And a debate is a perfect place to spit out numbers and plan names without a moderator fact-checking you. —  Paul Ryan’s Word Salad, David Weigel, Slate, today Indeed. I was absolutely dumbfounded to read yesterday that the MSM is now buying Lehrer’s idea of what a debate should be. Do they not understand that […]

Art at The New Arthurian Economics and I are looking at the relationship between debt and economic growth.  Art started with an observation of two FRED series, total credit market debt owed (TCMDO) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP,  nominal or GDPC1, inflation adjusted – take your pick.) Graph 1, from FRED, shows these data series.  […]

Beautiful. (I was thinking the same thing during the debate, but since no one afterward pointed it out, I thought I must have misunderstood.)  Just wondering whether Romney still has his old calculator around.  The one from his Bain days.  The one that could actually add and subtract!  And multiply and divide and perform algebraic, trigonometric and […]

Have you heard the news? Mitt Romney met with editors of the Des Moines Register yesterday and dropped a bombshell. “Romney promises no abortion legislation,” says the Associated Press. “Romney: No abortion legislation,” says Politico. “Romney says no plans to restrict abortion,” says Agence France-Presse. Nope. That isn’t what Romney said. This is a man with a long history […]

  Last month one hundred and fourteen thousand unemployed moochers…suddenly yank the government teat out of their mouths, get off the couch for forty hours a week? Why?     I say follow the money; cause I found out, that right around the time those people got those jobs…they started getting paid!   And just […]

Dean Baker takes note of the code word ‘tweaking’ regarding Social Security, and points us to one aspect of the Grand Bargain thinking apparently in vogue in DC.

If you listen to Randi Rhodes, you know she is still livid over Romney being declared the “winner” in last week’s – we’ll call it a “debate” for the nonce. Alas, though, the reason he won is that poll numbers have moved in his favor.  Whether that bounce is robust remains to be seen.  But […]

A really striking feature of the Romney campaign is the candidate’s penchant for stating policy positions as though each one exists in a vacuum.  To wit: His 20% across-the-board tax-rate reduction, which, this successful businessman made clear at the debate last week, he didn’t trouble himself to figure out the likely result of it on […]

  The Obama Administration—driven by Senior Democrats such as Rush Holt and, one suspects, Michelle—has been very attentive to the needs of veterans. On of the big initiatives of 2011 from the Obama Administration was Joining Forces, an effort to retrain, reeducate, and re-employ America’s veterans. It lead to the Vow to Hire Heroes Act […]

OK this isn’t up to Lewison production standards in fact not up to any production standards, but here is Romney vs Romney on how to evaluate records on employment Romney on Romney’s record of an employment decline followed by a slow increase (Via American Bridge Via Daily Kos) Five minutes searching for Romney on Obama’s record […]