by Beverly Mann Last week, one of the law blogs I read regularly mentioned a post from May 11 on a law blog read regularly by a lot of law geeks (but not by me) about the oral argument in those cases a day earlier. The blog is The Volokh Conspiracy. Its bloggers are prominent […]

by Mike Kimel I am not a Libertarian Because I Believe in Freedom and Property Rights, And I’d Like to Minimize Government Coercion I wandered over the Libertarian Party and I found their Platform. I’m sure there are a few items here and there with which some libertarians disagree, but in general, it seems to […]

There is an absolutely serious hypothesis that the sharp drop in violent crime in the USA since the early 1990s is due to the EPA and, in particular, to the shift from leaded to unleaded gasoline roughly two decades earlier. Kevin Drum notes that James Q. Wilson ascribes about half of the total decline to […]

Another edition of my diatribe on QE-II. Here I reply to Noah in comments who discussed debt deflation and also explain my guess about what happened going beyond the evidence. Why does expected inflation matter (so that we should be pleased at an increase in nominal interest rates not matched by an equal increase in […]

I think this article “GOP freshmen get a tough lesson in politics” by David Fahrenthold in the Washington Post perfectly illustrates everything which is wrong with US political journalism. The theme of the article is explained as follows “the same hoarse-throat tactics that helped them bring down incumbents last year — attacks on a health-care […]

There are reasons to expect the second half of the year to be be stronger than the first. Here are two: (1) the rebound in industrial activity following supply chain disruptions, and (2) possible impetus to investment spending coming from the depreciation allowance that expires this year. These factors, though, are just dressing up what […]

by Mike Kimel Robert Waldmann’s “How to Solve Many Problems,” This Time with a Question Mark The other day I noted that the S&P 500 leads the economy. A few days before that, my colleague, Robert Waldmann suggested that perhaps it might make sense for the government to issue bonds and use the proceeds to […]

Yesterday I addressed the weak high-frequency indicators, specifically with respect to leading indicators of investment spending on equipment and software (durable goods). I argued that Q2 has not started off well, given that the real core orders for capital goods are down compared to the January to March average. The BEA reported that Q1 2011 […]

My wife had knee surgery recently.* One of the great things about our then-current health insurer is that they provide complete data—list price, what they negotiated, what they paid, what you owe. Since we’re in the “doughnut hole,” I’m tracking more frequently than I usually would. And the bills—possibly because we were moving to a […]