Worth reading the whole article. Robert Eisner, Budget deficits and rhetoric, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1989 (Hat tip reader juan)

Krugman’s leeches analogy today spurs me to comment: If the police department in your town is doing a bad job and the crime rate is high, the obvious solution is to cut funding for the police department! Sounds a lot like bloodletting theory, dontcha think? We’ll just drain off the bad blood! It’s so simple […]

Last night, in a comment to my post from Tuesday, “Do‘Right to Work’ Laws Violate the Constitution Contracts Clause?”, reader PJR wrote: To a non-lawyer, it kinda looks like SCOTUS rejected the contracts argument in 1949, so unions would have to find someway to get the court(s) to reconsider–or is this wrong? If wrong, why […]

Paul Krugman Dec 13 2012 after the surprise announcement and market reaction. So philosophically, this represents a conversion to the Evans criterion for rates and the Woodford/Krugman doctrine about monetary policy in a liquidity trap.Substantively, however, there isn’t that much going on here. Basically, Bernanke is promising that the Fed won’t do anything stupid — […]

From the BLS: The 30 occupations with the largest projected employment growth, 2010-20of the top ten, only teachers and nurses require a degree…and four don’t even require a high school diploma for entry…(hat tip reader rjs)

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any […]

Update:  oooops.  Slow computer the problem, and the manager probably meant the APPs.  My bad…sorry Starbucks. While I don’t go to Starbuck’s, Ms, Rdan does on the way to work, and was told her card had $0 balance this morning.  She had credited $40.00 last week… it is hard to get a $0 balance right […]

by Dale CoberlySOCIAL SECURITY and Uncle Sam moving parts edition Most of us have heard the “phony iou” claim about the Social Security Trust Fund, with its accompanying cartoon of a hapless Uncle Sam furiously borrowing from his left pocket to fill up his right pocket, and stuffing “worthless iou’s” into the left pocket to […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: CPA Retirement Funding Act So I spent a part of the weekend reading summaries of the new IRS regs on the Obamacare 3.8% net investment income tax. Holy complications Batman! These rules are so complex and convoluted CPAs will spend their spare time reading yacht catalogs. Sure, […]

Two articles in The New York Times today got me thinking about the tragedy of the commons. This is not new thinking, but it’s not widespread enough, in my opinion. And, I hope this expresses it in a somewhat new way. One of the articles talks about the ongoing failure of pharmaceutical companies to develop […]