[A]n unusually high foreign tax credit in 2008 raises questions about the size and source of Mr. Romney’s foreign income that year and how it was treated for tax purposes.  — Tax Credits Shed Light on Romney,* James B. Stewart, New York Times, Aug, 24 I don’t follow finance-industry news very closely, and the only […]

I can’t top last year’s post, so I’m just going to embed a (now-dead) fictional character talking about the death of another fictional-but-loosely-based character. Obama Just Forgot the “Times Square” part. The previous Administration Just Forgot.

by Linda Beale Romer’s deficit reduction suggestions worth a read Christina Romer’s recent piece in the New York Times is worth reading.  See C.D. Romer, Cutting the Deficit, with Compassion, New York Times at BU5 (Sept. 9, 2012). Now, I generally have found Romer too willing to advocate austerity economics and too unwilling to support […]

From the NY Daily News comes a Tale of Two Cities (and does not include rural poverty): We have more poor people in Brooklyn than the entire population of Detroit; we have more people on food stamps than the entire population of Washington, D.C.,” Gelber said. “Yet there are more wealthy people than in Greenwich, […]

Part III – How to think about time series data. For reference:Part II  Federal Spending as a Fraction of GDP Part I  Federal Spending Growth Some commentors to the previous posts have rightly concluded that I consider spending under Obama in the context of historical trends.  In fact, if you don’t consider historical trends, you […]

I overheard a conversation at a local restaurant on the impact of the US being dependent on China buying US bonds to finance federal debt.  Usullay missing from such conversations is the % of money involved, whether that is a lot, and what effect it has on federal debt and trade (and some kind of […]

by Kenneth Thomas US wages trail 10 OECD countries, but with higher unemployment than 9 of them Contra Eric Cantor, Labor Day celebrates the importance of labor and the labor movement in American history. But the bluster of Cantor, where he celebrates the so-called job creators, does illustrate that organized labor has been in decline […]

by Run 75441 New Report on Getting the Best Care Both Matthew Yglesias at Slate and Sarah Kliff at WonkBlog and a host of other sites have posted some interesting results coming out of a recent study by the Institute of Medicine  Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in […]

From reader rjs comes this list of links in paragraph form on records being passed over time on Arctic sea ice and Greenland glaciers melting.  New radar allows for a variety of measurements, one being a way to measure ice thickness in the Arctic.  Edited lightly for readability: It has been an exciting week for […]