by Linda Beale Obama proposes to exempt some IRS spending on enforcement from budget cap The 2011 debt ceiling compromise, known as the Budget Control Act, establishes automatic cuts in spending for various categories if no further deal is reached to overturn them. In many ways, it might be ideal to allow the Budget Control […]
Romney’s best line of the day was unscripted. A stray Canadian had driven from Ontario to ask Romney a question and in the process joked that Romney could not have his ID card for Canada’s national health-care system. The ball sat on the tee for a long second before Romney hit it. “I don’t want […]
Poking around in FRED while thinking about money created by banks and by government, I came up with the following graph, which I found to be pretty eye-popping: Federal Debt Held by the Public as a Percentage of Total Credit Market Debt Owed That’s a pretty profound secular shift. But far from delivering any obvious […]
Via Chris Mooney to Digby to Krugman then me — this remarkable item from a Pew report: College-educated Republicans are more likely to deny scientific reality. They don’t spend their time in college (or life) trying to learn how the world works; they spend it learning how to mine, harvest, cherry-pick, and twist any “facts” […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Research on Defensive Medicine (Part 1) (Background – I have been an executive in two orthopaedic centers, and write and lecture for orthopaedic practice executives.) A Vanderbilt research survey of orthopaedic surgeons indicate that 24% of diagnostic testing is “defensive medicine.” This does not surprise me, as […]
by Rebecca Wilder All of the Euro Area Usual Competitive Suspects in One Chart…But with a Twist The European Commission’s Economic and Financial Affairs initiated the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP) Scoreboard. The MIP Scorecard will be used to identify emerging or persistent macroeconomic imbalances in a country. In their inaugural release, the EC listed 12 […]
by Linda Beale GOP candidates’ policies would raise federal debt by whopping trillions The GOP likes to pretend to take the high road, proclaiming itself to be against increasing the federal debt, running big deficits, or otherwise not running our government like a person runs their household. Pundits on the right tend to look at […]
I’ll just share two of these. HT Yoram Bauman. via 14 Ways an Economist Says I Love You. Cross-posted at Asymptosis.
Imagine an economy that consists of two households, one firm, one bank, and one government. The government issues $50 to each household (maybe they do some work for it), crediting their bank accounts and running a $100 deficit. Voila! There’s money! Now one household works for the firm, creating $50 in value, goods. The firm […]
It’s nice to see Matthew Yglesias embracing Modern Monetary Theory, but I wonder if he totally gets it: The point of collecting taxes isn’t that the government needs money (it can print money) it’s that if the quantity of taxes is too low relative to the stock of money, then the money loses its value […]