by Linda Beale The right’s smoke and mirrors scam about Social Security–it ain’t broke (unless China is too) We’ve noted in these postings the growing inequality between rich and the rest of us in America, and that is the appropriate backdrop against which to investigate further the right’s smoke-and-mirrors scams about tax policy and earned […]
On this Armistice Veteran’s Day, let’s try to do a counterfactual and Make Brad DeLong Happy.* Let’s assume that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley—commonly referred to, incorrectly, as “the repeal of Glass_Steagall”—is A Good Thing. Well, I won’t go that far. An Inevitable Thing. [Many sentences about Larry Summers omitted here.] After all, anyone who was paying attention […]
A commenter at Steve Benen’s Washington Monthly blog was grousing (correctly, as spencer notes in comments) that Benen had allocated all of the 2009 change (read:drop) in private-sector jobs to Obama, while GWB was in office for the first 19.5 daysduring the time the employment data for January was gathered. Turns out that there were […]
I wanted to look at the WSJ job database, suspecting what I might find, but currently lack the bandwidth in a major way. Fortunately, Noah took some (more) time from his thesis (“distraction from productive activity”) and did the dirty work. Apparently, being a STEM undergraduate isn’t the path to Nirvana:* I went through the […]
By Rebecca Wilder European Policy Makers Don’t Understand But Markets Do So here we are: the Italian yield curve is flat at above 7%; the government institution is in question; and the ECB is using its SMP purchase program as a carrot to drive austerity implementation in and Berlusconi out. Some would argue that the […]
Brad DeLong has two posts, one from Ezra “I’m a liberal who is safe for the Washington Post” Klein and one from Mike “I actually looked at the data” Konczal. Brad deals with Ezra’s folly: I think a B+ is too high a grade–largely because one big task of 2009 was to set up the […]
I believe Robert Reich points us in the right direct when he suggests in The Occupiers’ Responsive Chord: A combination of police crackdowns and bad weather are testing the young Occupy movement. But rumors of its demise are premature, to say the least. Although numbers are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests the movement […]
By Linda Beale Infrastructure gamesmanship puts wealthy ahead of jobs, good bridges, and country For those who are paying attention to the House and Senate these days, it seems like a frustrating exercise. Mostly it is one of watching the “do-nothing” Republicans find excuses for never requiring millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share […]