by Linda Beale Holman Jenkins’ Support for Job Destruction at Bain Capital Doesn’t Hold Up  Holman Jenkins Jr. writes an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal: “The Truth about Bain and Jobs,” Jan. 14-15, 2012, Wall St. J. at A13.  His first paragraph makes his bias in favor of “private equity” clear.  He says any […]

INTRODUCTION 1) Rethug Speaker of the House John Boehner says that as a nation, “we’re broke“; Rethug presidential candidate Ron Paul claims America “should declare bankruptcy.”  I say these two are liars, and at least one of them is crazy. 2) Tyler Cowan says “we are poorer than we think we are,” due to mis-measurement […]

I’ve noticed that many others, like me, are puzzled by the mechanics of the Saving=Investment accounting identity. How do household savings get instantly and perfectly intermediated, in a period, into investment spending — the purchase/creation of long-term productive fixed assets? An Aha! for me: According to Krugman’s textbook, they don’t. First a correction: “The savings[sic]-investment […]

Chris Bertram at Crookedtimber posted on a conference he attended (and Sandwichman, who hasn’t written to date) on the idea of working time reduction in response to keeping unemployment lower. The comments are worth a post to summarize, but at least this pointer is a start. Towards a 21-hour working week? by Chris Bertram Last […]

by Linda Beale Romney’s Tax Plan Helps the 1%, Hurts the Bottom 40% In spite of having to suffer some closer view of his Bain Capital time–during which the self-proclaimed “job creator” businessman did a lot of job cutting and destruction of going concerns so that his investors could make more money, Romney continues on […]

As you all have heard, Friday was (again) S&P’s day in the limelight. The rating agency downgraded over half of the 16 Euro area countries put on credit watch negative in December 2011. A quick look at my feed shows several takes on S&P’s action: the Economist’s Free Exchange comments on the now soft-core country, […]

I don’t usually link to Paul Krugman because he everyone reads him anyway, right? He doesn’t need my google juice. But I have to make an exception here because he adds to my trove of graphs demonstrating how America today — after thirty years of Reaganomics policies that were supposed to be all about freedom, […]

This is just a short post to illustrate the magnitude of GDP revisions. I downloaded quarterly GDP data from BEA in June 2011. I went back to BEA this morning to update the file. Forgetting about GDP revisions, I thought I’d be adding 2 or three more quarters of data, but discovered that all the […]

John Scalzi: …in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. […]