’t shy away from tearing down or giving props to fellow tax bloggers. It is no wonder that Beale, as a law […]

Even during the last “jobless recovery,” people did not continue to become discouraged. Things have changed.

by Bruce Webb Would that have been a fair headline for the following story: Richard Shelby Puts Hold On President Obama’s Nomineesl? Because the facts are pretty clear, Shelby placed these holds mainly because of concerns over as Politico delicately puts it “Pentagon’s bidding process for air-to-air refueling tankers”. We can put that a little […]

While I applaud the cautious optimism of Spencer and Tom, I’m more inclined to quote Joseph Brusuelas: [T]he January payrolls added a dollop of Zen like logic to a recovery that is shaping up like no other. An additional 111,000 workers entered the labor force, yet the unemployment rate fell to 9.7% while private sector […]

With the unemployment rate falling from 10.0 to 9.7 the employment report implies that the economy is in a transition phase.The period of widespread layoff and job cuts is over. So if you still have a job the odds ofyour losing it have roughly returned to normal. This change is reflected in the improvement inpersonal […]

by Linda Beale The Tax Foundation–at it again with bunk about overtaxed corporations Ok, I’m tired of it. Aren’t you? The Tax Foundation–an organization that claims bipartisanship but these days seems to be a shill for corporate managers and owners–is at it again, claiming that US businesses “are paying the second-highest corporate tax rate in […]

Robert Waldmann Matthew Yglesias discusses the financial crisis and the idea of causation. He shows that he was a philosophy major. I’m delighted. The question is whether the answer to the question “What caused the financial crisis?” is of the form “A, because if A had not been true, then there wouldn’t have been a […]